Caroline McGrath

12/04/19

Hunt, Katie. “Climate Change Could Be Making Birds Shrink in Size, Study Finds.” CNN, Cable 

News Network, 4 Dec. 2019, 

www.cnn.com/2019/12/04/world/dead-birds-body-size-climate-change-scn/index.html. 

41 years ago, Dave Willard began collecting bird corpses he found on the street simply for the reason “Why let them go to waste.'' After collecting the birds, some days over 300 birds, he goes home and measures them. Now, I have no idea why one would ever feel the need to measure dead birds, but alas Willard’s ‘hobby’ made a discovery of the first of its kind; simply this: birds are shrinking. The birds he collects are flying from Canada to Latin American in time for winter, and often find themselves crashing into skyscrapers and falling to their deaths, when Willard picks them up. Willard has been doing this since 1978 and collected over 100,000 dead birds, and noticed a particular pattern in the size measurements: the torso is shrinking, and the wings are getting longer. Willard and his team have credited global warming to this trend. Because the temperature has risen in the north, birds have adapted smaller bodies, as there is less need for larger bodies to contain heat and to compensate for the smaller body, the wings have grown. Out of 52 species collected, 49 have shown an average of 2.4% decrease in body size and 1.3% growth in wingspan.

This adaption could have many implications on our society. What is it’s not just with birds? What if Willard was lucky to catch these findings because animals all around are growing and shrinking and we don’t notice? Our entire animal kingdom could be different in twenty years because of global warming. Climate change is talked about a lot, but this is a new consequence in the developing phase, but could be threatening to our species. 

I believe the article was very well done, especially the title which immediately grabbed my attention and made me want to read more. I do think that the article lacked some explanation. It stated things like “ bird's wingspans may have increased to compensate for smaller bodies that produce less energy for the incredibly long distances the birds travel during their migrations.” I would have said a smaller body had the opposite effect on the wingspan, and was shocked to read this, however, I found no explanation whatsoever over why this was the case. I think in order to improve this article, there needed to be more of a why not so much as a how. I understand that it is shrinking and growing, but after reading I was still unsure of why.