Birds 02

Birds have beaks. Birds have skinny legs. If you look at a bird for a long time you may begin to think that it looks goofy. Goofier than your next door neighbor that's for sure.
Check out this goofy looking bird.
Do we need birds? Get real. We don't need birds. Maybe we could put them in a park. Or on an island somewhere.

Habitat loss for the last two centuries has been huge for birds. But, hey, who gives a hoot about habitat? 2/3 of bird species will be gone by the end of this century, or sooner. That is a conservative estimate from a speech given at the International Botanical Congress. Those guys are botanists. What the heck do they know?

Peter Raven, President of the International Botanical Congress at its 16th worldwide conference, August 2, 1999 announced:
"We are predicting the extinction of about two-thirds of all bird, mammal, butterfly and plant species by the end of the next century, based on current trends." In other words, we humans are causing a mass extinction of species greater than the extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. This is a very big deal, folks - if loss of 2/3rds of these species doesn't qualify as a major ecological collapse, we don't know what does. This should be front-page, red banner headline news, but it's not. The UN and every country around the world should be calling for emergency conferences, but they're not.

Burning the ecological candle at both ends for birds.

"One might suppose that migrating birds at least, would be safe from the island effect, since many of them can fly more than a thousand miles in a single day. Unfortunately, these birds are in particular danger, because their future depends upon the preservation of a good portion of the face of the earth. They spend half of each year in the middle of the old pioneer explosion and half in the new. Nearly half of the 700 species of birds found in the United States spend their winters in the tropics; including some of the country's most popular songbirds: thrushes, flycatchers, vireos, warblers, tanagers. If a relatively small amount of land is cleared in Mexico, Costa Rica, and the Caribbean Islands, many of these birds will vanish from North America, too."

"Already many species of songbirds are growing rarer in the United States. Some ornithologists say the American woods are getting noticeably quieter. The dawn chorus is fainter and less melodious. A study at one nature preserve, the Greenbrook Sanctuary in Alpine, New Jersey, shows that thirty species of birds became significantly rarer there between the years 1957 and 1983. Hooded warblers, American redstarts, and a few other songbirds all but disappeared."

"These birds have the misfortune to be endangered both by the expanding farms of South America and the expanding suburbs of North america. Some ornithologists think suburbia is hurting the birds more than tropical deforestation, because the island effect is so much more advanced in the North. All across America there are small towns like Cadiz, Wisconsin with less and less unbroken forest and more and more edge."

"There are birds who like edges, of course. For jays and crows the island effect is a bonanza. These are the kind of opportunists that are always favored by upheavals in the biosphere--they are the avian equivalents of rats and mice. They eat eggs of vireos, warblers, thrushes, tanagers orioles, hummingbirds and flycatchers. Each new edge that a town permits in its remaining woods invites edge-lovers, egg-eaters, and nest parasites, and disinvites the migrant songbirds that love dark forest interiors. They lose habitat if even a single road is cut through their forests in the North or the South."

Jonathan Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years, 1990.

NB, we don't often capitalize the word earth. We find it pretentious and hypocritical. Either the earth is important or it isn't. If it is, then humans will stop and reverse their overpopulation. If it isn't there is no need to pretend with a capitalization of the word earth.