Page 64 - BBC Wildlife Volume 36 #10

NEWS FEATURE
WhatcanIdo
tohelpwildlife
during droughts?
PROVIDE A BOWL OF WATER
for birds and mammals to drink and
bathe. It should be shallow or, if
it’s a large bowl, arrange stepping
stones so small animals can get out.
CREATE A WILDLIFE POND
Even the tiniest pool has enormous
value, but a deeper area (with
stepping stones so small animals
don’t drown) is less likely to dry out.
PLANT NECTAR-RICH
FLOWERS to compensate for the
lack of wildflowers in droughts. Top
up from rainwater butts or use ‘grey’
water from baths or washing-up.
MAKE YOUR GARDEN
DROUGHT-RESILIENT by
adopting plants, techniques and
features that save and store water.
Download a Rain Gardening Guide
at www.wwt.org.uk.
64 BBC Wildlife
41.1ºC
was the temperature in
the city of Kumagaya,
a new record high
for Japan.
4%
of the usual July rainfall
fell in Eastern England,
the driest since Met
Office records began
in 1961.
maintain water-tables close or near to the
surface throughout the year.”
Things go wrong when we step in.
“If we burn a bog to encourage heather at
the expense of sphagnum, or cut drains
to lower the water-table, the situation
changes,” Stoneman says. “The ecosystem-
engineer properties of sphagnum are lost.
Rotationally burnt peatlands of the North
York Moors in 1976 never recovered, as
the peat was entirely burnt away in places.
As this summer’s wildfires in Lancashire
showed, the impact can be catastrophic.”
The human impact
Ponds and streams, too, become more
vulnerable if human activities skew the
system. Jeremy Biggs stresses that a
healthy response to extreme temperatures
is only possible in a healthy freshwater
habitat. Where a water body is polluted,
the resilience of its ecosystem is
compromised. A heatwave lowers the
water level, but the level of pollution
remains the same, resulting in a more
intensely polluted habitat. “From the
perspective of clean standing water, I don’t
think droughts are problematic,” Biggs
concludes. “Droughts are occasional, but
pollution is everywhere.”
How occasional droughts will be in
future depends on the global climate –
which is getting hotter at a frightening
rate. The long, hot summer of 1976 was a
British phenomenon in a broadly normal
Europe, but this year we were locked into
something bigger. Everywhere in the
Northern Hemisphere was hotter.
Peat bogs can balance
drought and flood – but
only if we leave them alone.
“Climate change has greatly increased
the frequency of severe heatwaves over
much of the globe,” says Corinne Le
Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre
for Climate Change Research at the
University of East Anglia. “Studies that
have separated the role of human-caused
climate change from natural cycles show
that the risk of heatwaves has more than
doubled due to climate change so far in
large parts of the world.”
How will our wildlife respond, if
summers like this one become the
norm? Change isn’t always destructive
for everyone. Droughts and hot weather
create new habitats, and insectivorous
birds such as swifts, swallows and spotted
flycatchers may prosper in a hotter Britain.
We might also see further colonisation by
Mediterranean birds such as hoopoes.
On the flipside, Britain’s montane
habitats will warm, snowlines will creep
higher, and we could lose specialist
breeding birds such as snow bunting, as
well as alpine flora such as saxifrages. Peat: Ashley Cooper/naturepl.com; hedgehog: Coatsey/Alamy; pond & water butt: Gary K. Smith/naturepl.com; echinacea: Ilpo Musto/Alamy
Wild things will often find a way to
cope, even as temperature records tumble.
But the reality is that in the decades ahead,
in Britain and beyond, the flora and fauna
of the landscape as we know it will be
tested to its limits.
RICHARD SMYTH also wrote
this month’s feature on
kittiwakes (see p32).
FIND OUT MORE Stephen Thackeray
discusses ‘underwater heatwaves’ on p57.
October 2018