New Homes for Chimney Swifts

  • The almost-finished tower awaits its new residents on the grounds of the Orono School District's nature center next to Lake Claussen. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)

There’s one American bird that has an unusual habitat problem. Chimney Swifts have adapted in the past as humans encroached on their territory. But now changes in human behavior are presenting new problems for the birds. And some people are trying to help them adapt again. Stephanie Hemphill reports.

Transcript

There’s one American bird that has an unusual habitat problem. Chimney Swifts have adapted in the past as humans encroached on their territory. But now changes in human behavior are presenting new problems for the birds. And some people are trying to help them adapt again. Stephanie Hemphill reports.

In his dad’s window-and-door warehouse in the Minneapolis suburbs, Derek Meyer is supervising the boys in his scout troop as they build a wooden tower for Chimney Swifts.

They’re using rough plywood to build a narrow box twelve feet high with an opening about a foot square.

Derek is doing this project to earn the rank of Eagle Scout. In the process, he’s learned a few things about the lives of Chimney Swifts.

“They originally lived in hollow trees but when the settlers from Europe came over they started destroying the trees, so they decided to live in the chimneys, and then people started putting wire over their chimneys, so over the last 40 years they’ve lost half of their population.”

Not just wire, but rain caps and other devices to keep moisture and critters out of chimneys.

The new home these boys are building for Chimney Swifts is destined for the nature center next to a nearby school. The school district was planning to tear down an old brick chimney as part of a remodeling project. Rebecca Field found out about that, and she tried to stop it.

“I said, wait a minute, I’m sure there are Chimney Swifts in there and they’re really good birds because they eat about 2,000 insects a day, each of those birds. And their favorite insect is the mosquito.'”

Field is on the board of Audubon Minnesota, and she’d been watching the swifts hanging around the chimney in the evenings. Individually they look like fat cigars with wings, but when they get ready to swoop down into the chimney for the night, there are so many of them, they look like a funnel cloud.

“How they communicate I have no idea, how they put the brakes on when they dive into that chimney so quickly, it’s a mystery but it’s a fun thing to watch.”

In the end the school district decided to leave the chimney up.

So now, a few weeks later, and just in time for the Chimney Swifts to fly back up from the Amazon, the tower is standing on a concrete pad at the school’s nature center.

School naturalist Marleane Callaghan has already brought all her classes, grades three-through-five, to check it out.

“We’ve talked about the bird, what it looks like, the dimension of it, I’ve invited them to come back with their parents to watch in the school parking lot in the evening up at the high school where they’ve left the chimney, and then to walk on down, to be able to identify them.”

This project is part of an effort by Audubon groups all over the country to raise awareness of Chimney Swifts and their need for homes.

In Minnesota, project director Ron Windingstad wants to convince homeowners to make existing chimneys more welcoming. He says people can take the caps off their chimneys during the summer, or just raise them high enough so the birds can fly in from the sides.

Soon these school kids will be able to see the amazing acrobatics of the Chimney Swifts. Windingstad says they hardly ever stop flying, from morning til night. They’ll even sip water and take a bath in a nearby pond, without stopping.

“They’ll scoop down, lower their bill, and fly across it and drink in the water. They’ll use some of these shrubs around here to break off little twigs about the size of a wooden matchstick or toothpick actually, and use that to build their nests, and they do that while flying as well. They are marvelous creatures.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

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A New Climate Conference

  • President Barack Obama meeting with former Vice President Al Gore in the Oval Office on December 7, 2009 regarding Copenhagen. (Photo by Pete Souza, courtesy of the White House)

With no legally-binding agreement in
Copenhagen, there’s now talk of another global
warming conference next summer in Mexico
City. Lester Graham has more on that:

Transcript

With no legally-binding agreement in
Copenhagen, there’s now talk of another global
warming conference next summer in Mexico
City. Lester Graham has more on that:

When the U.S. House passed a climate bill this summer, the Senate was expected to pick it up and vote on it by the end of the year—maybe before the U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen.

