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The most frequent questions I hear these days are: “How are the birds handling this hot weather?” Or “Is the drought affecting birds?” These are actually two very different questions.
Hot weather doesn’t bother birds. A cardinal has a body. temperature of 109 degrees. Though an outside temperature of 100 degrees would be mighty uncomfortable for humans, it would be of no concern for the red bird. lir. Chickadees live with temperatures of 115 degrees; their little motors run constantly, and it is this metabolism, the breaking down of food into energy, that generates body heat. The smaller the bird, the higher the temperature.
A daily fluctuation of 10 degrees has been reported for the robin. A flying robin has a higher temperature than one perched on a branch. A variation of 10 degrees for humans would be disastrous.
Birds have no sweat glands pnd handle excessive heat by panting, like dogs. I have often seen this, particularly when a female is incubating eggs or brooding young. Sweat glands provide a cooling function for Us.
Anyone who has opened a nest box of Eastern Bluebirds to check on its contents during high summer knows that the temperature in the enclosed space of a nest box full of nestlings can be very high indeed. Still, the young survive and grow into adults.
Birds, like humans, are warm-blooded. Their “internal thermostats” adjust to heat and cold as ours do. This thermostat of newly hatched song birds does not function until they are seven or eight days old; this varies from species to
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