Wells here with us as our speaker. Adam wells is a naturalist, conservation consultant, writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in the guardian, the Atlantic Yale environment, 360 time magazine, and numerous other publications. Hes a recipient of the middlebury fellowship in environmental journalism and to compliment his writing and reporting. Hes an avid naturalist and birder while he currently lives cape town, south africa, with his wife and their triplet daughters. Hes lived in cities and communities over the world where hes the opportunity to observe strikingly wildlife communities and, ecosystems as well as hollows environments have changed across time. In that vein, hes just written a new book, the end of eden wild nature in the age of climate breakdown, which is what hes here to talk tonight. Reviewers are the end of eden exquisitely and beautifully written. Both celebrates and heartbreaking. An elegy, an exhortation and a climate book for everyone. If youd like to get a copy of the end of eden, there is a link to purchase the book in the chat panel here on zoom and also on secret science clubs website. Now we are very pleased to welcome adam wells, the virtual stage here at secret science club. Please take it away, adam. Thank you very much, margaret, for that very generous introduction. I trust you can all hear me well before, i get going. Id like to say this book that ive just written thats thats just come out that margaret talked about is quite a sad book and its quite a sobering book. Its not a book that youre going to. Yeah, im so happy that this is all happening, you know . And i just like, set that up just from get go in the sense that i, i try inject a bit of life a little when were talking about it, but at the end of the day it is a very sad and sobering book. And the reason i wrote it, i think, which is a good place to start this discussion, is that when we hear about Climate Change, when people write Climate Change in the media its almost overwhelmingly from a human perspective. So we read about, you know, cities flooding communities burning down what, extended droughts and so on. Mean for humans and very seldom do we read about it or see the tv stories about the impact of Climate Change on the Natural World, on wild species and. Of course, these creatures outnumber us by a pretty long way and i thought it was important to try and do a book that, as i say, the impact Climate Change or climate breakdown, as i prefer to call it, on the Natural World and initially i had this idea of doing a book that would be kind of lets put it not sound too grandiose, but a little bit of a little bit complete something that sort of gave readers the whole, as it were, or relatively complete picture was a somewhat encyclopedic and its approach. And i very soon realized that that was not going to happen, that was a waste of time because theres so much going on. I mean the entire Natural World, all our natural ecosystems, you know, all our wild species and so on are being affected by climate breakdown in one way or another. Were seeing a literal sort of transformation of the Natural World due to phenomenon. And trying to be anything like encyclopedic was a complete waste of time because the book could take, you know, lifetimes to write and be 20,000 pages long. And nobody be around to read it. And so what i decided was to to, to, to focus on a few species and a few, because in select and species and ecosystems that illustrated particular of how climate breakdown affects the Natural World and and bring things down. So readers could away knowing understood how things were happening. Certain places to certain species and realized that, you know, if something is happening to a particular species in a particular place the same kind of thing is happening other species in other places. So that way approached the try and give an idea of the big picture of whats whats going on everywhere but through these individual stories of individual species and particular places and it was also very important to me emphasize that climate breakdown is not just affecting, say, you know, the iconic polar bears, the north pole with melting ice sheets and the polar bears are all starving in these kind of iconic images. Actually, this is happening everywhere all around you. So ive deliberately set the introduction of the book in a new york city park. I actually lived in new york for five or six years until my kids were born nine years ago and left went back to south africa, but so i wanted to show folks that also of subtle things that are happening everywhere, all around us, all kinds of subtle, what i call a breakup ecological breakups and breakdowns. And these little ecological breakups and breakdowns are often quite quiet, quite require quite some attention to to notice and to see collectively amounts to ecological and in some cases, ecological collapse so that these these Little Things, these little quiet things that are going on due to Climate Change are actually as significant as the big dramatic type of that. We typically see in the mainstream stream media, lets put it that way. So really thats thats the book is coming from as as an introduction and one of the things i thought id start was ill go ill go chapter by chapter through the book talking about maybe a couple of the stories that that i, i wrote and, and why i wrote about them and how i approached them. So i thought it important that my chapter, which is called energy, water and time, is just to get the sort basics down. And one of the basic aspects of life and one of the basic things that theyre living organisms have to do is manage temperature. So oftentimes people think of, say, an animal, if you picture a bird in the in the desert, lets imagine a bird in the desert, maybe its Biggest Challenges of getting through the day is staying alive or finding food and predators, for example. But actually, this this bird needs to be doing 24 seven is is manage its internal Energy Managing its internal temperature unless it keeps internal temperature within certain it does it too cold too hot it dies and one of the ways birds