That didn’t happen.

In Copenhagen last week, former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore looked ahead to another conference next year.

“I believe that we are capable of resolving the remaining issues to the point we can meet in Mexico City this July in the aftermath of a successful action by the United States Senate in April and conclude a binding international treaty.”

Al Gore wants the Senate to pass the legislation by April 22 to be exact – Earth Day. With business concerned about coming greenhouse gas regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Senate might feel more pressure to by then.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Climate Bill Moving Along

  • A lot of compromises and some arm-twisting are persuading moderate Democrats to support limiting global warming emissions. (Photo courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol)

Work on the climate change bill
in the Senate is progressing
despite the controversy surrounding
the bill. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Work on the climate change bill
in the Senate is progressing
despite the controversy surrounding
the bill. Lester Graham reports:

A Republican boycott and bitter wrangling between Democrats and Republicans over provisions in the climate bill in the Senate and, still, supporters say it’s going okay.

A lot of compromises and some arm-twisting are persuading moderate Democrats to support limiting global warming emissions.

Even the Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, is now saying Congress will approve legislation this session.

Josh Dorner is with a group backing a climate bill, called Clean Energy Works. Dorner says getting moderate Democrats like Baucus on board moves a climate bill closer to reality.

“That coupled with the bi-partisan agreement amongst other senators, Senators Kerry, Graham and Lieberman to move forward, I think shows that we’re closer to a bi-partisan agreement on getting a bill done now than we ever have been before.”

“Bi-partisan” meaning only a couple of Republicans joining a lot more Democrats in support of the bill.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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National Parks Hit by Climate

  • Glacier National Park in Montana. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service)

A new report warns that US National
Parks will be affected by global warming.
Tanya Ott reports rising sea
levels and changing habitat will mean
major changes:

Transcript

A new report warns that US National
Parks will be affected by global warming.
Tanya Ott reports rising sea
levels and changing habitat will mean
major changes:

Forget melting ice-caps. Stephen Saunders wants you to picture your favorite
vacation spot closer to home.

“Climate disruption caused by humans is the greatest threat to all of our national parks.”

Saunders is president of the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization. Their new
report identifies 25 national parks, lakeshores, seashores and monuments
most at risk from warming temperatures, rising sea levels and retreating
snow.

So what does that mean? Among other things, wildlife is going to
have to move to other areas. The report recommends the Park Service work
with private landowners to create special wildlife corridors for migration.

Right now, the US Senate is considering clean energy and climate
legislation. The House passed its climate bill in June.

For The Environment Report, I”m Tanya Ott.

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Mice Morphing at Warp Speed

  • Oliver Pergams used a tiny caliper to measure the mice, tracking changes in size over the years. (Photo by Gabriel Spitzer)

Evolution takes place over long stretches of time: millennia and epochs. But some new research shows that animals might be changing much
faster than nearly anyone thought. Gabriel Spitzer has more on those
changes, and how they seem to be linked to humans:

Transcript

Evolution takes place over long stretches of time: millennia and epochs. But some new research shows that animals might be changing much
faster than nearly anyone thought. Gabriel Spitzer has more on those
changes, and how they seem to be linked to humans:

Tall Trees Park is a little patch of green in Glenview, Illinois – a
northern suburb of Chicago. About a hundred years ago, a lot of this area
looked a lot like this. It was mostly farms and pasture and forest. And now
of course it’s a lot of strip malls and subdivisions and stuff. And the
population has grown seventyfold. The climate has changed, too. It’s
gotten a little warmer, a little wetter.

And all this has made life a lot different for the northern white-footed
mice who live here. It’s actually not just made life different for the
mice, it’s changed the mice themselves.

