NYT
Millions of Missing Birds, Vanishing in Plain Sight
Last week, the Audubon Society released a new report describing the sharp and startling population decline of some of the most familiar and common birds in America: several kinds of sparrows, the Northern bobwhite, the Eastern meadowlark, the common grackle and the common tern. The average decline of the 20 species in the Audubon Society’s report is 68 percent.
Forty years ago, there were an estimated 31 million bobwhites. Now there are 5.5 million. Compared to the hundred-some condors presently in the wild, 5.5 million bobwhites sounds like a lot of birds. But what matters is the 25.5 million missing and the troubles that brought them down — and are all too likely to bring down the rest of them, too. So this is not extinction, but it is how things look before extinction happens.
The word “extinct” somehow brings to mind the birds that seem like special cases to us, the dodo or the great auk or the passenger pigeon. Most people would never have had a chance to see dodos and great auks on their remote islands before they were decimated in the 17th and 19th centuries. What is hard to remember about passenger pigeons isn’t merely their once enormous numbers. It’s the enormous numbers of humans to whom their comings and goings were a common sight and who supposed, erroneously, that such unending clouds of birds were indestructible. We recognize the extraordinary distinctness of the passenger pigeon now because we know its fate, killed off largely by humans. But we have moralized it thoroughly without ever really taking it to heart.
The question is whether we will see the distinctness of the field sparrow — its number is down from 18 million 40 years ago to 5.8 million — only when the last pair is being kept alive in a zoo somewhere. We love to finally care when the death watch is on. It makes us feel so very human.
Like you, I’ve been reading dire reports of declining species for many years now. They have the value of causing us to pay attention to species in trouble, and the sad fact is that the only species likely to endure are the ones we humans manage to pay attention to. There was a time when it was better, if you were a nonhuman species, to be ignored by humans because we trapped, shot or otherwise exploited all of the ones that got our attention. But in the past 40 years, we have killed all those millions of birds or, let us say, unintentionally caused a dramatic population loss, simply by going about business as usual.
Agriculture has intensified. So has development. Open space has been sharply reduced. We have simply pursued our livelihoods. We knew it was inimical to wolves and mountain lions. But we somehow trusted that all the innocent little birds were here to stay. What they actually need to survive, it turns out, is a landscape that is less intensely human.
The Audubon Society portrait of common bird species in decline is really a report on who humans are. Let me offer a proposition about Homo sapiens. We are the only species on earth capable of an ethical awareness of other species and, thus, the only species capable of happily ignoring that awareness. So far, our economic interests have proved to be completely incompatible with all but a very few forms of life. It’s not that we believe that other species don’t matter. It’s that, historically speaking, it hasn’t been worth believing one way or another. I don’t suppose that most Americans would actively kill a whippoorwill if they had the chance. Yet in the past 40 years its number has dropped by 1.6 million.
In our everyday economic behavior, we seem determined to discover whether we can live alone on earth. E.O. Wilson has argued eloquently and persuasively that we cannot, that who we are depends as much on the richness and diversity of the biological life around us as it does on any inherent quality in our genes. Environmentalists of every stripe argue that we must somehow begin to correlate our economic behavior — by which I mean every aspect of it: production, consumption, habitation — with the welfare of other species.
This is the premise of sustainability. But the very foundation of our economic interests is self-interest, and in the survival of other species we see way too little self to care.
The trouble with humans is that even the smallest changes in our behavior require an epiphany. And yet compared to the fixity of other species, the narrowness of their habitats, the strictness of their diets, the precision of the niches they occupy, we are flexibility itself.
We look around us, expecting the rest of the world’s occupants to adapt to the changes that we have caused, when, in fact, we have the right to expect adaptation only from ourselves.
1 comment:
this is IMPORTANT, in my 30 years we have lost almost everything,
It is alarming the great numbers of birds missing well over 5 past years of spring and summer at my location in Westchester County NY.