because birds dont have sweat glands birds in warm areas show their control their temperatures if it gets too warm is by sitting in the shade and panting they pass their across the inside the wet moist of their mouths in order to evaporate, really cool their bodies down. Now, one of the things i realized very early on is animals hot places that are that are getting hotter as many hot places are getting hotter, hotter. Now, what they have to do in in in in in order to do this. Dont they dont come close to the edge very quickly. They dont they dont fall out of the sky en masse in thousands. If we have a heatwave, dont see millions of birds just dropping out of the sky like hailstones. Birds for example, disappear from warm again in a more subtle. And i talk about this in terms of a bird called the yellow horned, which is a Southern African species that i know quite well. Its a its a midsized bird. Its very charismatic. It has a large yellow bell. Im going to try to show you a picture of one of them on the on the screen here. And im. One second here. Okay. So heres our yellow tornado. Thanks, folks. Your your patience. Its as i say, its a very charismatic characterful bird with very bright eyes and, this big bell. And they have very interesting breeding system to get away from predators during a very vulnerable phase in their lives. What happens is the female bird walls herself into they find natural hollow in a tree and the female walls herself into. This hollow creates a wall, literally, of of pieces of there and feces that dry, very sort of hard concrete like wall with a slit in the middle of it and the female goes is inside this hollow . And she lays her eggs and and incubates them at the same time as she loses pretty much all her feathers molds. If she was outside hollow, of course, losing all her feathers, shed be extremely vulnerable to predators. So she stays inside the hall, lays the eggs and what that means is that the male whos on the outside during that time has to work one heck of a lot harder in finding food, because he has to find food. The insects, the little lizards and so on, that these these birds eat. He has to find both for himself and her, and she tends to be walled up in inside this nest at the hottest time of the year. And what researchers have noticed was that a around ten years ago the yellow horned bulls within the kalahari, which is a large semidesert area in central southern south africa and gets very warm. Around ten years ago, the yellow hornbill populations in those areas breeding just fine. And now were in an era where within about ten years weve seen a near total collapse of breeding success. And this is simply because increased temperatures have wrecked these birds schedules. So the the essential i. E. The male bird now has to deal with increased periods of very high temperatures during the middle of the day where all he can do survive is sit in the shade and do nothing and pant and in, say, ten years ago, in the past, on very hot days would be a relatively short period of time where the air was so hot that he had to do that. Now its often many hours in the day and he simply does not have enough time to find enough food himself and for his his female in the hall and later on when the youngsters hatch certainly for the youngsters as well and so breeding success and basically youngsters end up starving because they dont get enough food. And so breeding success of this bird has absolutely collapsed. And were seeing similar patterns in other arid areas like the Mojave Desert in southern california. Recent work has found that around that the Breeding Bird species have disappeared. Any given patch of desert over the last hundred years and thermodynamic modeling indicates that its due to exactly same thing birds getting to warm they dont die outright of. The extreme heat. Its not this obvious dramatic thing but they over they they hit high temperatures that they cant handle and they run out of time during the day and then the Second Chapter of the book i deal with it. Ive called it plagues and diseases. And thats pretty grim. Thats exactly what the chapters about. I look at new diseases and and a new you know insect outbreaks and so on the plagues plagues if you like that are happening because rising temperatures in mostly in northeastern us which the focus of the of the chapter are allowing all. Of new critters to move into that are deep winter cold previously prevented them from into and the point of this chapter ready to show people that really tiny increases in in in minimum temperatures in other words winters getting quite as cold as they used to just by a few degrees allow certain insects in one case ticks to survive and to be active for much longer periods the year. And they can then have enormous effects the species that they traditionally go for and wipe them out and create like really rash ecological shifts, a very short space of time and one of the examples i talk about in this chapter is a thing called the southern pine, which is a small sort of beetle that drills into the bark of, a pitch pine trees and. This beetle was previously confined really the southeastern United States, sort of more temperate forests and where it wasnt really a very it was just one out of many insects that for trees and wasnt particularly noteworthy. Whats happened in recent years that winter minimum temperatures in the northeastern United States have got warmer and warmer and this beetle has been able to move north of before it is confined south of new jersey. This beetle is now being able move up through new jersey into, new york into massachusetts, a place like this. And then its recently been found in New Hampshire and maine. And and its absolutely hammering vice vast swaths of of pitch pine trees, which are the sort of ecological keystone species of, what we call the pine barrens, which is this very distinctive coastal type of habitat, a very coastal habitat in area. And is really hammering the pitch pine trees really define the habitat and is is transforming this within a space of just a few short years. You know, a single species of beetle is just