North America Has Lost 3 Billion Birds in 50 Years (washingtonpost.com) 96
Slowly, steadily and almost imperceptibly, North America's bird population is dwindling. From a report: The sparrows and finches that visit backyard feeders number fewer each year. The flutelike song of the western meadowlark -- the official bird of six U.S. states -- is growing more rare. The continent has lost nearly 3 billion birds representing hundreds of species over the past five decades, in an enormous loss that signals an "overlooked biodiversity crisis," according to a study from top ornithologists and government agencies. This is not an extinction crisis -- yet. It is a more insidious decline in abundance as humans dramatically alter the landscape: There are 29 percent fewer birds in the United States and Canada today than in 1970, the study concludes.
Grassland species have been hardest hit, probably because of agricultural intensification that has engulfed habitats and spread pesticides that kill the insects many birds eat. But the victims include warblers, thrushes, swallows and other familiar birds. "That's really what was so staggering about this," said lead author Ken Rosenberg, a senior scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and American Bird Conservancy. "The generalist, adaptable, so-called common species were not compensating for the losses, and in fact they were experiencing losses themselves. This major loss was pervasive across all the bird groups."
Grassland species have been hardest hit, probably because of agricultural intensification that has engulfed habitats and spread pesticides that kill the insects many birds eat. But the victims include warblers, thrushes, swallows and other familiar birds. "That's really what was so staggering about this," said lead author Ken Rosenberg, a senior scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and American Bird Conservancy. "The generalist, adaptable, so-called common species were not compensating for the losses, and in fact they were experiencing losses themselves. This major loss was pervasive across all the bird groups."
Cats are NOT house pets. (Score:3)
You know they're the cause.
Cats are an invasive species that does not mesh well in environments they aren't native to. Sure we've got mountain lions and bobcats in the U.S. but they're not the same niche as the reproduce rapidly and kill for fun house cat pestilence.
Re:Cats are NOT house pets. (Score:5, Insightful)
They are certainly a factor, but they aren't the single dominant factor. The loss of wetlands and migratory habitat due to encroaching cities (along with their attendant urban wildlife) is probably more important.
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Re: Cats are NOT house pets. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope, it's mostly cats:
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
Cats alone have caused the extinction of many native bird species here. Cats will kill birds just to kill them, they don't have any interest in eating it most of the time.
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Maybe yes, maybe [yale.edu] no [nationalgeographic.com].
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Re: Cats are NOT house pets. (Score:2)
3.7 billion per year, as in driving the population to a net decline, and 3 billion is the net decline. Most bird species will have more than one clutch per year.
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I wish someone would invent something that makes cats less effective hunters. You can put a bell on their collar but it's not that effective.
When cats get older they lose interest in hunting. Mine is about 5 and already couldn't really be bothered this summer. I wonder if there is something that can be done medically. I'm hesitant to perform medical procedures on my cat but then again I already had his balls cut off and occasionally give him mind expanding drugs (catnip) so maybe it's okay.
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I wish someone would invent something that makes cats less effective hunters. You can put a bell on their collar but it's not that effective.
Keeping them from roaming on their own? That also stops them from shitting in other people's gardens. Win-win.
Sad that Mr Wiskers isn't as happy being kept in the house? Maybe we shouldn't keep as pets animals that are not happy being kept as pets.
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Nope, it's mostly cats:
Nope, it's windows.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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Bird collisions with buildings kill up to the same magnitude of birds as do cats in the US per year.
Re:Cats are NOT house pets. (Score:5, Funny)
They have the ability to make humans into zombies. Once the human is zombified, said zombie will spend all of their time watching and talking about the cat. They'll post videos for other zombies to watch. None of these zombies can get enough of a cat. Everything that the cat does, the zombie will adore.
The zombie will make sure that the cat has a better life than it did yesterday, and anything that the cat breaks, or any type of travesty caused by the cat, the zombie will quickly mentally convert into "cuteness". At least this is my observation. I stay away from anything that constantly displays it's butthole.
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The zombie will make sure that the cat has a better life than it did yesterday, and anything that the cat breaks, or any type of travesty caused by the cat, the zombie will quickly mentally convert into "cuteness".
True story - when we were kids, my sister went off to sixth grade camp for a week. The day she got back from camp, her cat started peeing in her shoes - and this happened daily, for weeks.
AND my sister blamed herself for it!
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Once she got married she morphed into a dog person - so no cats.
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They have the ability to make humans into zombies.
It is caused by the Toxoplasmosis [wikipedia.org] parasite, a protist spread through cat feces. It infects about 11% of Americans.
