Birds are dying. Clues point to El Niño.Every month, Giovanny Suárez Espín walks a beach near his home in southern Ecuador, monitoring for dead seabirds. Usually, he sees maybe a handful. But on recent surveys, the sand has been littered with carcasses. “Every 10 steps you took, you found five or 10 birds, and it kept going,” said Suárez, who works for American Bird Conservancy, a nonprofit group. “On the three-kilometer walk, we saw lots of dead birds the whole way.” In June, Suárez and others tallied 638 dead birds on the beaches of three provinces in Ecuador, about seven times the number found over the previous year and a half combined. “It’s painful,” he said. In July, they counted an additional 968. It’s too soon to say for certain what has caused the spike in deaths, which has affected various species, including sooty shearwaters, Peruvian and blue-footed boobies, cormorants, petrels and the critically endangered waved albatross. Die-offs in sea birds aren’t uncommon, and can stem from a variety of factors. In 2023, Ecuador saw mass deaths from avian influenza, said Sebastián Cruz, a seabird ecologist who runs the South American marine bird program for American Bird Conservancy. But this time, he said, looks different. The birds’ bodies are emaciated. Testing for bird flu is needed, but the few necropsies that have been conducted, along with the behavior of surviving birds, show no signs of infection. And critically, sea surface temperatures off the coast have been exceptionally elevated. This points to an alarming possibility: The seabirds could already be victims of the building El Niño, a natural climate phenomenon whose effects are now occurring while the planet dangerously warms. In recent months, as scientists have predicted an El Niño that could be the strongest in recorded history, the attention has focused on how it could hurt humans. And it could hurt us a lot, potentially bringing record heat, drought and torrential rain. But wildlife stands to suffer, too. Marine mammals and seabirds are among the most at risk. The effects of El NiñoDuring an El Niño in the Pacific, the normal upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich waters weakens. Fewer nutrients near the surface lead to less phytoplankton, which leads to fewer small fish like sardines and anchovies, and on up the food chain. “Larger fish have the opportunity to feed deeper if there are deeper resources available or to move out of the region, but the seabirds don’t have that luxury,” said Sea McKeon, marine program director at American Bird Conservancy, which works with partners in more than 15 countries. Some of the birds arrive in Ecuador after long migrations from Australia or New Zealand. “They’ve just flown across the Pacific to find a desert instead of an oasis,” McKeon said. Historically, seabird populations were much more robust than they have been in recent decades, which gave them better resilience during natural El Niño cycles. But between 1950 and 2010 alone, monitored seabird populations decreased by 70 percent, researchers found. Globally, the birds face a litany of threats. Coastal development is taking over habitats. Predators like snakes and rats, introduced by humans onto islands where they didn’t evolve, are decimating seabird eggs. Fishing hooks are choking them and nets are drowning them. In recent years, avian influenza has taken a terrible toll. Then there is the bird-killing ocean heat, which isn’t always tied to El Niño but is intensified by climate change. About half of Alaska’s common murres, some four million birds, died as a result of a marine heat wave from 2015-16, scientists have concluded. Growing threatsJulia Parrish, an author of that study and a marine ecologist at the University of Washington who is not involved with the Ecuadorean surveys, said the deaths in South America were most likely related to El Niño. And they probably aren’t the only ones. “Along the North American coast, there is now a spreading uptick in carcasses of local birds,” Parrish said. “They appear, from the photos I’ve seen, to be emaciated.” In March and April, a marine heat wave in California may have been behind a brief increase in reports of dead birds, including brown pelicans, loons and grebes, said Krysta Rogers, a senior environmental scientist focusing on avian investigations at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. In Ecuador, the beach surveys were intended to monitor birds killed because of fisheries, often after swallowing hooks. Suárez and his colleagues work with local fishers to reduce those threats by helping them adjust their gear and learn to safely extract hooks from birds. In some ways, those efforts make it even harder to face the new deaths. “It’s sometimes hard to keep upbeat,” Cruz said. “I can work with eradicating introduced species and I can talk with fishers to reduce seabird bycatch. But then comes the potentially biggest El Niño we have ever recorded and there’s nothing I can do.”
DIRTIER AIR, DIRTIER WATER Trump’s vision for A.I. dominance comes with major air pollutionIn March, a developer working on a Meta data center in El Paso applied to power the site with a gas-burning plant large enough to supply electricity to 300,000 homes. Texas environmental regulators signed off on the project in just 20 days, months faster than usual. They approved another project in three days. And an even larger data center power plant, also gas-burning, won approval in just two days. All without public notice. When the El Paso facility’s power plant is complete, it could emit as much planet-warming carbon dioxide in a year as 360,000 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles over the same period. Fast-tracking polluting gas plantsIn the debate over data centers that is roiling the country, water use and noise are often cited as objections by neighbors and environmentalists. Less mentioned has been the pollution from the scores of gas-burning plants that will power these data centers. Nationwide, at least 82 gas-burning power plants are being built or have been proposed to power data centers, according to the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonpartisan research organization. Most were announced or granted permits within the past 18 months. If built as planned, the gas burning plants — scattered across states including Texas, Ohio and Wyoming — could release as much planet-warming pollution in a year as roughly half of all the passenger vehicles in the United States, according to one estimate by the Environmental Integrity Project. They would also produce harmful pollutants including particulate matter, formaldehyde and smog-forming nitrogen oxides that can contribute to heart disease, asthma, lung cancer, strokes and other ailments in people living nearby. — Hiroko Tabuchi NUMBERS OF THE DAY More than 1,700 butterfly species are not living where they once did.That’s according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, which covered 105 countries. That translates to nearly one in 10 butterfly species with a new range, Annie Roth reports. Climate change has been the main culprit. “Butterfly species are shifting their ranges on every continent where they occur,” one researcher said. ONE LAST THING
Sesame Street takes on extreme weatherNo place is safe from climate change these days. Not even Sesame Street, where sunny days used to sweep the clouds away. On Monday, David Gelles reports, an episode of Sesame Street took on the increasingly common phenomenon of extreme weather. But the episode does not mention climate change by name, or the fossil fuels that are warming the planet. “What do we do now? said Rocio Galarza, vice president of U.S. educational programs for Sesame Workshop said of the episode. “Can I, as a 3, 4, 5-year old, be part of the rebuilding process? Children do have those questions.” More climate news from around the web:
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