Check out the nonsense in the following release and media reports of same. It’s about the feral cattle living on 330 acres of Chillingham Park in the UK. What they don’t tell you is that only 13 of these cattle survived the cold winters following WWII and that they have now bred up to about 85 in the park with another 20-odd having been relocated to Crown Estates land in Scotland as a reserve herd. In other words their population has increased 700% with the “global warming” of the last 60-odd years. Yet this “study” claims they are having “fewer calves” according to one report and “fewer surviving calves” according to the release. In the bizarro world of global warmers, population explosion equals population decline.
Spring flowers are opening sooner and songbirds breeding earlier in the year, but scientists know little about how climate change is affecting phenology – the timing of key biological events – in UK mammals. Now, a new study on Northumberland’s iconic Chillingham cattle published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Animal Ecology shows climate change is altering when these animals breed, and fewer calves are surviving as a result. (EurekAlert)
By Tom Peck
The blast furnaces that powered the Industrial Revolution had only just begun belching clouds of carbon into the sky when, in 1860, Charles Darwin encouraged a Victorian nobleman to maintain accurate data on an intriguing herd of cattle living feral in the grounds of his medieval castle.
He could not have imagined that 150 years later the behaviour of their descendants would shed light on a problem that his pioneering contemporaries had set in motion – climate change.
Stories of unseasonably warm springs causing daffodils to bloom and birds to arrive prematurely have become perennials in recent years. But only now have scientists observed climate change leading to behavioural changes in mammals.
A new study on Northumberland’s Chillingham cattle, published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Animal Ecology, shows climate change is altering when the animals breed, and fewer calves are surviving as a result. (Independent)