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Dont' worry we are fighting back in Australia. Cat people do not click on this link https://www.smh.com.au/nationa... [smh.com.au] , if you hate cats you will like the link.
You definitely do now want small birds that eat insects dying out. Of course I have ones that eat fruit, a family of Rosellas even dug a hole in my carport fascia and made a home, living there for over a decade. The lorikeets just eat my fruit, take a bite, squeeze out the juice and spit out the pulp, technicolour rodents. The noisy miners https://e [wikipedia.org]
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You make Australia sound like the planet in the movie Avatar, but scarier.
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It is scarier. It's like Avatar, but with AUSTRALIANS!
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"Zombie" implies mindlessness, and I'll have to know I actually spend a lot of time thinking about ways to please my cat.
the rest of the story (Score:2)
''Everything that the cat does, the zombie will adore.''
Until one day, when the zombies are at their weakest point, that cats take over. It's their total motivation. They completely understand everything we say, everything we do. When we're not watching, they're planning the catmageddon. That's what we should be worrying about, the little will take bastards revenge.
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Like, at Facebook, Microsoft, Google, all of them.... it's just cats walking on keyboards throughout the entire structure of the company.
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Re: Cats are NOT house pets. (Score:4, Interesting)
Here in Phoenix, that would be the European Starling, which is killing off the Purple Martin, and driving Gila Woodpeckers out of their nests, which is bad because Gila Woodpeckers create most of the nests that native cavity nesting birds use (though the native birds typically don't disturb the nest's existing occupant.) There's also this gray dove with red eyes that most people think it's a pigeon, can't remember the name of it, but it isn't causing other birds to decline so much as it just shits everywhere.
Not much beyond those two. Many birders set traps to capture and later kill starlings, sometimes getting twitter shamed by a social justice warrior.
Re: Cats are NOT house pets. (Score:3)
House sparrows, starlings, and collared doves are common invaders here.
At least the doves are legal to shoot and big enough to eat.
And my cat doesn't care for feathers, so sticks to mice. She does get an occasional junco, but any bird that can't see a black cat sitting in the snow in daylight needs to die.
Last winter the American Kestrel found the feeder, which I suppose makes it a second order feeder. I feed the little birds, and they feed the kestrel. The kestrel put a much bigger dent in the local junco
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Agriculture and habitat loss are thought to be the primary drivers, with other factors such as light pollution (which disorients birds), buildings (which they crash into) and roaming cats (which kill them) amounting to “death by a thousand cuts,” Rosenberg said.
Perhaps one could add intensified forestry as a cause, but I guess that falls under habitat loss.
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You know they're the cause.
Cats are an invasive species that does not mesh well in environments they aren't native to. Sure we've got mountain lions and bobcats in the U.S. but they're not the same niche as the reproduce rapidly and kill for fun house cat pestilence.
Give me a break, it's not the cats, it's people who let their cats roam outside. Blaming cats is just human denial. Clearly the problem is people. People are selfish, greedy and irresponsible. Oh, and did I mention that most of us are living in denial.
We, especially the affluent, should be ashamed of ourselves and our societies. We're a complete disgrace.
Re: Cats are NOT house pets. (Score:2)
Do you drive a Dodge by any chance?
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Cats are probably unique in the natural world in that they predate on an enormous scale, yet they are not dependent upon prey to survive. We feed them. There is no question that they have an immense ecological impact.
But if cats were the sole issue, you'd see a difference between species. Birds like robins that are ground feeders and common in suburban lawns would be hardest hit. Birds like swallows that build their nests in hard to reach places and take insects on the fly would be largely unaffected.
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Don't feral cats, with no one to feed them, out number tame cats?
Hard to find numbers but estimates are 50-70 million feral cats in America and about 90 million pet cats of which a good percentage aren't allowed to roam. Then there is the in between like barn cats
Re: Cats are NOT house pets. (Score:2)
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If you oppose the will of Neko-sama you will be purged.
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Cats are bulldozing bird habitats?
Those bastards.
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You know they're the cause.
Cats are an invasive species that does not mesh well in environments they aren't native to. Sure we've got mountain lions and bobcats in the U.S. but they're not the same niche as the reproduce rapidly and kill for fun house cat pestilence.
Cats don't kill eagles, or ducks, or other species that have declined dramactically. I am in the UK, and numbers of linnets and yellowhammers and dropped enormously in the last 40 years and very few cats, even 40 years ago, would have seen one as they live in the countryside and only occasionally enter towns, where cats tend to live, and in winter when cats tend to spend more time indoors. Even for species that do sometimes frequent gardens like bullfinches or goldfinches the issue is more development. In
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About 3 billion in the last 50 years
Far more than that.
