When smoke from Canadian wildfires started turning U.S. skies orange this month, ecologist Olivia Sanderfoot watched the news from her office in California with growing unease.
She felt concerned for people experiencing the megafires and smoke, but she also started worrying about what all that smoke exposure could mean for North American birds in their prime breeding season.
Smoke exposures now, the University of California, Los Angeles postdoctoral fellow feared, could lead to possible population dips later.
Studying the effects of wildfire smoke on birds—versus the effects from actual fires—is a relatively new area of inquiry, and Sanderfoot is one of the few scientists focused on this question. That’s partly because there used to be less interest in smoke, says Morgan Tingley, Sanderfoot’s adviser and a UCLA ecologist.
But a mass avian die-off in the western U.S. in 2020 that some researchers hypothesize was linked to that year’s destructive blazes likely increased interest in this area of research.
“Climate change is causing fires that are bigger, that are more frequent, and that burn more severely,” Tingley says, and “each of those things would cause more smoke, but the three together compound to cause a lot more smoke.” (Learn how climate change increases the risk of wildfires in the U.S. West.)
More than two-thirds of North American birds are vulnerable to extinction due to climate change-related habitat loss, according to the National Audubon Society.
Making matters worse, the current fires in Canada are occurring at a time of year when nestlings are ill-equipped to flee, and the smoke may also be affecting the activities of insects their parents would’ve fed them early in life, says Cory Overton, a U.S. Geological Survey wildlife biologist. Stressed parents, he says, may be more likely to consider abandoning their nests.
“It’s too early to tell if there will be an increase in mortality this year, but we know that smoke can cause health issues for birds,” says Andrew Stillman, a postdoctoral researcher with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Birds “have a super-efficient respiratory system to help power flight,” Stillman says, which means toxic air exposures capable of sickening humans would also harm birds.
A new area of inquiry
Birds have evolved alongside wildfires, and periodic fire cycles can play a vital role for ecosystems—attracting the bugs that woodpeckers eat, for example. Some predator species have even seemed to hasten fire spread for their own hunting gains.
Yet with past fires, many birds might fly away to avoid blazes or smoke. Escaping is much harder now with more destructive, climate change-induced conflagrations that burn larger and longer, Overton says.
Moreover, birds wrestle with other significant stressors, including noise pollution and habitat degradation, so poor air quality from smoke can push birds past their limit. "Flight is very energetically demanding so they're breathing deeply," Overton says. (Read how North America has lost three billion birds since 1970.)
Because little is known about how wildfire smoke affects wild birds, researchers have been forced to instead look to related research: In one study, captive birds with accidental smoke exposure experienced damage to their lung tissue and that left them more susceptible to future respiratory illnesses. And some birds with industrial air pollution exposures have had fewer or lower-quality eggs. Other research on poultry exposed to smoke during structural fires detected short-term decreased egg production.
Tracking migration amid the smoke
To date, Overton at USGS has conducted the only study looking at how wildfire smoke affects bird migrations, but that worked relied on a goose-tracking project Overton and colleagues had already been conducting.
When the massive 2020 wildfires tore across the western U.S., his team saw that four of their GPS-tagged tule geese were taking a much longer and circuitous migration route to fly through the Pacific Northwest after they’d encountered dense smoke with levels of fine particulates unhealthy for people.
Three birds halted their migration, landing in the Pacific Ocean for a few days—likely trying to wait out the smoke. One bird flew on an abnormally indirect route, transiting via Idaho where the species had never been known to land previously, and some of the birds also soared to extreme heights.
The good news is that the tracked birds all survived. Yet as the team reported in the journal Ecology, the birds took more than double the time to travel from Alaska to their typical stopover site in Oregon—around nine days, covering more than 400 extra miles.
At issue with these lengthy flights, the authors wrote, is that longer, more draining migrations may make it harder to survive, recover or reproduce. (Read more about how wildfire smoke affects animals.)
To gain further insights about smoke and bird migration, Josée Rousseau, a Cornell Lab of Ornithology postdoc, says that in ongoing work she’s been using weather radar data to scrutinize bird migration in smoky conditions.
A pressing matter—and how you can help
Further studies like Overton’s are soon likely to come out of the smoke affecting the East Coast in 2023, says Tingley. “What we are going to see over the next year and a half is a lot of scientists who opportunistically had studies going on in the northeastern U.S. and southern Canada,” he says, predicting that we’ll see some interesting results by next year.
Ultimately, he says, sharing data sets across long-term studies designed for a variety of purposes and drawing from community observations, will help fill in some of the gaps about smoke effects.
Next month, Sanderfoot will launch a community science project called Project Phoenix in partnership with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
It will ask volunteers to record sightings of birds in their area for 10 minutes a week, with the goal of eventually drawing inferences about how birds alter their habitat use—including visiting bird feeders and bird baths—when exposed to various intensities of smoke.
Sanderfoot and Tingley also recommend homeowners keep bird feeders full and available during wildfire season to help energy-strapped birds.
Keeping bird baths full of clean water may also help, but bird baths must also be regularly cleaned to reduce the chances of spreading disease between birds, cautions Overton.
Helping wild birds overall, Sanderfoot adds, also means keeping cats indoors, leashing dogs, putting stickers on windows to help birds avoid flying into them, and generally trying to curb your carbon footprint and pollution.
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