Word: warblers
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Think you're a frequent flyer? Then talk to the whitethroat, a common warbler found throughout much of Europe and western Asia, which migrates on average an incredible 3,417 miles each year, wintering in sub-Saharan Africa. (Americans, by contrast, fly about 2,000 miles each year per capita...
...whitethroat is hardly alone in clocking a killer flight schedule. Among other birds of its type - like the Subalpine warbler, the Orphean warbler and the Barred warbler - annual migrations exceed 1,500 miles, sometimes over the Sahara. It might seem that another 200 miles tacked onto a several-thousand-mile journey wouldn't be too taxing. But for the estimated 500 million birds that migrate annually from Europe and Asia to Africa, surviving the journey is already difficult enough. Migrating birds - some of them as small as your fist - pack on body weight to stock fuel for the flight, sometimes...
...study, which was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and the European conservation charity RSFB, is a future projection of the effect of climate change on migratory birds, but it is already being felt today. In previous studies, Willis and his colleagues found that birds like the Dartford warbler - which generally breed in the warmer areas of Western Europe - are increasingly being spotted in Britain, even though the island was thought to be too cold for them. (The U.K. is blessed with an energetic corps of amateur ornithologists, which means scientists there have a wealth of data on bird...
...rusty blackbird, for example-one of the most rapidly dwindling species in North America, says Butcher-may also be due to global warming, but the immediate cause seems to be a drying up of the Canadian wetlands where it breeds. The same may apply to the Canada warbler. The cerulean warbler, also in decline, is losing habitat not because of global warming but because of another human activity: the destruction of Appalachian mountaintop forests by coal-mining operations...
...grandparent-friendly oldies (When a Man Loves a Woman) through the disco era (Celebration) to 21st century raves (Complicated). So it's not hard to imagine the whole family battling for the next turn at the mike. The easiest level is forgiving enough for even the most tone-deaf warbler to win a round or two. Just be thankful Simon Cowell isn't listening...