For example, we know that, although hornbills never drink water, they are triggered to breed by rainfall. The southern yellow-billed hornbill is an ideal species for these studies because it breeds during the hottest time of the year in the Kalahari Desert, and some of the links between temperature and its behavior and physiology are already fairly well understood. Thus, Mr Pattinson and his collaborators investigated the impact of climate change on hornbill breeding success over a 10 year period. “he motivation for this study was to investigate if rapid climate warming was having a demonstrable effect on the breeding success of an arid-zone bird over a longer time scale, and whether sub-lethal ‘hidden’ effects of high temperatures and drought could be affecting population-level breeding outputs”, Mr Pattinson told me in email. ![]() But what is happening to desert-dwelling birds over time frames longer than a few days? Mr Pattinson noted that heat-related mass die-offs that occur over just a few days are increasingly being recorded, and these pose a deeply worrying threat to population persistence and to ecosystem function. “There is rapidly growing evidence for the negative effects of high temperatures on the behaviour, physiology, breeding and survival of various bird, mammal, and reptile species around the world”, said conservation ecologist Nicholas Pattinson, who is a graduate student at the University of Cape Town’s FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology. Editor What are the effects of climate change over decadal time scales?
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