Americans will eat a record 93 pounds of chicken per person in 2018, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
https://www.nationalchickencou... [nationalch...ouncil.org]
Other sources suggest that works out to about 8 or 9 billion chickens per year in the US, and 65 billion annually worldwide.
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You are off by several factors of 10 given the time frame.
The US produced about 8.5 billion broilers (not for egg production, generally) in 2014.
99.8 billion eggs that year (that's amazing).
https://www.usda.gov/sites/def... [usda.gov]
As a child we would culll 30-40 chickens per year and get at least a dozen eggs every couple of days during primary egg season. I have fond memories of raising chicks in the basement under a small heat lamp. Watching a chick hatch was awesome, and a few months later, tasty. Seeing one'
Another crisis! (Score:3)
Who's to say there wasn't just a bird overpopulation crisis 50 years ago?
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Who's to say there wasn't just a bird overpopulation crisis 50 years ago?
Donald? Is that you?
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Clearly it must be those wind turbines. Killing birds and giving everyone cancer with their noises!
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Nothing a Sharpie can't fix.
It's those damn windmills, giving the birds cancer (Score:2)
Gotta tear 'em down and put up clean coal
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Citation needed. Sound pressure drops fast as you increase distance, and your own link says that a 50 m turbine generating 102 dB (not 110+) at the source maxes out at 60 dB when standing right at the base of it. A neighbouring turbine 200m away would be maybe 47 dB - well under the accepted limits for e.g. road traffic noise, which is usually around 55 dB.
From your prior link:
O'Neal et al (2011) [iop.org] compared indoor and outdoor LFN and infrasound at two wind farms (30 turbines × 1.5 MW and 15 turbines × 2.3 MW). They concluded that the measured levels at both sites complied with several different national guidelines for LFN and infrasound [40-44 dB] at 305 m distance or more from the wind turbines.
Even the worst-case observations (from just a few metres away from the turbine base) only got up to around 80 dB, a pretty long way
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That suggests that wind farms shouldn't be jammed up against residential areas though. Of course, they generally aren't since they work best in open fields.
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More concerning is information in the introduction:
Prolonged exposure to LFN with an SPL of 58–61dB is accompanied by stress overload, sleep disturbances, vibroacoustic disease,[2] and disorders of the vestibular system, manifested as vertigo, nausea, and nystagmus.[5]
Of course, this also suggests banning of "boom cars" thudding through neighborhoods.
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Well, just get yourself a high SPL soundblock cream
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Without the bird-catching windmills, he couldn't have his beloved KFC.
Too many people (Score:1)
The only life form on the planet of which there is no shortage is human.
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That's not true. We are only about 0.01% of the planet's biomass.
I wish... (Score:5, Insightful)
Grassland species have been hardest hit, probably because of agricultural intensification that has engulfed habitats and spread pesticides that kill the insects many birds eat.
I really wish some of them would develop a taste for Asian (brown marmorated) stink bugs. They have been spreading west for the past decades and annoying AF, not to mention a growing crop pest.
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I'm telling ya... these critters have no sense of neighborly conduct. We had a bunch of sticky snow some years ago that took down swaths of trees and power lines. The squirrels did absolutely nothing about it. Little slackers.
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Some birds tough out the bad taste. Spiders will eat them. Parasitoid wasps target them for the Aliens egg implant thing.
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Some birds tough out the bad taste. Spiders will eat them. Parasitoid wasps target them for the Aliens egg implant thing.
That might explain all the spiders I've been seeing outside lately. There is a species of orb weaver with webs all over my yard (and deck, and porch) this year. I don't recall seeing so many in past years.
Obligatory (Score:1)
It's their own fault for being delicious.
lost & found (Score:2)
Don't worry, they'll all be found, right in the last place you look!
There's plenty of birds! (Score:2)
There's about 9 billion chickens in the US alone!
Oh, maybe that's part of the problem too.
They all went to Canada (Score:1)
They all went to Canada because they heard Trump was coming.
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And now they have a prime minister who isn't sure just how many times he went to parties in "brown face." In 2001 no less! What the heck is up with North America?
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And now they have a prime minister who isn't sure just how many times he went to parties in "brown face." In 2001 no less! What the heck is up with North America?
Better a brown face than a brown nose, which Trump has permanently with layers of Putin's encrusted shit on it.
