Standard breed to excess, live to the resource limit stuff..
Dwindling
What I learnt briefly when I did a little bit of ornithology was the MASSIVE *natural* fluctuations in populations. E.g. a hard winter will take out 90%+ of the entire wren population.
Which may take years to recover. Natural species live on the limit of the resources - there are more urban foxes than rural ones because there is more to eat in town trash.
Forgive me asking a stupid question, but: Suppose lots of ice is falling off the Antarctic shelf because of global warming. Where does that go? It's not going to melt immediate, is it? So, maybe that creates large ice sheets.
I don't know anything about all this. But I am just pointing out that formation of large ice sheets doesn't mean that there's no global warming.
Into the sea where it floats off and eventually melts.
Icebergs is what they are then called, even if the lump of ice is bigger than Belgium. Note that such ice falling into the sea does not alter the sea level, because that part of the ice shelf off which it fell or cracked off is already floating.
We've been to Antarctica. On the first trip there was a colony of Gentoos on Cuverville Island that had bred later than usual in the season due to the weather. The chicks, hundreds, probably into the thousands, were not going to survive the winter. This kind of event is not unusual.
On a later trip a colony of Adelies in the Fish Islands were trying to raise chicks that were in poor condition. Survival was going to be difficult. This is not unusual.
It's not climate, it's weather, but the BBC don't get it. They don't report that the ice in Antarctica now extends as far as it did in the days of Shackleton, Amundsen and Scott as evidenced by their maps.
The BBC don't even know the difference between Adelie and Gentoo penguins. The news programme reports about the deaths of the Adelies originally showed video of Adelies and Gentoos. They're now showing videos only of Gentoos!
I think the idea was less ice on the land, due to global warming, leads to a rise in sea levels.
NASA shows a rise of 85mm in the last 20-odd years, and around 250mm over the last 150 years, or so. That's not significant if you live half-way up a mountain, but more worrying if you live only a few feet above sea level.
Something has caused that sea level rise, and I assume it's generally accepted to be global warming. What's less generally accepted is the cause of the global warming.
Sealed soffits maybe a bit but ISTR they used to nest in hedges and shrubs round our way. Not all that much horsefeed around in the 60's when they were still plentiful.
Eh? I thought it was down to the lack of horses, and the spilled grain from their feed, not to mention the proportion that goes straight through. Horses have crap ... err... inefficient digestion compared with cows.
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