Since they began in 2007, these notes have repeatedly described spring droughts but this year’s was a real humdinger! For 40 days, from 18th March to 27th April inclusive, no measureable rain fell in Formby. It was also the sunniest and fifth warmest April on record. Climatologists have shown that these droughts are associated with a warming trend in the Arctic that leads to persistent high-pressure systems over Greenland. These disrupt the North Atlantic Jet Stream, which brings most of our rain. Apart from having serious implications for agriculture and water-supply, largely ignored by politicians and the media, these changes in our climate are having major impacts on wildlife.
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A Cuckoo called Carlton II has just arrived back in England having spent the last ten months travelling to and from the Congo rainforest, becoming the first of the BTO’s satellite tracked cuckoos to return to this country in 2020.
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Take part in the City Nature Challenge this weekend:
Friday 24th to Monday 27th April!
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In 1995 the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) launched a weekly garden bird survey: Garden BirdWatch (GBW). Today the project is still going strong, having received over eight million lists of birds and other wildlife from a total of more than 50,000 British gardens, and giving us a unique insight into the changes at our bird feeders over that time.
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The first half of the month continued the trend set earlier in the winter of repeated low-pressure systems driven on a particularly vigorous North Atlantic Jet Stream. Measurable rain fell in Formby on 13 days but the last 12 days of March were completely dry as the strongest high-pressure system ever recorded dominated the Atlantic and the usual spring drought set in. The month was also windy, with particularly fierce blasts on four days. One of these on the 12th coincided with 10.2 m tides, amongst the highest we get, adding to the damage caused to coastal dunes during a similar coincidence of storms and spring tides in February. I managed to get a photographic record of the losses to the dune frontage, this being not quite as bad as the massive storm surges of the 2013/14 winter.
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Data collected by volunteers as part of the Wetland Bird Survey, and published in a report today, play a crucial role in the designation of protected wetland sites in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and underline their importance in helping to conserve our waterbirds.
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