Geoffrey Hill endorses another hoax: Five years after claiming that "At least a half dozen pairs" of extinct woodpeckers live in Florida, he claims that CO2 is causing rusty blackbird population decline

Climate change plays major role in decline of blackbird species

(PhysOrg.com) -- Populations of the rusty blackbird, a once-abundant North American species, have declined drastically in recent years, and Auburn University researchers say climate change is to blame.

That's the finding of graduate students Chris McClure, Brian Rolek and Kenneth McDonald published recently in the scientific journal Ecology and Evolution.

Under the direction of ornithology professor Geoffrey Hill, McClure, Rolek and McDonald studied the blackbird decline and wrote the paper "Climate change and the decline of a once common bird."

The group analyzed rusty blackbird breeding data and climate indices and examined temperature oscillations in the Pacific Ocean, and concluded that climate change does in fact play a major role in the recent decline of the population.

"It was hard to figure out what exactly is going wrong to cause decline because of the complexities of the life cycle of the birds," said Hill. "They breed in the far north, winter in the southeast and move through the middle of the country during migration. But we now have good data that pins the decline of this blackbird to climate change. Studies of these sorts of biological systems are showing that even small changes in temperatures can have a big impact in the environment."

Hill says it is not the actual temperature change that is dooming the birds, it is the way the changes in temperature are affecting the birds' ecosystem.

March 2007: "At least a half dozen pairs"

[ornithology professor Geoffrey Hill] What I am sure of is that the ivorybills are there. Not one bird. Not a single pair. At least a half dozen pairs and perhaps tens of pairs of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in the extensive swamp forests along the Choctawhatchee River. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is not extinct. It isn't even hanging by a thread. It has a toehold in the forests on the Florida Panhandle.