This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Annie Sneed.

Every spring, a bird called the Barnacle Goose migrates from the North Sea coast to the Russian Arctic where it breeds. That's a 3,000

kilometer trip. Along the way the geese usually take pit stops to rest and

refuel, but the Arctic spring has been arriving earlier and earlier.

So researchers analyze six years of Barnacle Goose migratory tracking data

to try to figure out if these geese and other species like it

can adapt their migration to stay in sync with the changing seasons.

And then we used satellite images to see when snow was melting in the Arctic

and then we could relate the timing of the birds to the snow melt.

Bart Nollett, an ecologist at the University of Amsterdam.

Nollett and his colleagues found that the geese did not leave their wintering ground sooner to match the earlier Arctic spring.

But they did speed up their trip by skipping many of their usual stopovers.

The birds arrived in the Arctic up to 13 days earlier than they used to but at a cost.

So in a normal year they start laying their eggs right after a rifle,

but now they spent more than a week forging before they were laying their eggs.

So in effect they weren't that earlier than could have been the case if they would have been able to later eggs immediately.

And as a result, the chicks that hatched from the eggs in that early year,

they survived much less than normally

probably because they missed the food peak which is actually a combination

of a very high quality in the grass and enough grass around and that food peak is around three

weeks after snow melt but now they were a few weeks later.

With devastating effects.

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