Content
Skip to Main ContentAccessibility Help
Quirks and Quarks

Arctic warming is shrinking the red knot shorebird

The Red Knot has become 15% smaller due to lack of food on its breeding ground, which is making them less able to feed in wintering grounds as well.

Birds are being born too late for best feeding, due to climate change

CBC Radio ·
Red knot feeding on a shoreline in Mauritania (Jan van de Kam)
Quirks and Quarks8:32Arctic Warming Is Shrinking The Red Knot Shorebird - 2016/05/28 - Pt. 4
The red knot is a small shorebird that migrates from its breeding grounds throughout the high Arctic to wintering grounds in various locations in the tropics and southern hemisphere.

Scientists, including Dr. Marcel Klaassen from the Centre For Integrative Ecology at Deakin University in Australia, looked at one sub-species that breeds in the Russian High Arctic and winters in Mauritania in Africa. They studied data from the past 30 years and determined that the red knot is 15 percent smaller today, apparently because of climate change.

Snow melts two weeks earlier today in a warmer Arctic, resulting in an earlier peak in insect availability. The red knot chicks miss that peak food source and have consequently grown smaller over the three decades, resulting in a shorter bill. That means that they are unable to retrieve molluscs, deep in the sand on the shores of some wintering grounds, and have had to rely on less nutritious food sources.

Related Links

- Paper in Science
- Royal Netherlands Institute For Sea Research release
- ABC news story
- National Geographic story
- New York Times story
- Washington Post story

More from this episode