Climate change impacts bird populations in Newport County

        At the Sweet Flag Preserve, adjacent to Bailey’s Brook in Middletown, Jameson Chace and his students at Salve Regina University spend two days each week every autumn capturing and banding birds as they fly through the area on migration. They’ve found it to be a hotspot of activity every year and one that many birds depend on for rest and refueling before continuing on their long journey south.
        “If there’s a migratory bird that comes through the Northeast, it’s shown up there,” says Chace, associate professor of biology and chairman of Salve’s Biology and Biomedical Sciences Department. “These little bits of riparian conservation zones are doing a whole lot more for wildlife than we probably ever imagined. That’s the big takeaway from our research.”
        Much of what he has learned about birds in recent years, however, is worrisome. And much of that worry comes from the effect of the changing climate on bird populations. He points to a study

Jameson Chace (Photo by Peter Silvia)

published last winter that found that North American bird populations have declined by about 30 percent since 1970, a decline of about 3 billion birds.
        “I remember when I was a kid, there were just so many more birds around – more bird songs, more bird activity – and that’s all depressed now, regardless of what species you’re talking about,” Chace says. “We used to have massive flocks of blackbirds, and I don’t see those kinds of flocks any more. These are changes that many people would recognize if they stopped and thought about what it was like when they were younger.”
        He says that birds are “amazingly resilient” and can adapt to many things in the environment. But the climate is changing so quickly that some species will likely have a difficult time adapting fast enough.
        “Some bird populations are already on the cusp of serious problems,” he says, noting that saltmarsh birds are at the top of the list. “As sea levels rise and storm surges occur, they don’t have anywhere to go. Their nests are getting flooded.”
        One species, the saltmarsh sparrow, used to be easy to find at the marsh at Hazard Road in Newport or at the marsh behind the Third Beach parking lot in Middletown, among other places. But most nesting attempts fail as their habitat gets flooded, and the birds are expected to go extinct within 30 years.
        Chace has also been conducting surveys of wintering sea ducks along the Cliff Walk in Newport since 2006, and he is observing some concerning trends that are likely attributable to shifts in the availability of food due to the warming climate. He said that ducks like surf and black scoters and greater scaup, which he used to see in massive numbers across Easton’s Bay, appear to be declining.
        “There have been times in the past when duck numbers there have been so thick you could walk across them, but other years there aren’t so many,” he says. “We know the fisheries in the region are changing, which means the prey base for these ducks may be changing, too. What has been a traditional wintering area for sea ducks may be changing because of these shifts in food availability.”
        He also worries about woodland birds. As moisture levels change, the tiny creatures living in the soil that many birds feed on struggle to survive, forcing forest birds like wood thrushes to move elsewhere to find food.
        “We have all these amazing birds, but some of the changes happening are going to cause them to shift their distribution,” he says.
        Chace has been studying birds on Aquidneck Island for about 15 years, following several years of research in Colorado, Arizona and Vermont. A native of Portsmouth, he taught outdoor education in Texas and Maine in between stints at graduate school before landing the job at Salve.
        “I’ve always been interested in wildlife since as far back as I can remember. I was the oddball in my family that way,” he says. “My stepmom recognized my interest and wanted to help me with it, so she connected me with Norman Bird Sanctuary. I’d go on bird walks there on Sunday mornings with Tim Traver.”
        Chace took that experience and turned it into a career. In addition to his teaching and research duties, he is in the midst of a two-year term as president of the Wilson Ornithological Society, an international organization of bird scientists.
        “I love taking science and breaking it down in a way that’s interesting and understandable to undergraduates so they get scientific literacy and, hopefully, a passion to want to use science in their lives to make decisions,” he says.
        Despite the many negative implications, the impact of climate change on birds in southern New England isn’t all bad, according to Chace. As species shift their ranges to adapt to warming temperatures and other climate-related factors, some species are expanding into our region. Red-bellied woodpeckers, for instance, were seldom seen in Rhode Island 50 years ago, but now they are common throughout the state and are easy to find in suburban neighborhoods. It’s a southern species that has expanded its range northward in recent years. The same is true of Carolina wrens and northern cardinals, both southern species that are now abundant in southern New England.
        “The more generalist foraging birds and the more adaptable species are going to do better, but the specialists aren’t going to be able to hold up in more urbanized environments,” he says. “Birds that can shift from one resource to another will do OK, and those that are very specific in their needs will have more challenges.”
        Chace says his role as an ornithologist during this period of rapid climate change is to do his best to document the bird population shifts and other impacts he observes.
        “These changes are important to pay attention to,” he concludes. “Part of my job is to be a watcher and to keep track, so that’s what I’m doing.”

        This article first appeared in the January 2021 issue of Newport Life magazine.