How Are Mountain Birds Adapting to Climate Change?
Articles/Websites
Grades6, 7, 8, 9, 10Biology
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Provided by Science Journal for Kids
What it is
- This article, adapted from a peer-reviewed study, describes how scientists retraced a 30-year-old bird survey in old-growth forests to see how mountain birds are responding to warming temperatures.
- Students learn three possible responses to warming and discover that although patterns varied across species, birds became more common at higher elevations.
Teaching tips
Classroom Implementation:
- Give students a visual organizer to define highlighted vocabulary terms and summarize key ideas of each section.
- Engage students in small heterogeneous groups to respond to the "check your understanding" questions at the end of the article.
- As a class, discuss why this study taking place in an old growth forest helps explain the conditions of the findings.
- Teacher's key is available after confirming a school and work email.
Extensions:
- To practice reading graphs, print out and cut the three graphs (top of the second page) and have students match each of the three hypotheses to a graph.
- Have students research a local bird species and determine what vulnerabilities it has to climate change to predict what behavior it may exhibit.
- Connect what students learn from this article to a conversation about impacts on the rest of the ecosystem, such as trophic cascades.
- Discuss how shifting behavior in a species may lead to natural selection and evolution taking place.
From the scientist review
This resource presents original research on how mountain bird populations are adapting to climate change. An adaptation of a peer-reviewed article, this resource clearly shows the varied responses of different bird species to warming over the last 30 years. Key terms are clearly defined in text, and several additional sources are linked. This resource is recommended for teaching.
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