| Category: Health & Beauty: Environmental Health |
Hundreds of baby swifts in southern Spain have died after leaving their nests prematurely, in what ecologists described as an attempt to escape the extreme temperatures during one of the country’s earliest heatwaves on record.
Concerns were raised for the protected species late last week after residents in Seville and Córdoba noticed dozens of recently hatched birds scattered across sidewalks.
“You would walk down the street and there would be 100 chicks, lying at the foot of a building, some dying and some barely alive,” said the biologist Elena Moreno Portillo of Ecourbe, a Seville-based association dedicated to conservation in urban areas.
Ecourbe and other organisations laid blame on the extreme temperatures – Spain’s earliest heatwave in more than 40 years coincided with the hatching season for swifts.
These birds often build their nests in building facades or the cavities of roofs, leaving just a small crack open to the outside. “Our buildings are usually made of concrete or metal plates and these get very hot. So it becomes an oven and the chicks, who can’t fly yet, rush out because they can’t stand the temperature inside,” Moreno Portillo said. “They’re literally being cooked.”
As the mercury climbed in recent days – hovering at about 42C in both Seville and Córdoba – volunteers in both cities started to assemble around swift colonies, gathering up as many of the dehydrated and undernourished chicks they could find. More than 400 of these birds were brought to the state-run recovery centre for threatened species in the hope that they will be nursed back to health.
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Moreno Portillo estimated that thousands of swifts – most of them pallid swifts – had been forced out of their nests by the heat in Andalucía. In Madrid, the Brinzal bird centre said it was also treating scores of baby swifts who had attempted to escape the heat.
Ecologists in Andalucía have long come across swifts who left their nests prematurely, said Moreno Portillo. But as summer temperatures steadily arrive earlier on the peninsula – the country’s state weather agency says summer now begins 20 to 40 days earlier than it did 50 years ago – the phenomenon is growing more common. “It’s becoming more habitual and we’re seeing larger numbers,” she said.
In this case, a weeks-long delay could have made a difference, she said. “By mid-July, it is likely that many of these birds would have been able to fly. But they got caught in the heatwave and didn’t have time.”
~ Via The Guardian |
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