That gets back to a guy named Oliver Pergams. He’s an ecologist, and in
the mid-90s, he was looking at deer mice who live on the Channel Islands
off the coast of California. And he was taking these mice and comparing
them to museum samples of the same kind of mice from the same place, but
decades earlier.

“And I found something kind of strange – that the older specimens were
larger than the newer specimens, so they shrunk in size over a period of
about 30 or 40 years.”

That got him wondering if those relatively quick changes are happening in
other places. So years later, now on the faculty at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, he gathered up some of those White Footed Mice from
the Chicago suburbs. And he went to the Field Museum of Natural History…

(sound of a cabinet opening)
… where they have a hundred years of dead mouse specimens stored in
white metal cabinets.

“Here we have trays and trays of the northern white-footed mouse.”

With a tiny caliper, he’d measure their skulls, their feet, the distance
from their eyes to their noses.

“So this one here was collected by Aikley in 1903.”

And he compared mice from before and after 1950.

“Here are some skulls, this one was collected in 1989.”

Lo and behold, these mice had grown: by more than 10% on some measures.

This phenomenon goes way beyond Chicago. Pergams measured more than 1,300
rodents from four different continents – Alaskan lemmings, Mexican
gophers, Filipino rats. Some of them got bigger, some smaller. But across
the world, most of the animals have changed over time spans thought to be
mere evolutionary eyeblinks.

The next step is to figure out why.

“You can’t get in a time machine and go back and look to see what
actually happened. So the next best thing is to see if there’s
associations or correlations with big factors.”

He found the variations correlate with changes in climate and human
population density. The exact reasons aren’t clear – more people might
mean more yummy trash for the mice to eat, for example. That’s going to
take more research to figure out, and these critters might be overdue for
some extra attention.

“One of the questions is, well, why didn’t anybody notice this before?
And I think the answer is, they haven’t looked.”

Larry Heaney curates the Field Museum’s mammal collection. He says
Pergams’s research opens up new questions about how animals respond to
changes driven by humans.

“The implication is, these animals are changing very, very rapidly. So in
a sense, it’s good: they can change. But the other side of the coin is,
they’re having to change.”

Now, the question is, is this happening in other species, too? What about
birds or bugs or plants?

“There’s been this default attitude that if you go to one place and you
capture or you observe animals or plants, that essentially there’s going
to be the same animals or plants 50 years or 100 years later. I don’t
think that’s possible to assume at all. We have to include the fact of
this change in all of our decisions, from ecology to evolutionary biology
to conservation.”

Pergams’s findings show that even the most common creatures have more to
teach us – when we ask the right kinds of questions.

For The Environment Report, I’m Gabriel Spitzer.

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Climate, Health Care Bills Connected

  • The climate change bill is currently in the Senate, awaiting the Senators when they return from August recess. (Photo courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol)

Experts are saying the fate
of the climate change bill
is tied to health care reform.
Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

Experts are saying the fate
of the climate change bill
is tied to health care reform.
Mark Brush has more:

The climate change bill squeaked through the House of Representatives. And now it’s waiting for action in the Senate. But the Senate has full plate right now with health insurance reform.

And some experts are saying the fate of the health care bill will have a big impact on the climate change bill.

Nicky Roy with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

He says if the Obama Administration manages to do well in the health care debate, that will carry over to the debate on climate change.

“On the other hand, if the health care rallies succeed in fatally wounding the whole healthcare process, I think that’s going to make it tough for energy and climate because it’ll show that that tactic has worked.”

Some lobbying groups are using the same tactics being used in the health care debate. We’re already starting to see some anti-climate change legislation rallies in big energy states of Texas and Colorado.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Conversations With China About Climate Change

  • President Barack Obama addresses the opening session of the first U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue. Listening at left are Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan, center, and Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo, left. (Photo by Chuck Kennedy, courtesy of the White House)

The Chinese are in Washington in high-level talks with the Obama administration about – among other things – energy and the environment. Lester Graham has more on that:

Transcript

The Chinese are in Washington in high-level talks with the Obama administration about – among other things – energy and the environment. Lester Graham has more on that:

Opponents of the climate change bill in the U.S. like to remind us that China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. China likes to point out the U.S. didn’t even sign the Kyoto Protocol.

