10 Years Of The Hot Birds Project

In mid-2009, the late Phil Hockey – then director of the Fitztitute – and Andrew McKechnie of the University of Pretoria (UP) spent two days in Phil’s office developing a research programme focusing on desert birds and climate change.

- Andrew Mckechnie & Susie Cunningham

Our first field season during the summer of that year involved a team of three researchers based at Tswalu Kalahari Reserve: Fitztitute postdoctoral fellows Susie Cunningham and Rowan Martin and UP doctoral student Ben Smit. In the 10 years since, the Hot Birds Research Programme (HBRP) has grown into a team of about 20 people based at the Fitztitute, UP, National Zoological Garden and Rhodes University, with a network of collaborators spanning several overseas universities.

During the HBRP’s first decade, we have learnt much about how higher temperatures affect desert birds. Small birds face a significant risk of lethal dehydration on very hot days; evaporating water to lose heat, often by panting, is the only way birds can avoid lethal heat stress. In extremely hot weather, small birds can die of dehydration in a matter of hours.

In the intensely hot deserts of the American south-west and the interior of Australia, climate change is producing conditions under which catastrophic mortality events involving thousands – occasionally millions – of birds will occur far more often than in the past. Some range-restricted Australian species could be driven to extinction within a matter of days in extreme heatwaves. If this sounds alarmist, consider that Australia lost one third of its entire population of a flying-fox species in just two days of extreme heat late last year.