The Silence of the Songbirds

[flashl]

Somewhere in North America, a meadow is silent, a forest without song. Here a pair of mockingbirds has disappeared; there habitat suitable for robins has been bladed. A meadow hospitable to vireos has been flooded; a desert river that acts as a beacon for meadowlarks, cedar waxwings, willow flycatchers, and hummingbirds has gone dry.

All over North America, populations of songbirds are declining. They have been doing so for the last couple of decades, to an extent that is alarming because, to make a poor play on words, songbirds are the proverbial canaries in the great coal mine that is the environment.

The causes for the decline are imperfectly understood, but, increasingly, scientists are seeing it as a perfect storm of multiple causes.

Some of those causes are on a global scale. Because of climate change, for instance, there have been more hurricanes in the Atlantic basin, and these have tended to be more intense than hurricanes of past eras. Some scientists theorize that songbird populations in eastern North America are in decline because, as the songbirds migrate over open water, they are felled by violent squalls. Literally millions of migratory birds that cross the Gulf of Mexico are thereby at risk. Coastal breeding grounds, migratory stopovers, and wintering grounds are similarly threatened by rising sea levels. A recent National Wildlife Federation report ventures that rising temperatures and habitat loss mean that species such as the blue-headed vireo and the purple finch may soon be absent along the eastern seaboard.

Reuters

Reading this makes my spirit cry out loud.