In Spain, storks' trash diet driven by climate change
COLMENAR VIEJO, Spain (AP) — The storks float and swoop in formation, circling over a landfill in the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains north of Madrid. Then a garbage truck pulls up and disgorges its contents. One by one, they dive to the ground: breakfast is here.
Europe’s storks used to fly south to Africa’s Sahel region to spend the winter, stopping off in Spain along the way. But with higher temperatures driven by human-caused climate change and abundant food available at open-air waste disposal sites, most adult storks no longer make the long and exhausting journey.
At Madrid’s Colmenar Viejo landfill, around 100 trucks a day dump household waste into a crater that is then covered with sand by diggers. Hundreds of white storks have built nests up to six feet long on roofs and in the bell tower of the nearby church. There are even nests on streetlights.
“This is a stork paradise because they have grass, pastures and then the landfill, so they have it all here,” said Alejandro López García, who is studying Madrid’s stork population for his PhD at Madrid’s Complutense University.
Researchers found 36,217 of Europe’s approximately 450,000 white storks in Spain in fall 2020, accordingto a census. That makes it the most popular host country for this breed on the continent, along with Poland. In the Madrid area alone, López García said, his working group recently counted 2,300 breeding pairs of birds, compared with just 200 registered in 1984.
The higher temperatures are likely to keep rising, meaning more and more birds will be drawn to Madrid in winter. Other species like swallows are also no longer migrating further south into Africa. Researchers at Zurich Technical University have predicted that the average temperature in the Spanish capital's...