The migration of geese as an indicator of climate change in the southern Hudson Bay region between 1715 and 1851
✍ Scribed by Timothy Ball
- Publisher
- Springer
- Year
- 1990
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 426 KB
- Volume
- 5
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0165-0009
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Bay between 1714 and 1825, serve as the source of information for a study of changes in the date of arrival of geese as a phenological indicator of climatic change. Changes in the migration pattern of geese are reflected in the changing date of arrival at the same location over a long period of time. Variations in this date are determined to be a function of southerly or tailwinds in the northward spring migration.
At the present time there are many areas of the world and many periods of history for which no climatic data exists. This is true for both actual climatic data and phenologic data. The region of Hudson Bay in north central North America is one of these areas. It is difficult to suggest that one region of the world has any greater climatological importance than another because it is an open system. The southern shore of Hudson Bay is a region for which a special case might be made. Situated in the standing wave created by the Rocky Mountains and also being a large body of ocean penetrating to the centre of a large continent are two factors. The presence of the tree line between York Factory and Churchill Factory coincident with the mean location of the Arctic Front make an even stronger case.
The position of the Arctic Front, its seasonal movement and fluctuations on a longer term are very direct indicators of changes in the dynamic factors of climatology. Any information that provides information on these factors should serve to strengthen our understanding of climatic change.
The records of the Hudson's Bay Company stand as virtually the only written documentation of events occurring in Central Canada over a majority of the last 300 yr. For the Company and its employees the climate was a dominating factor in all aspects of its operations and as a result they made constant references to weather and weather-related information in their records.
Bird migration
In the second volume of his magnum opus Climate: Present, Past and Future H. H. Lamb writes, Records of differences of range that were regularly maintained for some time in the past are therefore of interest to climatology, though they seem unlikely to supply more than confirmatory evidence of climatic differences already known by other means. [ 1 ] Climatic Change 5 (