If we don’t individually and collectively make choices that support the birds that can’t live in our yards (perhaps 98% of the total number of North American bird species), the 2% that can live with us will soon be all we have left.
As I touched on in that last blog entry, sprawl, agribusiness, hydrocarbon pollution and pesticide use are among the ecologically unsustainable forces that are wiping out our birds. In this entry I’ll write briefly about a few of the many other ways that human activities are killing hundreds of millions of birds every year. Our individual choices make a difference (one way or the other) here, too!
Transmission towers
It’s been well-known since the 1950s that radio and cell towers kill staggering numbers of birds. Most of these are nocturnal migrants who, flying blind in storms or fog, head for and then circle the towers’ blinking red lights and crash into superstructures and guy wires. Apparently the red lights disorient the birds’ onboard navigation systems.
While a single storm event at a single tower might kill 10,000+ birds (it’s been documented many times), the current guess-timate is 2,500 birds killed per tower per year on average, with taller towers being much more deadly. Multiply that by over 100,000+ towers and you get the picture.
Many conservation organizations are prodding the FAA to mandate bird-safe lighting on towers but so far this massive federal agency, which exists to serve big business over wildlife or human beings, has done nothing. More pressure is needed! Here’s a link to advice and info: view link
Power lines
Not only in this country but worldwide, pylons averaging 150 feet high cut across the landscape, holding up the high-tension cables that carry millions of volts of electricity from power plants to substations and energy grids. All these wires are uninsulated. And birds, of course, perch on these wires and associated structures all the time -- especially in places like prairies and deserts where they’re the often the best perches around.
As long as a bird doesn’t become part of a circuit by touching two wires at once, no worries. Smaller birds rarely have a problem. But bigger birds like Bald Eagles, Golden Eagles, Harris’ Hawks, Turkey Vultures, California Condors, Sandhill Cranes and Great Blue Herons can easily touch multiple wires or a uninsulated transformer. The result is a flaming corpse, its beak and feet literally melted before it hits the ground.
Worse yet, research indicates that more birds are dying from colliding with power lines than are fried by them. And new steel power poles are being deployed that act like giant ground wires, toasting even the smallest birds that touch even one line. Utilities can mitigate some of the deadly effects of these poles. But without sufficient pressure from the public and government agencies many these businesses will choose to kill birds rather than spend money to save them.
You might want to contact your local electricity provider to learn what they’re doing about this issue. Meanwhile, here’s a link to an unbiased paper that illustrates potential solutions and explains their benefits to utilities: view link
Automobile strikes
If they survive encounters with our power and communication grids, birds must also run the gauntlet of our transportation system. Two separate federal studies corroborate that 60-80 million birds annually wind up bouncing off our automobile windshields, jamming into radiator grilles or otherwise being killed by moving vehicles. No doubt a good many more fall victims to planes and trains. As in so many other respects, the more we drive the more we kill…
Free-roaming cats
While some cats are beloved members of human families, from a bird’s perspective cats are introduced carnivores not native to North America. Our birds are not adapted to cope with cats, and the predators that would keep cats in check in a natural landscape, such as wolves, have been exterminated. Tens of millions of free-roaming cats, many of them feral or semi-feral, are wiping out hundreds of millions of birds each year. And their population is increasing even faster than our human population.
Cats don’t just kill our backyard birds like the House Finch, House Sparrow, Northern Cardinal and American Goldfinch. They also take out threatened and endangered birds like Least Tern, Piping Plover, Sharp-shinned Hawk, and many more. Birds that nest on or near the ground, like the California Quail and Wood Thrush, are particularly vulnerable. Many bird species might hang on in various altered habitats near humans if it weren’t for the presence of cats.
Obviously there’s more to this topic than I can cover here, but this is the bottom line: Whether your cat roams free and kills birds (and also the small mammals many raptors, like the American Kestrel, depend on for food) is your choice.
Hopefully I’ll circle back to this topic another time in more depth but in the meantime, for those of you Eons birders who choose to let your cats out, here’s a link to a product that is proven to work by gently interfering with your cat’s fine-tuned hunting skills but otherwise doesn’t inconvenience him or her unduly: The Cat Bib.
Windows
Of all the agents of death I’ve described so far none is more brutally efficient than our window glass. The more glass we put out there, the more birds die -- they just don’t see it coming until the moment of impact. Clear glass, reflective glass, it doesn’t matter. A billion birds killed annually is a conservative estimate.
Researchers are working on solutions at the manufacturing level that will help birds see windows so they can avoid them. In the meantime here are some tips for homeowners (and no, those little falcon stickers are not worth squat): view link
Doing the math
It’s guess-timated that there are still about 20 billion birds living in North America during the spring and summer, and considerably fewer in the winter. Each year some are born and some die. More and more things are out there killing the ones that are born, and there are fewer and fewer places for the survivors to nest, roost and/or feed every day. We don’t need hard, verifiable numbers to do the math here.
At both the species and individual levels birds are magnificently adaptable, incredibly resilient, uncannily intelligent. How long can they hold out if we don’t change our individual and collective tune?
My personal feeling, which it tears me to pieces to articulate, is that within the lifetimes of our grandchildren being born right now more than 50% of North American breeding and wintering birds will be extinct or virtually extinct. If you find that unacceptable, then please join me in loving the Earth -- which automatically means loving your family, yourself, etc., even more, too. And, from that place, changing the things you feel you can.
Start by recognizing that every choice matters and that each of us is responsible.
Peace and good birding,
Scott Cronenweth
www.naturalpathwalks.com
