A male cardinal rests on a feeder with other birds at a house on Hillside St. in Syracuse Friday morning, February 7, 2020.
Many of our common backyard bird species tend to move from forests and fields into towns and cities when extreme cold temperatures arrive, according to a new study.
Ecologists Chris Latimer and Benjamin Zuckerberg, at The Nature Conservancy and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that birds with lower tolerance for the cold and some with higher tolerance use the same behavior to escape the harshest winter conditions.
Northern cardinals, Carolina wrens and house finches – three species that have been expanding their range to the north and are among the least cold-tolerant – moved into the more urbanized environments, where they found temperatures as much as 10 degrees warmer and more abundant food available at bird feeder.
Downy woodpeckers, red-breasted nuthatches, and black-capped chickadees – species at home in the northern climes and more tolerant of cold temperatures – exhibited similar behaviors.
The researchers used data from more than 3,500 Project FeederWatch sites in the eastern U.S., including Pennsylvania.
Project Feederwatch is a citizen-science, November-April survey of birds that visit backyards, nature centers, community areas and other locales.
Their study period covered 3 winters over the past decades, including the harsh winter of 2014–15, which saw a polar vortex and the second-coldest February ever recorded by NOAA.
On launching the study, they hypothesized that birds would move out of agricultural areas and cities and into forests during harsh winter weather events, because forests can buffer extreme temperature swings.
The birds moved in the opposite direction.
Contact Marcus Schneck at mschneck@pennlive.com.
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