A mainstay of Disney animated films is the animal side characters and this applies even to animated films where all the characters are animals, like the iconic movie the king lion. This particular movie had a number of likable characters including Zazu, the yellow-billed hornbill who is Simba’s wise and reliable advisor and his pride over lions. The realistic yellow-billed hornbill has become very popular to follow the king lion, but now the beautiful bird is on the verge of extinction. As I mentioned NEWSWEEKBirds are being wiped out due to climate change.
According to new research, global warming has greatly affected the reproductive success of the southern yellow-billed hornbill, a bird commonly found in the dry forest regions of South Africa. There is evidence that higher temperatures affect a variety of animals, and the yellow hornbills his team studied between 2008 and 2019 in particular, writes the author of the new study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, Dr Nicholas Pattinson of the University of Cape Town. They are the most affected.
“During the observation period, the near-lethal effects of elevated temperatures—including foraging, foraging, and maintenance of body mass—reduced the chance of hornbills successfully breeding or even breeding at all,” Pattinson wrote.
The data in the study tells a very bleak tale. When the study compared the first three breeding seasons (between 2008 and 2011) and the last three seasons (2016 to 2019), there was a significant decrease in the successful rearing and reproduction of at least one chick — from 58 percent to 17 percent — while the average Chick production per breeding attempt increased significantly from 1.1% to 0.4%. No successful attempts were recorded above the air temperature of 35.7 °C (96.26 °F).
What this means for yellow cows is horrendous. The study goes on to show that with current projections of warming for the region, birds will not be able to breed successfully in the region during the entire breeding season by 2027 — meaning the birds could be extinct by that time as well.
Conservation efforts are underway across a variety of groups to try to save the yellow hornbill, including one from the San Diego Zoo as well as the Hornbill Improvement-A-Nest Program. You can check out more about these conservation efforts here.
.
[ad_2]