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Between those millions of dollars accepted to give "speeches", the sweetheard deals that has helped russian oligarchies and now you have that report of him telling the russian president he would have "more flexibility" after the next election.
you would think somone would call for a special investigation to investigate all that evidence of collusion.
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Stung huh, Igor?
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They all went to Canada because they heard Trump was coming.
Yah, Russian trollmod, fuck off and die.
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Wait, what? You're whining about mods?
Warning! The above account has been sold, don't believe the digits!
flying (Score:4, Insightful)
they probably flew away.
No more rotisserie pigeon? (Score:2)
I guess we'll have to switch to grilled rats on a stick.
In My City (Score:4, Interesting)
My suburb use to have swallows, purple martins, and bats (I know that they aren't birds).
Over a decade ago the first instance of West Nile was found in my city so they decided to drop larvicide/insecticide down all storm drains three times a year. Since then there are no more swallows, purple martins, or bats.
A couple of years ago I was biking along a trail on the greenbelt and saw that a government project had doubled the size of a pond in order to help the swallows and purple martins. So the government on one hand is paying to get rid of insects which gets rid of the birds and it's also paying to help the birds.
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if your city is like mine any standing water or pond gets a floating insecticide chucked in
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Now if there was a 'Deer Joe' that could get rid of these deer that eat everything in the yard, well I might be interested IF it doesn't effect other wildlife.
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Now if there was a 'Deer Joe' that could get rid of these deer that eat everything in the yard, well I might be interested...
Want to keep deer out of your garden? According to my gardening advisor: Put in two concentric fences a few feet apart.
With one fence the deer will sidle up to it and jump over. They can do a 12 foot standing broad jump almost as easily as they could walk through an open gate. (Easier, as they might worry about a gateway.)
But with two fences to hop over in two hops, they worry ab
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Just put a strong, black wire about a foot over the top of the fence. Then there's a good chance they will fall and break their fucking neck when they jump over, and you can eat the fuckers. We put deer netting at the tops of our fences so we could grow vines on them to make the fences taller, but stuff didn't grow up everywhere. Killed two of those fuckers with broken necks, but one of them bloated before we found it and had to be discarded. I just threw it in the wheelbarrow and took it to someplace where
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Some want to bring back DDT to control mosquitos. This is an example of why it may be a bad idea. DDT has a long half life of about 10 years. One sought after quality of pesticides is a short half life of a few weeks. This prevents bioaccumulation and helps keep the pesticide under control. Its not that DDT was very toxic to humans, the problem was the very long half life would mean a lack of precision in controlling the effects of it.
Buncha dumasses replying to this (Score:3)
50 years ago my house was surrounded by construction building new houses and apartments. I'd outgrown boy scouts so who knows what happened in Fallbrook.
40 years ago I could drive 10 miles inland and see open space. Now, it's a 50 mile drive.
30 years ago I could drive to Las Vegas and after 30 minutes it was open country. Now, yeah.
20 years ago I drove to Fallbrook to see the in-laws up I-15. It was city all the way.
10 years ago they bulldozed my elementary school and built 10-15 2 story McMansions where it was.
Somehow, I'm thinking cats aren't the problem.
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Shhhh the armchair warriors are having a battle. Just grab the popcorn and enjoy the show.
Found them, over here (Score:2)
I found all those lost birds. They are over there ------>
Agriculture (Score:3)
One word: agriculture. More specifically: huge, sterile fields of monoculture, soaked in pesticides. Nothing lives but the desired crop. How much of America's most fertile land has been sterilized?
Simply prohibiting the preventative use of pesticides might be enough. Insects could return, huge monoculture would be less viable.
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Simple, pay every farmer a salary equal to his investment in land and equipment and his labor and management skills. Then you can dictate how your food is grown. My farming neighbor has a collage degree and ten million dollars worth of land and equipment. $500,000 a year would be a fair salary. He would jump at that. No more danger of losing his investment to the vagrancies of weather and markets. No more arguing with brokers and begging for contracts, No more researching the best way to grow his crop and m
Lots of causes (Score:2)
Cats, agriculture, and habitat loss all contribute, and in my city, I suspect the fact that the mosquito truck that sprays permethrin fog. I suspect that the permethrin spraying is killing the birds' food source.
Not surprising (Score:2)
Car Wash profits plunge (Score:1)
How truly Social this is. (Score:1)
How does this compare to normal change? (Score:2)
Before people inhabited North America by the millions, how did the bird population fluctuate? Is this trend different or more severe than other rises and falls in population in history?