Warming shrinks birds in Australia

CANBERRA: Some species of Australian birds are shrinking and the trend will likely continue because of global warming, a scientist said yesterday.

Janet Gardner, an Australian National University biologist, led a team of scientists who measured museum specimens to plot the decline in size of eight species of Australian birds over the past century.

The research, published last week in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, found the birds in Australia's southeast had become between 2 percent to 4 percent smaller.