Climate Change and British Wildlife

370 Pages·2018·54.639 MB·English

by  Beebee, Trevor

Climate Change
and
British Wildlife
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Climate Change
and
British Wildlife
Trevor Beebee
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Dedication
To Maggie, lifelong companion in wild places; and to Malcolm Smith and John Clegg,
inspired naturalists of an enviable generation.
Half-title: Snowdrops in melting snow.
Frontispiece: Large waves engulfing a local train at Dawlish on the south coast of Devon during a storm.
BLOOMSBURY WILDLIFE
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY WILDLIFE and the Diana logo are trademarks of
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
This electronic edition published in 2018 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 2018
Copyright © Trevor Beebee, 2018
Trevor Beebee has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as Author of this work
For legal purposes the acknowledgements on p. 352–3
constitute an extension of this copyright page
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
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have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4729-4320-0; ePDF: 978-1-4729-4317-0; ePub: 978-1-4729-4319-4
Page layouts by Susan McIntyre
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Contents
Preface 6
1 What’s going on? 10
2 How are plants responding? 38
3 Invertebrate tales 74
4 Freshwater and terrestrial vertebrates 118
5 Fungi, lichens and microbes 162
6 Freshwater and terrestrial communities 180
7 Coastal and marine environments 214
8 As time goes by 244
9 What the future may hold 266
10 Conservation in a warming world 306
References 338
Abbreviations 344
Species names 345
Credits 352
Index 354
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Preface
A hazy sun climbs hesitantly above Glastonbury Tor, while
Garden Bumblebees drone peacefully among the creamy
blossoms of a sprawling honeysuckle. It’s already shirt-sleeve
weather on one of those perfect, spirit-raising days that announce
the start of another spring. After dusk, Smooth and Palmate Newts
tread warily across the floor of a garden pond. But this is not spring,
at least not by any calendar definition. It is New Year’s Day 2016 and
the scene is not unusual. For years now, bumblebees have appeared
every month, indeed on most days, in our garden from September
through to April. Newts have been in the pond since November, and
by the end of December the first wild garlic flowers are in bloom,
trailblazers of what will shortly become a glorious white carpet.
Occasional daffodils, normally expected for March’s Mothering
Sunday, have also raised their yellow flags above the parapet.
It hasn’t always been like this. Something is afoot, the seasons are
changing and naturalists (at least, those a bit long in the tooth) have
been among the first to notice it. Even so, the realisation came slowly
because no two years are ever the same and there have always been
unusually early springs and mild winters. On 16 January 1777, Gilbert
White recorded in his diary: ‘bees and flies moving, air full of insects;
spiders shoot their webs: butterfly out’. But what White described
much more often in The Natural History of Selborne were winter conditions
that are now rarely or never seen in southern England:

… meat frozen so hard it can’t be spitted; several of the thrush kind are
frozen to death; the Thames, it seems, is so frozen that fairs have been kept on
it; rugged, Siberian weather; many rooks, which attempting to fly fell from the
trees with their wings frozen together by the sleet, that froze as it fell …
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Preface
and so on. Recognising true trends in climate involves a statistical
element, separating real, long-term change from the background
noise of occasional, exceptional years. This separation has now been
accomplished, and significant changes in the British climate over the
past few decades have been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt.
In this book I briefly review the evidence for climate change,
especially trends in temperature and rainfall in the United Kingdom
over the past 50 or so years, and ways in which these changes could
affect our wildlife. The bulk of the text, however, describes the actual,
reported changes across a wide range of taxonomic groups including
plant, invertebrate, fungal and vertebrate species, together with
impacts at the level of ecological communities. Whenever available,
these changes refer to the results of serious scientific studies, but I
make no apology for also including occasional less robust inferences,
essentially anecdotal, where they seem credible. However, I clearly
distinguish this kind of evidence wherever I allude to it. For each
species I give both the common and scientific names on first mention
but thereafter only the common ones where such exist, except in tables
where scientific names are always included. At the end of each chapter
I discuss whether it is possible to draw any generalisations about
climate change effects across the various taxonomic groups.
British Wildlife magazine has published many articles about the
impacts of climate change, the first very shortly after its inauguration
in 1989, and no doubt many naturalists are broadly aware of what
has been going on. I hope, nevertheless, to interest both those
already familiar with the subject and others looking for an overview
by drawing together a wide range of material in this single volume.
Although there is now a plethora of books on actual and potential
impacts of climate change, most are concerned with broad issues
such as environmental consequences, economic impacts and other
potential disasters for humans. Precious few major on wildlife, and,
at the time of writing, none has attempted to assemble evidence for
what is happening to plants, fungi and animals in the UK. Thus
Schneider & Root (2002) listed some North American case studies,
Brodie et al. (2012) reported effects on vertebrates worldwide, Pearce-
Higgins & Green (2014) were concerned with birds, while Root et
al. (2015) focused on evidence in California. All good reads, but
excepting Pearce-Higgins & Green, hardly any mention of Europe,
let alone the UK. Yet we have the longest history of wildlife recording
anywhere in the world and are therefore in pole position for studying
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Climate Change and British Wildlife
how climate has influenced our flora and fauna over at least decades,
and in some cases centuries.
I should make clear what this book does not intend. I have not
attempted to make it into a scientific review of the standard type,
punctuated with references that try and cover every eventuality. There
are references – but, for the most part, I have limited them to just one or
two for each topic area. Another ambition was to avoid making the book
a simple list of all the plants, fungi and animals that have been affected
by climate change. There are, of course, plenty of examples, but I have
tried to write them into explanations of the whys and wherefores of
how our wildlife is responding to a warming countryside. Then there
is a chapter devoted to people’s perceptions of climate change in the
UK, including some views of scientists and politicians. While focusing
on events for which there is already evidence of change, I could not,
and would not wish to, ignore altogether the many prognostications
of what we might be in for in the coming years. These predictions
test human ingenuity to its limits of credibility, and perhaps beyond,
and I have confined such considerations to the penultimate chapter. In
the final chapter I contemplate the implications of climate change for
wildlife conservation, ironically including the dangers posed by human
activities devoted to countering climate change effects.
My natural habitat is mostly wetland, the places where amphibians
and aquatic insects lurk among wafting waterweeds. These enchanting
corners of the countryside entrapped me early in life, mostly thanks
to a nearby farm pond long since obliterated under concrete. For me,
as for many friends and colleagues, the realisation that climate change
was impacting our wildlife dawned slowly, and mostly as a result of
happenings in my back garden. Probing more widely into the subject
for this book has been a real eye-opener, a mixture of both delight at
new arrivals and serious concern about species declines. I’m still not
sure what will be the final, dominant emotion. The wheel is very much
still in spin.
I have many people to thank for assistance with the writing of this
tome. Katy Roper, of Bloomsbury Publishing, could not have been
more supportive from start to finish. I am also grateful to Hugh Brazier
for meticulously improving bits of the text, and for spotting occasional
silly mistakes, and to James Pearce-Higgins for reviewing and making
helpful comments on the text. I am indebted, too, to friends and fellow
travellers who have volunteered their personal experiences (including
quotations) of how climate change has impacted on the species and
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