Our Development, Their Decline
Who doesn't love to hear birdsong? To view birds in flight. To share this earth with those graceful and wonderful creatures in all their various manifestations, in their multifarious plumage, their geographies and vocalizing. They add so much to our existence. Yet what we continue to do in degrading our environment threatens their very existence on our shared planet.A new census just revealed by the National Audubon Society, of common birdlife in North America gives us shocking results of the state of species most prevalent in our experience and geography. It tells us that of the most common twenty species of birds over the past 40 years, there has been an average 54% decline. Some, in fact, have declined to the point of outright endangerment.
These are formerly robust populations of birds such as chickadees, terns, grackles, evening grosbeaks, American bittern, field-, grasshopper- and lark-sparrows, loggerhead shrikes, northern pintails, whippoorwill, horned larks, eastern meadowlarks, rufous hummingbirds, ruffed grouse, greater scaups, snow buntings and northern bobwhites.
Simply put, their right to life on this planet has been endangered by habitat loss, invasions of alien plants and animals (much caused by human commerce) and ecological changes of a wider nature caused by global warming. Urban sprawl has been implicated in habitat loss, as well as agricultural expansion and "plantation-style" forestry.
Birds once considered to be common in their ubiquitous presence, are becoming rare to sight. The common terns' population declined by 70%, while a quail, the bobwhite, ordinarily found throughout the eastern United States and Southern Ontario has recorded a precipitous decline of 82%. Domestic cat populations have had an inordinately deleterious effect on songbirds, and their presence is allied with a larger spread of human populations.
The report gives us a ray of hope. What is now seen as critical to the survival of declining bird populations is the preservation of breeding and feeding grounds in Canada's vast boreal forest, a huge expanse of land comprised of the geography between the U.S. border and the Arctic. Yet even there, problems arise as a result of logging, mining and roadbuilding encroachments which have the effect of fragmenting swaths of the boreal environment.
We're not doing such an upscale job of our environmental stewardship for the other animals on our planet. Nothing to be proud of at all.
Labels: Environment, Nature
posted by Pieface @ Monday, June 18, 2007
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