“We’ve been each other’s biggest excuse for the past five, eight years about not acting on international commitments.”

That’s Jennifer Turner. She’s Director of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Turner says things are changing.

Recently China and the U.S. started talking about how they can help each other. And, she says, while China’s not talking about climate change a lot, it is talking about energy efficiency.

“China has actually been doing a lot over the past eight years on lowering their CO2 emissions, pushing energy efficiency more, for trying to ensure their own energy security and to lessen the health impacts of pollution.”

While the U.S. has been stressing climate change.

The governments have figured out they’re working on the same problem, just looking at it a little differently.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Report Warns of Climate Effects in US

  • The report summarizes what the scientists have been finding (Image courtesy of the US Global Change Research Program)

Scientists say the effects of human-caused climate change can no longer be ignored. Their findings are part of a national report just released. Sadie Babits reports it outlines the current and future impacts of climate change in the US:

Transcript

Scientists say the effects of human-caused climate change can no longer be ignored. Their findings are part of a national report just released. Sadie Babits reports it outlines the current and future impacts of climate change in the US:

The U.S. Global Change Research Program’s report summarizes what scientists have been finding.

As temperatures warm, sea levels are rising, crop production is changing and hurricanes are getting worse.

Katherine Hayhoe is one of the report’s authors. She says we all need to curb greenhouse gas emissions and learn to adapt.

“So we need to figure out how to best prepare for the change that is coming.”

The report comes out while Congress is considering a major bill that would cap greenhouse gas emissions and reduce them over time.

But Hayhoe says the timing is just a coincidence.

Hayhoe says she does hope the report helps inform the debate in Washington.

For The Environment Report, I’m sAdie Babits.

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Cleaning Up the Car Wash

  • At the London Road Car Wash, the first blast of soapy water is captured in a pit under the floor and used again. (Photo by Stephanie Hemphill)

Many business leaders are taking a serious look at their environmental impact. Companies from Ikea to Home Depot are following a science-based approach to sustainability called the Natural Step. Stephanie Hemphill visited one small business that’s rethinking its operations:

Transcript

Many business leaders are taking a serious look at their environmental impact. Companies from Ikea to Home Depot are following a science-based approach to sustainability called the Natural Step. Stephanie Hemphill visited one small business that’s rethinking its operations:

You probably wouldn’t think a car wash would be the kind of place that pays attention to the environment. But this one is.

It’s trying to become more sustainable — putting back what it takes away.

“What we’d like to do is, we’d like to be a closed system, a closed loop.”

Frank Nicoletti is the manager of this car wash in Duluth Minnesota.

“That’s the goal of the whole Natural Step is to be closed loop, meaning nothing goes in or out, and you just recycle the whole time. Of course, how feasible it is we don’t know. ”

Nicoletti is trained as a biologist. He’s the kind of guy who spends a lot of time watching the hawks as they migrate across the western tip of Lake Superior. It’s right across the street from the car wash.

His concern about nature is bubbling over into his business.

When a local non-profit group brought in Natural Step experts, Nicoletti and a dozen other business people signed up to learn how ecosystems work, and how they could operate their businesses more sustainably. They started looking over their operations from top to bottom to see how they could make them more earth-friendly.

One big change they’ve made at the car wash is switching to a biodegradable detergent. That’s not required by law, but it’s one of the principles of the Natural Step program — to reduce the use of man-made toxic substances.

“Everything that’s on line here is non-persistent so it breaks down in the environment.”

As cars move through the wash, the first flush of soapy water is captured in a pit the below the floor, and re-used.

