From the BBC: Snow sports 'stress' to wildlife
Winter sports such as snowboarding, off-piste skiing and trekking are putting Alpine wildlife under stress, scientists have concluded.
Researchers found that in areas of the Alps heavily used for sports, black grouse produced large amounts of a hormone indicating stress.
Writing in the Royal Society's journal Proceedings B, they say these sports represent a new threat to wildlife.
Climatic change is also affecting habitat for these birds.
During the winter, they make burrows, or "igloos", in the snow. They come out twice each day to feed, then make a new igloo in which to hide.
Rising winter temperatures are reducing the availability of these hiding places on lower slopes, while this new study, by scientists based in Switzerland and Austria, suggests the growing popularity of "extreme" winter sports is affecting their chances higher up the slopes.
(Notice the non-sensical global warming bit? The grouse can no longer build snow igloos on the lower slopes because of global warming, and can't build them higher because that's where the ski runs are. Hmm...why weren't the ski runs lower down? Maybe because of the variability of snow fall at those elevation? Nah, couldn't be.)
Under pressure
In a wide variety of animals, production of the hormone corticosterone rises in conditions of stress.
Black grouse are apparently no different.
In the first part of their study, the research team tagged three of the birds for identification. They then put them under stress for several days by repeatedly forcing them out of their snow burrows, mimicking conditions the birds face in areas heavily used for human recreation.
Signs of stress were evident in the birds' faeces in the form of elevated levels of corticosterone.
The second part of the study involved collecting black grouse faeces left in 32 sites, some close to winter sports centres and others in unused parts of the mountains.
Birds closer to human sites produced higher levels of corticosterone, the stress marker.
O.K. I'm supposed to think there is some looming wildlife catastrophe here because, here is the shocker, we humans "stress out" wildlife. You know, I can worry about species under threat because of the destruction of habitat, or the elimination of breeding/nesting grounds that impact the ability to reproduce and cause a decline in numbers....but "quality of life" issues for grouse? And lets be clear that is exactly what the study is about, as the article makes clear:
Stress can affect animals in a variety of ways, potentially affecting even reproduction, though this study did not look for or find any specific impacts of the elevated stress.
So, the study did not find, or even claim they were looking for, negative effects of the increased "stress" levels in the grouse. So why exactly are we supposed to think there is some sort of major "problem" here?
Of course, one might wonder how much stress was caused by the capturing and tagging of the birds, or by the obvious human encroachment taking samples of grouse guano.
Coincidently, there was another interesting story about bird behavior I found today: A chirp you can't refuse: Cowbirds run 'mafia racket'over eggs
WASHINGTON — Raise my kids, or else! People have long wondered how cowbirds can get away with leaving their eggs in the nests of other species, who then raise the baby cowbirds. Why don't the hosts just toss the strange eggs out? Now researchers seem to have an answer — if the host birds reject the strange eggs, the cowbirds come back and trash the place.
The so-called "Mafia behavior," by brown-headed cowbirds is reported in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"It's the female cowbirds who are running the mafia racket at our study site," Jeffrey P. Hoover, of the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Illinois Natural History Survey, said in a statement.
"Our study shows many of them returned and ransacked the nest when we removed the parasitic egg," he explained.
Hoover and Scott K. Robinson of the Florida museum studied cowbirds over four seasons in the Cache River watershed in southern Illinois.
While cowbirds leave their eggs in many other birds nests, the researchers focused on warblers in the study because warblers usually accept and raise cowbird eggs.
To see what would happen, Hoover and Robinson watched where the cowbirds left eggs in warbler nests, and then removed some of them.
They found that 56% of the nests where cowbird eggs were removed were later ransacked.
They also found evidence of what they called "'farming' behavior," in which cowbirds destroyed a nest to force the host bird to build another. The cowbird then synchronized its egg laying with the hosts' "renest" attempt.
"Cowbirds parasitized 85% of the renests, which is strong supporting evidence for both farming and mafia behavior," Hoover said.
This is fascinating. I wish the story gave a little bit more insight as to how researcher designed their study (I mean, sure its interesting but do I really want to track down the original paper to get a sense of their methodology? No! So just give me the highlights like the BBC did in the grouse piece...which was pretty good on the methodology for a MSM story.) Once again I worry about the influence of the researcher themselves upon the study. Maybe they should have compared their findings to how cowbirds react with other species of birds that accept the eggs less readily, i.e. compare the behavior of the cowbirds after the removal of eggs by other birds with the behavior after egg removal by a human.
Ah!! Nothing says "fun" like research design!
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