Nature Notes (# 451)~If you were alive in the year 1970, more than one in four birds in the U.S. and Canada has disappeared within your lifetime.

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Below are the participants from last week’s Nature Notes…Thank you…

1. Pictografio 4. Day One 7. Birgitta B.
2. Pat — Anchorage, Alaska 5. A Quiet Corner 8. MOSS
3. Rqauel Jimenez Artesania 6. orchid( apan) 9. Mitzi Rice Digi Renderings

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Thank you for participating. I am having trouble leaving comments on Blogger blogs even after signing into my Blogger/Google account. I can do it on my MacBook with a different browser, but I can’t on my IPAD and I am having to do everything for now on the IPAD. I apologize. This has been the case for Blogger blogs for months. Also the verification of 4 or more choosing photos is getting more challenging as the photos are not clear. So thank you Google for the problems which is why I switched to WordPress 8 years ago.

It has been a very wet time. The 7th wettest September is being followed by a very wet October making it hard to get out with the camera as fall really sets in..

Along with the rain comes some very sad and sobering news about birds here in North America but this is happening all over the planet.

If you were alive in the year 1970, more than one in four birds in the U.S. and Canada has disappeared within your lifetime.

According to research published online in September by the journal Science, wild bird populations in the continental U.S. and Canada have declined by almost 30% since 1970.

“We were astounded by this net loss across all birds on our continent, the loss of billions of birds,” said Cornell Lab of Ornithology conservation scientist Ken Rosenberg, who led an international team of scientists from seven institutions in the analysis of population trends for 529 bird species.

bird loss chart

 

90 percent of the missing birds came from just 12 families, and that they were all familiar, perchy, cheepy things such as sparrows, warblers, blackbirds, finches, larks, starlings, and swallows.

bird chart

About 19 species have each lost more than 50 million individuals. Seemingly ubiquitous species such as the red-winged blackbird are at risk. The dark-eyed junco, a type of sparrow and one of the most common sights at bird feeders, is in trouble. Even birds that humans successfully introduced to this continent—such as the house sparrow and European starling, which are famed for their adaptability—are in trouble. “If we can’t even keep introduced species in healthy populations, that could be a stronger indicator that the environment is unhealthy,” Rosenberg says. It’s as if all birds are canaries, and the entire world their coal mine.
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With this great emptying of the skies, there are now 3 billion fewer beaks to snap up insects, and 3 billion fewer pairs of wings for moving nutrients, pollen, and seeds through the world. We haven’t just lost birds, but all the things that birds do, “as well as our connection to what is arguably one of the most widely cherished forms of wildlife on the planet,” says Kristen Ruegg from Colorado State University. “Our forests and backyards will continue to grow quieter with every passing year, and within that leftover space there is an opportunity for complacency about the natural world to grow.”
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bird chart

What Kills Birds

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The new study is silent on the causes of these declines—that’s what Rosenberg’s team will look at next. But it’s widely accepted that “habitat loss and degradation are the largest forces behind the decline of birds,” Rosenberg says. The fact that grassland birds have suffered more than those in other habitats attests to this problem. As wild prairie has been converted into agricultural land, invaded by non-native plants, and flooded with harmful pesticides, 700 million local birds have disappeared, and three-quarters of bird species are going downhill.
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One of the biggest of these threats, by some margin, is domestic cats, which kill an estimated 2.4 billion birds every year. Window collisions claim 600 million bird lives a year, vehicles take out 214 million, power lines are responsible for killing 32 million, and the lights of industrial towers fatally distract about 6 million.
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The organizations behind the new study have compiled a list of seven personal actions that people can take to protect North America’s remaining birds:

1) Make windows safer with products that prevent collisions.

2) Keep cats indoors (or walk them on a leash).

3) Choose native plants instead of lawns, to offer food and resting places for migrants.

4) Avoid pesticides.

5) Choose bird-friendly, shade-grown coffee that’s grown on farms that preserve bird habitat.

6) Reduce the use of plastics, and especially single-use plastics.

7) Watch birds and report what you see to help scientists track the surviving populations.

Ultimately, it will take political will and action to refill the emptied skies which really depresses me because the political will of the people in charge is not science based or humanity based and certainly is not interested in the environment or wildlife. So I do what I can do…I have to..I have grandchildren who will be living on this planet long after I am gone.

Nature walks are wonderful. But you don’t have to travel to special location to enjoy Mother Nature. There is so much to see in your own neighborhood or even in your own back or front yard. Get a guide-book of the wildlife in your area and learn the calls of birds and frogs and toads. So many times I hear a bird that lets me know what I am looking for in the trees.

Have a wonderful week from Michelle!

4 thoughts on “Nature Notes (# 451)~If you were alive in the year 1970, more than one in four birds in the U.S. and Canada has disappeared within your lifetime.”

  3. I have noticed great changes in the bird life in Hawaii. We left Hawaii in 1974 and returned in 2008. In that time the changes in wildlife itself was dramatic. We used to have a ton of monarch butterflies. Now I hardly ever see them. We suddenly have a dramatic increase in tiny finches all over the place, not to mention bulbuls which we didn’t have in 1974. I know we’ve lost a lot of the Hawaiian birds. It’s very sad.

  4. It is so sad for the birds and it is not in the US. I am a little guilty because we have the domestic cats who really kill birds and eat them sometimes. There are those which come near the low thickets that allow cats catch them. By the way, i don’t know why i cannot put my link URL now, unlike the old times. The windows for linking do not appear.

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