By Richard Phelps
Every so often, a set of statistics comes along that gives even a jaded one like me, pause.
Since I graduated from high school, 30% of the bird population of North America has vanished. Let me say that again, in the last 50 years, the bird population of North America has declined 30%. That is a reduction of 2.9 billion breeding adult birds in the blink of an eye.
Human’s love the phrase, “Like a canary in a coal mine.” Canaries were taken into coal mines to indicate the presence of dangerous levels of methane. If the canary died, the methane levels were too high for the miners. A simple, effective test. So I have to wonder, if the birds of North America are disappearing (the canaries), is the world safe for humans?
These statistics are part of citizen-based science studies and the combined results from the North American Bird Survey and the Audubon Christmas Bird Counts published in Science. The Audubon Christmas Count is an established institution and is a short-period bird count conducted along designated migratory routes and backyards. It is the gold standard.
What’s going on here? Is it quiet outside? Where are the huge flocks of blackbirds that filled the skies of our childhood? We watched them for hours on late afternoons just as this, the sun going down, the air turning cold. 700 million songbirds of 31 species have disappeared. Loss of stop-over sites for migrations, loss of breeding habitats, the poisoning of our fields and water with pesticides, insecticides and herbicides.
Let’s look locally. Benedict Farm Park is a 100 acre town park, grasslands, woods and riverfront. At one time you could see 84 species of birds within this one location. In order to protect the grassland song birds of the park, the town’s Conservation Advisory Council helped the town board draw up mowing regulations to protect the hatching songbirds who build nests in the grass of the hayfields. No mowing until after the fledglings were safely in the air, late June. The hay was sold on a one year basis. Now I see all the fields have been plowed and reseeded. There is a 5 year contract.
Any meadowlarks, bobolinks, redwing blackbirds who thought they were coming back to their old nesting tufts of grass will be in for a shock come March. Is it the purpose of a town park to sign 5 year contracts for a local hay merchant to make big bucks off the farmland? Or, is it the purpose of the park to offer comfort to different species, to secure and foster different habitats, and in doing so, offer the town’s human denizens opportunities to see these creatures, to hear their songs and watch their acrobatics?
Can the birds just move on down the road? No. Medline is building a 27 acre warehouse in one field. Amazon, doing under another 75 acres. Legoland clear-cut 150 acres. Birds are territorial: they need space. Some of our local elected officials mock me. They call my questions “chirping”; they ask me, during serious discussions, how many times a swallow’s wing beats in a minute? I can take it. I don’t care. They simply prove to me they are unqualified for elected office. Perhaps, by the time you read this, they will have been voted out. The march is on. In another 50 years, another 30% reduction? Or much more? The industrial age is only 200 years old. Where will this end? This is the Anthropocene Epoch, the time the Earth was dominated by the effects of human activity.
The conservationist John Muir once observed, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Well, let’s see now, birds are kinda related to insects, since they eat so many of them. Are we losing our insects too? Looky here. A study shows Germany has lost 77% of its flying insects since 1989. A 6.7% annual decline. In a Puerto Rican rainforest, Brad Lister, lecturer at RPI, who was there, at first, to study lizards, sees a 95% loss of ground insects, and an 80% loss in canopy insect life, over the 35 years between observations. Climate change? Rain forests are built on steady climate ranges. No more. “The number of hot spells, temperatures above 29C, have increased tremendously,” Lister observed. “It went from zero in the 1970s up to something like 44% of the days.” Calling it a “bottoms up trophic cascade”, the loss of insects has led to a loss of bird and frog life, 40% to 50%, according to Lister.
Oddly, the growth rate of the world economy is equal to the per-cent loss of insect biomass, about 2.5% per year. So let’s see, another 100 years and the mass extinction will be complete -- the Anthropocene Extinction.