Nesting birds turn the clocks back 50 years after cold spring

[Chris Merkord]

Pied Flycatcher has recently begun to decline owing to the earlier hatching of its caterpillar food source, but this year may have over-compensated for the trend. Photo: Lars Falkdalen Lindahl (commons.wikimedia.org).

This year's chilly spring delayed the breeding of many birds by several weeks, taking their dates back to those more typical of the mid-1960s.

After several decades of rising temperatures, the cold spring of 2013 harked back to the typical weather conditions of 1966, when the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) first began systematically collecting nest data. Information collected by BTO  volunteers shows that birds responded by delaying nesting for several weeks, resulting in a breeding season that would not have seemed out of place 50 years ago.

 

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