Julia Baum

Photos of large mammals like mountain goats and moose and caribou and they declined.

And so you can't say from that, oh, they were all dying and their population declined.

Really, that just indicates a change in their activity level.

So they probably just declined.

went into the forest and sought shade as any of us would, right?

So it's a change in activity level and kind of similar for birds.

Basically, one of the only sources that we had for birds were acoustic recordings.

So there were wildlife biologists who not to do with the heat dome, but just were running these long-term studies where they had recorders set up.

And they record what they hear.

And often what they're recording are songbirds.

And they just found slight differences in the times of those songbirds.

So what that tells us is that birds and mammals, they're doing something different, right?

They're trying to escape the heat.

So maybe they're out foraging in the open at the cooler times of day instead of the optimal time that they would normally do it.

But we don't actually know whether or not

a lot of them died, for example.

And that kind of gets the reason I'm making that point is that these heat waves just erupt very quickly without much warning, right?

And so scientists don't have time to, you know, plan a study and plan exactly how we're going to

you know, collect the evidence for every type of species out there.

We just had to, you know, make do with what we had, which was by reaching out and talking to all sorts of scientists and say, did you happen to be out observing nature during this heat wave?