In my life outside of climate science, I am an avid fan of birdwatching, and am always eager to connect the two. Today I’m going to share some citizen science data I collected.

Last year, I started taking notes during the spring migration. Every time I saw a species for the first time that year, I made a note of the date. I planned to repeat this process year after year, mainly so I would know when to expect new arrivals at our bird feeders, but also in an attempt to track changes in migration. Of course, this process is imperfect (it simply provides an upper bound for when the species arrives, because it’s unlikely that I witness the very first arrival in the city) but it’s better than nothing.

Like much of the Prairies and American Midwest, we’ve just had our warmest March on record, a whopping 8 C above normal. Additionally, every single bird arrival I recorded in March was earlier than last year, sometimes by over 30 days.

I don’t think this is a coincidence. I haven’t been any more observant than last year – I’ve spent roughly the same amount of time outside in roughly the same places. It also seems unlikely for such a systemic change to be a product of chance, although I would need much more data to figure that out for sure. Also, some birds migrate based on hours of daylight rather than temperature. However, I find it very interesting that, so far, not a single species has been late.

Because I feel compelled to graph everything, I typed all this data into Excel and made a little scatterplot. The mean arrival date was 20.6 days earlier than last year, with a standard deviation of 8.9 days.