The rest of the waste water is treated at the local sewage treatment plant, so grease and oil and other pollutants aren’t going into Lake Superior. Around the country, most car washes send their waste water to treatment plants, and Frank Nicoletti says it’s better for lakes and streams when people use a car wash instead of doing it on the driveway at home.

Here, the used oil from the lube operation is another part of that closed loop.

“We have two special boilers in our basement that actually recycles the oil and heats part of the building as well as heating all of the hot water.”

And the company recycles the cans and bottles they haul out of the cars they wash. They use the money from the recycled trash to give the people who work here a free lunch once a month.

“The amount of trash that comes out of these vehicles is unbelievable. We’re actually putting less trash in the garbage can now that we’re recycling, which is a great thing, and we’re also helping our guys out by giving them lunch once a month on these recycled cans.”

That’s another part of the Natural Step. It says a sustainable business will make sure its employees can meet their needs. And since they started recycling the trash from the cars, a lot of the workers are recycling at home now too.

Frank Nicoletti says he’d like to make the business fit in with nature even more — by rebuilding the roof.

“I’d love to make butterfly garden up there, and that will actually clean the air. Because the butterfly migration and the dragonfly migration through the lakeshore here is just huge. I mean, there are days when the dragonflies are going by, you can see a million — of different species.”

When they’ve finished a year’s worth of training and work, the car wash and the other businesses trying out the Natural Step approach will share their experiences with others in the community.

Frank Nicoletti says it’ll be like a pebble dropped in a pond. There’s no telling how far the ripples will go.

For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

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Citizen Scientists Track Climate Change

  • Reporter Sadie Babits is tracking the blooming of a lilac tree, as part of a "citizen scientist" project that will document climate change. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Scientists are asking citizens to pay attention to plants this spring. They want you to report everything from leaf buds to blossoms. Scientists want those observations from right in your backyard to better understand how climate change is affecting plants and trees. Sadie Babits liked the idea and signed up:

Transcript

Scientists are asking citizens to pay attention to plants this spring. They want you to report everything from leaf buds to blossoms. Scientists want those observations from right in your backyard to better understand how climate change is affecting plants and trees. Sadie Babits liked the idea and signed up:

You know, I found it really isn’t hard to be a citizen scientist.

I’m on the website for Project Budburst. It’s a nationwide effort to get people out into their backyards to track spring flowers. All I have to do is to pick a plant or tree to keep an eye on and then report my findings.

I’m thinking I’ll check out the lilac trees in my neighborhood here in Portland. But before I head out, I need some advice.

So I called Sandra Henderson. She’s busy these days directing Project Budburst at the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research.

“Hey Sadie.”

I reach Henderson at her office in Boulder, Colorado.

What advice do you have for me, a first citizen scientists observing phenology?

“The ideal thing to do is get a sense of when lilacs in your case in Portland, Oregon are expected to have different pheno events.”

Good thing I looked up phenology before calling Henderson. Basically it means nature’s calendar – the timing of when cherry blossoms bloom or a robin builds a nest.

And these life cycles of plants and animals are sensitive to changes in climate.

“Plants provide a wonderful context for understanding changes to the environment and they certainly respond to changes in temperature and precipitation, things that climate scientists are very interested in.”

Scientists can’t be in everyone’s backyard. That’s where volunteers come in. Last year some five thousand people across the country reported their observations to Project Budburst. That information now is the foundation for an online database that includes everything from dandelions to ponderosa pines.

So after walking through our neighborhood and seeing a lot of trees that have already flowered, I’ve decided that these lilac trees outside of our house are perfect for watching because they haven’t flowered yet and there are leaf buds all over the branches. And here’s a branch and the leaf buds are huge and they are just starting to unfurl.

Now that I’ve found my lilac tree to watch, I can report today’s findings.

Really that’s it. Scientists are finding out a lot of interesting things. For example, forsythia in Chicago are blooming a week earlier. These simple observations will eventually create a snapshot of how climate change is affecting plants across the U.S.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sadie Babits.

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