Magazine Highlights The Bermuda Longtail
Hakai Magazine has featured the iconic Bermuda longtails, noting they have been “turning up in Bermuda earlier and earlier.”
The story said, “White-tailed tropicbirds spend most of the year at sea, out of sight of people. When the seabirds make their annual descent into Bermuda to breed, though, their long, streamer-like tails, snowy white plumage, and shrill calls are impossible to miss. To locals, the birds’ return to the islands is a reliable sign of spring.
“But long-term records kept by birdwatchers hint that white-tailed tropicbirds, known locally as longtails, have been turning up in Bermuda earlier and earlier. Instead of being heralds of spring, these birds are potentially becoming harbingers of changes occurring in the nearby ocean, according to new research.
“The birds piqued the interest of Italian biologist Letizia Campioni, who works at the Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre in Portugal, when she visited Bermuda in 2019 to study endangered Bermuda petrels. Local birders and researchers kept mentioning to her that tropicbirds were arriving earlier than they had in the past. “Is this just a perception?” she recalls wondering. “Or is there something actually going on?”
“To test if peoples’ perceptions were correct, Campioni and her research collaborators analyzed data from the citizen science platform eBird, where local birders had uploaded tropicbird records going back decades. Adjusting for variation in the size of the tropicbird population and the number of birders looking for them over time, Campioni and her colleagues found that since the 1950s, the average date of the first longtail observation in Bermuda has advanced by 20 to 25 days. That works out to a shift of one day earlier roughly every three years. Seventy years ago, tropicbirds arrived in mid-March; today, they’re showing up in mid-February.”
Read the full story here on the Hakai Magazine website.
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Category: All, Environment
