One-third of US birds are endangered, says conservation report

[Chuck]

Energy production deriving from wind, ethanol and mountain-top coal mining contributing to steep drops in bird populations

AP – Mar. 20, 2009

It's also the expansion of suburbia, highways, etc. -- Ed.

Nearly one-third of US birds are endangered, threatened or in significant decline, according to a government conservation report.

It says the findings are "a warning signal of the failing health of our ecosystems" and reports that birds in Hawaii, the most bird-rich state, are "in crisis".

The authors say that energy production deriving from wind, ethanol and mountain-top coal mining is contributing to steep drops in bird populations.

The State of the Birds report chronicles a four-decade decline in many of the country's bird populations and provides many reasons for it, from suburban sprawl to the spread of exotic species to global warming.... [Read More]

[SentraSE-R]

I've been a birder for more than 50 years, so this isn't news to me. Is it really news to any of you?

[Chuck]

I see fewer of them too

[SentraSE-R]

I see the tail feathers of one poking out from between the cat's teeth

[Chuck]

Spencer is an indoor cat, but he does enjoy bird watching.

[drimportracing]

Darrell,
I knew bees where missing, not pollinating, pesticides were killing other bugs too so there were fewer birds laying eggs (birds lay according to their safety and sustenance confidence level,) but that is pretty much my entire simplistic knowledge. I know that they (forgot the name of the group) do a bird count every year or two. I didn't realize that 1/3rd were endangered. I still haven't read the article. I'll read it after work. It is a barometer of our entire ecosystem when this great of loss is experienced.

Maybe when we get rid of the real pests nature will rebuild. Humans. Like cockroaches you can't kill them all, but it sure seems like we try to do so, sometimes. I don't condone violence, just making an observation of our damaging behavior and violent interactions. - Dale

[bnther]

It doesn't surprise me that bird population is on a downward trend, not with so many other species in decline.

It does irk me to see such a bias story though. I loved how they tried to make the association that drilling for more oil makes more trash for the sea gulls to eat. Brilliant!

I'm also curious as to how wind was lobbed into the bird killing group. According to the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), bird mortality rate is "less than one bird/turbine/year to as high as 7.5 birds/per turbine/year." or 10k to 40K birds per year. In comparison, automobiles kill 60 to 80 million per year and feral and domestic cats are the worst offenders with 100's of millions of birds per year.

I don't have any problems building wind generators that are more conducive to birds, but if we really want to do something for the birds, then we should start with the worst offenders...cats (and we can't start with my wife's 'kitties' first. )

source: hxxp://science.howstuffworks.com/wind-turbine-kill-birds.htm

[worthywads]

Originally Posted by bnther

It doesn't surprise me that bird population is on a downward trend, not with so many other species in decline.

It does irk me to see such a bias story though. I loved how they tried to make the association that drilling for more oil makes more trash for the sea gulls to eat. Brilliant!

I'm also curious as to how wind was lobbed into the bird killing group. According to the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), bird mortality rate is "less than one bird/turbine/year to as high as 7.5 birds/per turbine/year." or 10k to 40K birds per year. In comparison, automobiles kill 60 to 80 million per year and feral and domestic cats are the worst offenders with 100's of millions of birds per year.

I don't have any problems building wind generators that are more conducive to birds, but if we really want to do something for the birds, then we should start with the worst offenders...cats (and we can't start with my wife's 'kitties' first. )

source: hxxp://science.howstuffworks.com/wind-turbine-kill-birds.htm

My guess is the cats are not killing the same types of birds that are getting killed in wind turbines. Those birds would probably kill cats no problem.

[SentraSE-R]

Habitat loss and destruction is the leading killer of birds. In my town, developers wanted to subdivide property that would have added 60% more population to the town. We fought it on every front, but what saved us was the presence of a Superfund toxic waste site within half a mile of the property. The environmental laws were all jokes.

There was a Golden Eagle nest identified on the property, but the Bald Eagle Protection Act only kept the bulldozers half a mile away from the nest during the nesting season. During the non-nesting season, the developers could put homes within 150' of the nest tree. You can easily guess whether Golden Eagles that need 100 square miles of hunting territory would use a nest with lawnmowers and homes and people within 150' of their nest.

There was a hillside with a candidate for Endangered Species listing living there - the Callipe Silverspot Butterfly - a species found in only two places in the world. This butterfly lives its larval life feeding on the foliage of the California Golden Violet, and its adult life feeding on the nectar of the same plant. Since the developers wanted to build on a hillside where these butterflies were found (during the Environmental Impact Study), they proposed a mitigation. They would remove the violet rhizomes and butterfly pupae from a half mile by half mile area in the middle of winter, and transplant them to another hillside. I testified that this amounted to bulldozing the top six inches of soil from this half mile area into a pile in the Winter, and bulldozing it back onto another hillside in the Spring, with no proof of efficacy, and no studies to show it could possibly work. I noted that unless the developers were going to hire a small army of volunteers to dig up violet rhizomes with trowels, the area would be bulldozed, and destroyed. Besides that, of course, I noted that if God and Nature hadn't managed to create a suitable habitat for those butterflies over the past hundred million years, why was the city council expecting such a harebrained idea to work? That night, the city council approved the EIS.

So that's how we protect wildlife habitat. We have ten to twenty billion birds in the USA. Every year, we lose roughly 100 million to a billion of those birds in building collisions, one to four billion to domestic and feral cats, fifty million to collisions with communications towers, 72 million to pesticides, two million in oil and wastewater pits, 60 million to cars, and the line of survival gets precariously thin.

In Hawaii, there isn't a single Hawaiian endemic species other than the Nene that survives below the 4000' elevation level. Every bird you see there below 4000' elevation is either a seabird, or an introduced alien species, with resistance to avian malaria. The Hawaiian endemics have no resistance to avian malaria, so they survive only on the four islands with mountain climates cold enough to kill the malaria parasite's mosquito hosts, which breed in the pig wallows left by feral pigs, which feed on the introduced ginger and other alien plants that account for 50% of the vegetation in Hawaii.

[basjoos]

If all cars were shaped like mine, the bird death toll from car collisions would be practically zero and their insect food supply would also not suffer by being thinned out from collection and drying on the grills and windshields of cars.