October 11, 2019
By Mickey Friedman
One bird, two birds, three birds, four. Five birds, six birds, seven birds, more. More birds than I can count.
I can’t imagine three billion birds. I’ve had a canary, a parakeet, and for a short time, Vladimir, a Quaker parrot. A remarkable fellow. Unfortunately, I wasn’t home enough for Vladimir who needed someone more reliable than me to discuss the important matters of the day. And so he found a better human.
More importantly, Science magazine reported on one of our latest disasters: since 1970, we lost nearly three billion birds. That’s about 29 percent of our bird population. We take birds for granted. As Rachel Lallensack of Smithsonian put it: “it’s hard to imagine a place in the world where you can’t find a bird – a place where you can’t look to the sky and see one flying overhead, or see one hop across the sidewalk, or close your eyes and hear at least one singing its song.
“Take the Red Knot, a shoreline bird that migrates to the Delaware Bay in summer to indulge on horseshoe crab eggs until it’s fat enough to fly all the way to the Arctic Circle to breed. Or consider the Baltimore Oriole, a songbird that breeds in summer from Louisiana up along the U.S. East Coast and into Central Canada, then spends its winters in the Caribbean, across Central America and down to the northern regions of South America.”
We now know about this tragedy because bird watchers and not quite scientist-scientists counted 529 avian species bird by bird.
And now we know that we’re not just talking about the birds we’ve suspected were headed for extinction, rather “common birds—including beloved backyard companions like sparrows and blackbirds—are taking the biggest hit.”
“A total of 419 native migratory species experienced a net loss of 2.5 billion individuals,” the study says. More than 90 percent of the total loss can be attributed to just 12 bird families, including sparrows, warblers, blackbirds, larks and finches … birds that can thrive just about anywhere. The large-scale loss of these hardy birds reveals the extent to which avian animals across the world are struggling to survive.”
Maybe you’re thinking that while it’s kind of nice to hear a bird chirp, what with smart phones and Spotify and Pandora and instantaneous Taylor Swift we’ll easily get by. Bird song apps. But, according to Scott Sillett, director of Smithsonian’s Migratory Bird Center, birds are “amazingly efficient” dispersers of seeds. Turns out that “jays, for instance, which not only harvest acorns but replant them as well, [are] successfully maintaining oak forests. Hummingbirds are important pollinators across North America, and birds keep insect populations in check. Black-billed cuckoos happily devour defoliating caterpillars that can destroy forests, for example. And predatory birds, like falcons, devour rodents that often spread human diseases. Even the smallest bird helps control the spread of plants or insects.”
Smillet reminds us that “Birds are at the top of the food web … Birds are the sentinel. If you have huge declines of birds, it tells you something is amiss.”
Speaking of bird studies, a new study by Biological Conservation found that eight rare bird species may have already quietly disappeared. According to National Geographic: “The eight-year study statistically analyzed 51 critically endangered bird species and found that eight could likely be classified as extinct or very close to extinction: They found that three are extinct, one is extinct in the wild, and four are precipitately close to extinction if not already gone.”
Interestingly, the Spix’s Macaw, which appeared in Disney’s 2014 animated “Rio” exists only in captivity, while the last wild Spix’s Macaw is thought to have died in 2000. According to Dr Stuart Butchart, BirdLife’s Chief Scientist and lead author on the paper: “Ninety per cent of bird extinctions in recent centuries have been of species on islands. However, our results confirm that there is a growing wave of extinctions sweeping across the continents, driven mainly by habitat loss and degradation from unsustainable agriculture and logging”.
In the Amazon, where many of these species were once abundant, deforestation is a growing concern. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that more than 17 million hectares of forest were lost between 2001 and 2012. An editorial published last March in Science Advances found that the Amazon is reaching an ecological tipping point—if 40 percent of the region is deforested, scientists say the ecosystem will be irreversibly altered.
Luisa Arnedo, a biologist and senior programs officer for the National Geographic Society, explained that birds can be especially susceptible to extinction when they face habitat loss because they live in ecological niches, eating only a specific prey or making nests in specific trees.
“As soon as the habitat is gone, they’re gone too,” she says.
Looking for other reasons? Add toxic pesticides and the climate crisis.
We’re losing. Bird by bird.
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Bird By Bird was first published in the September 28, 2019 issue of The Berkshire Record.