overhauling this ecosystem for for everything that lives in it. Another be a story i tell in this chapter is about these the winter ticks and moose where we have a phenomenon now with extended warm seasons allowing a species of tick called the winter tick to have a much longer growing season and what they call a quest season, which is when the ticks the tiny young ticks go out on vegetation and feel around and wait for large animals, walk past them and brush off on, grab onto and. Because of the longer questing season and larger tick populations moose are getting absolutely hammered by ticks. We now have a like a recent study in vermont showed that the average moose in vermont has 47,000 and winter ticks on them and as a result of this moose, which are again being such large animals, are quite influential in the ecosystem, they are now either dying that are literally sanguine, arid theyre having all the blood out of them by these these these vast numbers of ticks or theyre being weakened by these the parasite load by the tickler to such an extent that they breed success anymore. They just dont have the nutritional resources, lets say, in their bodies. So thats another charming story about this but again, the point not to really emphasize the gruesomeness. All of this some of it is it is gruesome and disturbing, but just it takes just the tiniest shifts in in in minimal maximum temperatures in order to change the way that certain individual species operate in ecosystems. And those can have just radical sort of ramification and change things very very quickly indeed then. I have a chapter on extreme weather which focuses very much on uses as a as its example, all hurricanes in the caribbean. And one of the stories i tell this, which is for me, an incredible story because it brings together history. It brings together human influence and all of these other things that affect species with with climate breakdown. And that is the story of the puerto rican parrot on the on island of puerto rico. And the fascinating thing about this parrot, i tell its its long history, was that it was a very common bird on on the island of puerto rico prior to european colonization of the there were possibly estimates of being made of roughly a million a million of these parrots living on puerto rico. But as the colonists in they they chopped down more and more forests. And over the centuries the parrots were left the only place could breed was in a tiny little parrot patch of old growth rainforest, puerto rico, in heart of whats called the uk forest. Nowadays. And it was a fascinating story because again, parrots like these are like the yellow hornbill thats on the screen now. Actually let me let me pull up a picture of of of a of a puerto parrot. Why dont we hold on one second. Im six. This is all so much easier person, isnt it . Anyway heres some puerto rican parrots. There are attractive birds, as you can see, this is a large amazon parrots. As youll notice, these guys are a cage and they have little, Little Things around, their necks. These are actually parrots that are part of a captive Breeding Program endangered species captive Breeding Program. And each of them has these distinctive colors with a little necklace icon it so that the parrot keepers can tell different individuals each other. This is a photograph took when i visited this facility but what happened was that the puerto rican parrot was pushed into a tiny little patch rainforest, which is the only place on the island that still had big old trees in which it could. It could make its nest. Its a an obligate cavity. Nestor needs to nest inside natural hollows in, old trees. And there was only one part of the island that had the trees that were old enough to have these birds it nest them. But unfortunately, this area was in pretty much the wettest part of puerto and to the influence that that climate had has on species. Their breeding success was also cratering during the last century during the 1900s because so of their eggs were getting fungus and all kinds of diseases the young birds were getting all kinds of diseases. Their survival rates were absolutely and in fact, species was on the very, very brink of extinction when it became one of the very first species that was listed under endangered species act decades ago. And the government put a huge amount of money and lots of researchers went in and lots of conservationists in and did an incredible of work to save this the species from outright extinction. It really in dedicated work of over decades and one of the ways they saved the puerto rican from extinction was taking what they taking some of the eggs out of the last wild nests. And what this does is if you you effectively steal eggs of the nest you can take them an incubator and raise these birds. Then in but it also triggers the wild birds to then relay a second clutch of eggs to replace those which they can then try and raise in the wild that can increase the output of the birds by stealing their first clutch of eggs and, raising those in captivity and what happened though, was rather interesting is when they started this captive Breeding Program, they didnt have any adults, puerto rican parrots in captivity or very, very few of them. But what did have was a related called the hispanic island parrot from a nearby island. And they had hispanic island parrots that had been sort of confiscated, animal traders and things like this. And what they did was they took the use the hispanic island parrots as as foster parents for the puerto rican parrots the eggs that they in. But what happened was baby puerto rican parrots parrots a highly vocal they have very sophisticated culture they have very detailed language that people learning more and more about is that these captive raised puerto rican parrots learns a kind of a kind of a crude, simplified version of his Spanish Island parrot language in these cages which was very, very different and very much simpler and cruder than the language of the real wild puerto rican parrots. And over time, these conservationists moved and some of these captive bred parrots released them out into