...And Through the Woods

When I met my husband (MH), his family was living in a town in Morris County, New Jersey. Over the years, the family has slowly migrated to central New Hampshire. 

First was MH's immediately younger brother, who had met a New Hampshire girl and eventually settled up there with her after college. Then MH's youngest brother migrated up there with his then-wife to look for a job. He also stayed and remarried after the first marriage ended. Once the grandchildren started coming, my in-laws moved to New Hampshire, too, leaving MH and me the only members of the family still in New Jersey, from which we had migrated from the city to a town not far from where his parents had lived..

Thus we've gone to New Hampshire for Thanksgiving for years as the children have grown and had children of their own. Coming from a suburb of New York City to a rural area gives me a chance to get away from work and observe a different area. I've seen the changes in this part of the state over several decades as other people have migrated up there to live either part time or full time. And, of course, I've watched the birds for ones I can't find at home.

A black-capped chickadee (Margo D. Beller)

MH's brother knows I am a serious birder and, considering he works at teaching people to look at, enjoy and protect nature, he always likes to test my knowledge.

So this year he asked me to guess which birds were currently coming to his yard, including his one seed and two suet feeders. One of them, the red-breasted nuthatch, is a rare visitor to my yard because I don't have the pine trees this bird prefers. I also don't get bluebirds (he has nest boxes for them). Aside from that, his visitors are what I typically get in suburban New Jersey: cardinal, chickadees, titmice, white-breasted nuthatch, song sparrows, juncos, downy and hairy woodpeckers, mourning dove, jays, robins.

But more recently he has also been visited by a Carolina wren, and after we left he told us a redbellied woodpecker came to the suet and he saw a redtailed hawk looking down from one of the trees on his property.

These were not visitors to this part of the state even 10 years ago, I believe, but, like the year-round human population here, that has been slowly changing.

Carolina wren, common to my feeder
but now appearing to the
north. (Margo D. Beller)

I recently read an interesting book, by the biologist Thor Hanson, about the effects of climate change and how plants and animals react to it. The sections of the book cover the four possibilities: adjust, evolve, move or die. When it comes to the birds, as the planet warms many species have expanded their territories northward into previously inhospitable areas. (The increase in the number of people putting out feeders when winter comes doesn't hurt either.) The birds already in those areas are faced with increasing competition for limited resources. Those birds, in turn, have to move or change the way they live in order to survive.

The appearance of a redtail near his property interests me in particular. In all our visits I've never seen a redtail in his part of the state. The more urbanized part of New Hampshire to the south, yes, particularly near the interstates where the hawks sit in a tree or on a lamp post and wait for a meal to appear below so they can swoop down and grab it. In my brother-in-law's area the more usual are redshouldered and broadwinged hawks.These birds usually fly south for the winter. What happens when they return to find redtails in their midst? Or what if this area warms enough that these birds fly south later than usual, or not at all?

Redtailed hawk (Margo D. Beller)

There are now more people on my brother-in-law's road who have either built new houses or converted their summer houses to year-end living. These people tend to be older, with children or visiting grandchildren, and are driving more luxury vehicles and trucks. As they come to the area, the forest disappears. The climate changes in subtle ways. If they put out feeders, the birds come during the winter. So do the hawks that feed on them.

Many of the common birds I see in my yard were once exclusively from south of my area: cardinal, mockingbird, Carolina wren, redbellied woodpecker. Now they are common in New Jersey. We don't think anything of it. But, as Hanson points out, climate change has slowly been prompting the flowers to bloom earlier than usual and bring out the insects, affecting what the migrating birds find when they are passing through during their long journeys from winter to breeding territories. Meanwhile, the yard birds benefit so why should they leave?

Male bobolink (RE Berg-Andersson)

The national Audubon Society believes there are nearly 400 bird species threatened by climate change and habitat devastation including 53 types of coastal birds, 69 types of Eastern forest birds and 39 types of grassland birds including the bobolink - a bird I once saw and heard in a field not far from the N.H. town where my in-laws moved. But that was many years ago. As people have migrated into areas once dominated by woods or grasslands, they have pushed out the birds that can't adapt or are forced to leave when humanity cuts down the forests, paves the dirt roads and generally warms the planet with car exhaust.

I don't know what we can do to hold back this tide, and that bothers me.