News from the Mathews range

Hello everybody! August is vacation time here in Kenya, and as usual I am in the Mathews range with my team and we are busy busy busy on our forest bird research.
The big news is that birds are again in trouble this year, another big drought is impacting the forest very strongly and our data show that bird populations this year are hitting another the all time minimum more than -50% decrement since 2005, the year when we began this study.
Lawrence and Sammy as usual are using mist nets to obtain very accurate information on the biology of the forest birds, and their results are clear - some species, even common ones like the Grey-backed Camaroptera, this year did not breed at all, as it shown by the fact that the number of juveniles that we caught this year was more thna 50% than the number we got last year. Clearly, the drought is hitting very badly on the birds, and one wonders what will be the long term consequences of this.

A Grey-backed Camaroptera in the nets. This year we caught almost no juveniles of this species. A clear sign that the breeding season was a failure due to the harsh drought conditions

Talking of global climate change might seem like shooting too far, but the fact is that the most recent research suggests that droughts like the one of this year (and the one of 2009) will become more and more common in East Africa in the future. No doubts that this will have a very bad impact on the forests and their fauna.