What’s happening out there?

Wildlife organizations are looking at 30 years of research and are bewildered by recent changes in the behaviours of plants and animals:

“Migratory birds are taking flight an average of three weeks earlier than they did 30 years ago, said Douglas Inkley, senior science advisor of the National Wildlife Federation. And those same birds have moved north an average of 60 miles over the past 20 years.

…Terry Root, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies, said in the upper latitudes of the world there has been a shift by as much seven days per decade in the arrival of spring.

‘What that means is that the flowers are blooming seven days earlier,’ said Root, an ecologist and lead author for the last report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. ‘If you are a bird or a flower, that is quite a lot. There is a very strong global change going on.'”