The death of birds feels like the end. I do not know another way to put it. I cannot muster any optimism. Let me quote at length:
“A new study, which analyzed decades of data on North American birds, estimates that the continent’s bird populations have fallen by 29 percent since 1970. That’s almost 3 billion fewer individuals than there used to be, five decades ago. “It’s a staggering result,” says Kenneth Rosenberg from Cornell University and the American Bird Conservancy, who led the analysis.”
“His team found that 90 percent of the missing birds came from just 12 families, and that they were all familiar, perchy, cheepy things such as sparrows, warblers, blackbirds, finches, larks, starlings, and swallows.”
“Habitat loss and degradation are the largest forces behind the decline of birds.”
“Other threats are easier to quantify, and the biggest of these, by some margin, is domestic cats, which kill an estimated 2.4 billion birds every year. Window collisions claim 600 million bird lives a year, vehicles take out 214 million, power lines are responsible for killing 32 million, and the lights of industrial towers fatally distract about 6 million. Wind turbines are often cited as a problem for birds, and while they should be placed carefully to protect migratory species, their effect is comparatively small; for every bird killed by a wind turbine, thousands are killed by a cat.”
“But Donald Trump’s administration has recently moved to gut the most important bird-conservation law in the United States: the century-old Migratory Bird Treaty Act. This proposal would absolve companies of responsibility for millions of incidental bird deaths, and hold them accountable only for purposeful killings, which are negligible. “This is the absolute worst time to be weakening protections,” Rosenberg says.”
“No one hunts the sparrow, he notes, but bird lovers are so numerous that they could form a constituency to match the political clout the hunting lobby used to save waterfowl. “We need to raise our voices,” Rosenberg says.”
Thirty five years ago I kept records of nesting sites and species on 3 and ½ acres of mixed woodlot and fields in East Coventry. I did this for 11 years. We had 36 nesting sites (including boxes) used in one form or another year after year. I recorded over 50 species who either made our property home, came to our feeders or whose calls I heard.
We have been in our present home in Warwick Township for over 20 years, and until the last 7 years a ½ acre surrounded by a long ridgeline of woods and fields (development has ripped some of that apart). Three years ago all five of our nesting boxes produced young — chickadees, finches, wrens, bluebirds. Nuthatches, orioles and robins built in trees and shrubs. Catbirds and goldfinches in the treeline and fields next door. For 19 years I could pinpoint the area where one indigo bunting family returned season after season.
Crows in multiple family groups came to our feeders. Kettles of 12, 15, 20 vultures rode the thermals above us.
Since 2016 we have noticed the disappearance of birds here. In the past two years our nesting boxes have remained empty except for one brood of wrens. Finches have bred in a cap I suspended from hooks on our porch. That’s it. We have seen a significant decrease in robins, goldfinches, sparrows of most types. Whole families of crows have vanished. Mornings are quieter. Last year we did not hear an oriole.
This vanishing extends to Europe. China has all but wiped out bird populations in its gargantuan cities. The loss of rainforests, as witness to the deliberate fires in the Amazon, continues. Climate change and swiftly rising global temperatures further wreck habitat, food supplies and birds’ capacity to adapt.
Trump, as always, is the essence of death in all this, but his policies have nothing to do with world wide losses reaching back to 1970. We are the emissaries of death, human beings, civilization in all its ingenuity, its chemical designs, its grotesque appetites, its carnal avarice for more land, for more money, for wealth unlimited by any reverence for life or ethical restraint. We are the locust species, the paragon of killers. We are fucking annihilation itself.
A list of changes would help to stop the decline and over time reverse it — an absolute protection of habitat and wetlands, a vigorous regulation and outright ban of many chemicals, a change in farmers’ practices, the suppression of feral cats and dogs (a ban on domestic cats being left to roam), the removal of fossil fuels from our energy supply (over a relatively short period of time). Those are a few recommendations. In sum, we would have to sacrifice some material well being, adapt our transport systems, learn to live with much less in the way of possessions. We would have to reverse our moral bearings and embrace a love of life and discard a love of wealth. How terrible that it is easier to envision the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
At 67 I have relatively few years left here. It has given me comfort to know that when I die, life in abundance will continue, and that birds will fill the heavens. In Genesis, God commands, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 21And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 22And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.” My anguish and heartbreak come from the knowledge that this will not be the case. I dreamed of a paradise, and for a time lived in one, but today I curse my own poisonous contributions to this devastation. My mourning will be ongoing. My desolation will be an indelible part of the years that remain.
Yong, Ed, “The Quiet Disappearance of Birds in North America”. The Atlantic, Sep. 19, 2019
Genesis 1: 20-22: the King James version
