Is Warming Changing U.K. Breeding Season?
For a bird, the bleak midwinter wouldn’t seem an ideal time to go about the precarious business of starting a family. But recent winters haven’t been particularly bleak in Britain, and last Christmas scores of fluffy owlets grew fat on mice, voles, and baby rats caught by parents that spotted a breeding opportunity too good to ignore. Scientists at the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) say 2002’s mild temperatures and an explosion in rodent numbers sparked an unseasonal baby boom in the country’s barn and tawny owl populations.
