Magpie sighting may be sign of climate change

Some residents of Baker Lake, Nunavut, were taken aback recently when they spotted magpies flitting around town.

The scavenger birds, a relative of the crow, are a familiar sight on the Prairies and in forested areas of the North, but had never been seen in Nunavut before.

"He was eating a few things here and there scraps, someone's caribou meat that was outside he was eating that," said Steve Niego, one of the first men to spot the bird in the community.

Niego says they had no idea what the black-and-white bird was, and ran to their office to look it up in a bird identification book.

Niego says he only saw one at first, and then a friend pointed out there were several more.

Craig Machtans, a forest bird biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service, said climate change could have something to do with the bird's appearance on the tundra. He says there's no record of the birds ever having been in Nunavut, but they have been moving North for years.

"They've really become well established in N.W.T. in the last 20 years," he said. "You know, each year we hear about them spreading a little bit further north to another community or overwintering somewhere that they hadn't previously."

He says with fewer days of extreme cold in the winter, the birds are moving north, and are now as far as Fort Good Hope in the N.W.T.

The birds haven't been seen in Baker Lake, a hamlet located 1,330 kilometres west of Iqaluit, since the initial sighting a few weeks ago. Machtans says the birds may have moved on or died.

He says magpies need a food source like meat or scraps and certain climate factors to survive.

It may be some time before the birds establish themselves in the area, however. Magpies need trees to build their bulky nests, so it is unlikely they will be able to reproduce on the treeless tundra surrounding Baker Lake anytime soon.