Winners and losers of ‘tropical’ Britain
Climate change is impacting the UK’S flora and fauna, so what does the future hold?
There have been moments during the past week where life here has felt like a post-apocalyptic world devoid of any nature. As temperatures topped 40C, the birds stopped singing, swift fledglings fell from their nests and, in Cambridge, parched purple hairstreak butterflies were seen tumbling down from the tops of oak trees where they normally live in pursuit of moisture of any kind.
In Norfolk, though, there was better news. On Wednesday, the RSPB reported that bee-eater chicks had successfully hatched in the county for the first time. These exotic birds – whose plumage is a mix of claret, gold and brilliant turquoise – normally nest in southern Europe, Africa and Asia but, on the weekend of the Platinum Jubilee, had pitched up in a quarry at Trimingham, near Cromer, and started excavating their burrow-like nests.
There have been six recorded breeding attempts by bee-eaters in the UK in the past 20 years, with the last successful bid on the Isle of Wight in 2014. The RSPB says the latest hatching of the chicks (it is not yet known how many have emerged) is a “vivid reminder of climate change”.
The new hottest record of 40.3C recorded at Coningsby, Lincolnshire, this week is an ominous sign of where our weather is heading. According to the Met Office, heatwaves in Britain are now lasting twice as long as they did 50 years ago.
Even if humanity manages to restrict global warming to 1.5C (we are currently on course for double that), our summers are likely to regularly record temperatures above 40C in the future. And, as Britain increasingly resembles a tropical island, there will be winners and losers.
Alongside the bee-eaters, for example, the red-billed leiothrix – a lurid-coloured and highly invasive Asian songbird – is increasingly establishing itself in southern England, having doubled its European range in the past few decades. Cattle egrets and little egrets, which first bred in Dorset in 1996, now proliferate across the countryside.
As our weather rapidly changes, so, too, does our nature and landscape. The skies over Glasgow are now filled with the squawk of ring-necked parakeets (the most northerly parrots on Earth), rare orchids bloom on northern roadside verges, and purple herons, which normally call Africa home, are stalking our waterways.
Meanwhile, a 14ft basking shark was spotted by a fisherman off the Welsh coast. The sharks, which feed on plankton, are a regular visitor to the UK in the summer and scientists suggest that warmer oceans will mean different species of shark will increasingly be spotted in areas previously deemed outside of their range.
Some species of bat will also thrive as temperatures exceed 40C – particularly considering the new metric of “tropical nights” that the Met Office has introduced in recent years, when evening temperatures remain above 20C. Sophie Pavelle, a zoologist and the author of Forget Me Not: Finding the Forgotten Species of Climate-change Britain, maps the species most affected by the rising temperatures. She says the grey long-eared bat, the rarest in Britain, which is currently only found in a handful of locations in southern England, could be one such beneficiary of these balmy evenings.
According to Pavelle, as temperatures get too hot for the bats in their current population stronghold of the Mediterranean and the Iberian Peninsula, scientists expect them to increasingly colonise the UK. She also says that the long-held notion of what species should be considered native and non-native is becoming more irrelevant. “We need more acceptance of wackier species like parakeets and blur between the lines of what is native and not,” she notes. “Humans are the ones that came up with labels. I often find it interesting to ask where do animals really belong?”
However, even if more tropical species take advantage of a warmer UK, experts warn that the rising temperatures will be a disaster for much of our resident wildlife. A 2021 report published by the independent Climate Change Committee revealed that 75 per cent of upland species such as mountain hares and lapwing will be under threat by 2100, along with 30 per cent of coastal species, 45 per cent of woodland species and 40 per cent of wetland species.
According to Kathryn Brown, director of climate change and evidence at Wildlife Trusts, in recent days dehydrated hedgehogs have fared particularly badly. “It’s the problem of shock,” she says. “Things are happening too quickly for them to adapt.”
For the losers, these are changes that will be wrought on many levels. For example, Pavelle warns, the bilberry bumblebee, Britain’s furriest bee which is found exclusively on moorland, is particularly susceptible to over-heating. “It’s like walking around wearing a down jacket in a heated department store and you can’t take it off,” she says. “They can’t feed, pollinate and do what they need to do.”
While many of us will not necessarily notice the loss of such a bee (one of eight of our 25 resident populations that are currently endangered), whole swathes of the landscape are also under threat. Beech woods, for example – a cherished feature of Britain with their carpets of bluebells – are particularly susceptible to periods of sustained drought.
In planting street trees, planners are increasingly opting for droughtresistant non-native species such as gingkos, an Asian species which is famously so hardy it survived the Hiroshima nuclear bomb of 1945. Meanwhile, flowers such as pheasant’s-eye – a rare arable plant that has previously suffered steep declines – and lizard and bee orchids are extending their northern range, with the latter increasingly spotted in places where they have never previously been recorded by botanists.
James Pearce-higgins, director of science at the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), says birds of the uplands and oceans will particularly struggle to adapt. He cites the likes of ring ouzel, wheatear and curlew, as well as cherished seabirds including kittiwake, guillemot, great skua and puffins, as a major cause of concern. For the latter species, a population decline of 89 per cent is projected across Britain and Ireland by 2050. More common garden birds will also struggle to adapt to the rising heat, such as the song thrush and blackbird, which will find burrowing for worms in baked-hard soil much more difficult, especially as the worms go deeper underground to find cooler earth.
According to a BTO report last year, a quarter of the UK’S breeding species of birds appear to be negatively impacted by climate change, while a quarter may be responding positively. However, Pearce-higgins stresses that new species arriving in the UK will only be able to thrive if suitable habitat is created for them. As well as ensuring the quality of wetlands, meadows and forests to provide a refuge for new visitors, it is also vital to help our current native species to adapt.
One example is by re-wetting boggy moorlands that have been drained over the past century, to ensure they do not dry out during the summer and sustain healthy insect populations for birds to feed on. Pearce-higgins says studies around the threatened moorland bird, the golden plover, show that, with sympathetic work to help preserve its upland habitat, the species can cope with as much as 2C warming.
“There is a lot of evidence around the world that if you understand the species you are trying to help, you can do something to make populations more resilient to the negative effects of climate change,” he says.
Tropical Britain, then, could be noisier, wilder and more exotic than we will have experienced for millennia – but without preserving the landscapes to accommodate our new guests, we may well find ourselves staring out at a desert instead.