Perhaps the environment here was too favorable and habited by numbers of creatures too great to be sustained but these are sad times for our lost friends.
We have ponds and small rivers and parks with associated green space extremely attractive to ducks, herons, kingfishers and even an occasional Ibis was detected. Past 5 summers not one duckling was seen on our small lake and pond, where years earlier over 100 ducklings SURVIVED.
I have seen not one little green heron, these were such odd creatures, sitting on branches in the water with odd screeches as they flew away, not one kingfisher, no cormorants. And only one night heron a few weeks ago. We had for the first time 6 years ago a family of wood ducks, 12 hatchlings were spotted but snappers got all but 2 and they too have disappeared.
We are not altogether without waterfowl, we have lots of geese and a few remaining mallards but everything else is gone. Along the Bronx River, nesting area for ducks and other species, with wood duck nests constructed and an IMPORTANT birding site, I saw nothing!!! A horrible and compelling disaster has occurred for ALL BIRDS!!!! (geese remain)
I heard just one screeching bluejay earlier this season but have not seen one, they too are gone along with the cardinals, orioles and mockingbirds,
And the crow, he sadly also is gone, although I think disease is responsible but THIS WAS A TRUE CATASTROPHY and I am not sure folks realise this. These were perfect and intelligent creatures, the ONLY alarm for birds and animals unaware of the danger from the sky and the branch of the tree. And the screeching bluejay too.
Things have changed so dramatically these past 10 years.
The return of the hawk!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I cannot begin to sound enough alarm bells about this, they have killed ALL OUR WOODPECKERS. Yesterday in a westchester county park I heard a sound I had heard hundreds of times years ago, I had even seen large woodpeckers mating 10 years ago, but NOTHING now. I immediately searched the trees where this woodpecker sound was coming from, I was desperate to find it, maybe 15 or 20 seconds, then nothing. then I saw why. a large bird, I could not identify it, but it flew from the trees with that large woodpecker hanging dead in its beak. Our nesting ducks have been destroyed with not one clutch of hatchling in over 6 years, I saw right in front of me a redtail killing a female mallard and plucking feathers, totally fearless in attack. our rabbits are long gone, it is unbelieveably desolate and silent in westchester county parks these days. it is astonishing what has happened. in an open field I saw last year just one tiny songbird flitting across the grasses, then, that tiny bird was swallowed by a hawk. With not a crow anywhere to alarm!!! Everywhere killing everything, mallards, wood ducks, small animals and all sizes of small bird. That whistling shrieking sound was the only spring and summer bird sound for us and now the robins and sparrow must suffice. We never saw these predators years ago, maybe driving along major highways far off, but never here, and never on low tree branches or directly overhead.
I know why birds are becoming extinct. they could survive people, loss of forest, habitat destruction, but they cannot survive the relentless proliferation of hawks. My granddaughter loved to see birds at her feeder in her back yard, one day however she saw a large hawk just sitting in that tree with the feeder, killing chickadees as they searched the food. She no more has bird feeders. In the past I personally asked people please not to feed birds and waterfowl in nearby park (one woman told me she saw right in front of her from a tree branch a hawk grabbing one of the few squirrels she was feeding, perhaps not unusual, but this in the middle of the day with people around? Our stressed out birds searching food for springtime fledglings on tree branches are killed as food for predator birds, males and females, these species cannot survive. And it is wintertime most dangerous when we lost everything! All our smaller birds now are in danger of extinction. It sure is NOT air pollution responsible for the millions of missing birds.
It is NOT loss of habitat, not here, it is the population explosion of the predators at the expense of the defenseless, the demise of the crow a MOST important factor! The losses now irreversible, it is only a matter of time.
This letter is a sad one, Perhaps in forests some beautiful things might still manage to hold on, but for those seeking comfort in habitat seclusion, remember, there are no border checkpoints in the skies. For us fate has been cruel indeed, a sad and sorry end for our beautiful creatures that might have been avoided had not people encouraged what never should have occurred.
Post a Comment