“A bird
seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life,
large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and
his heart with song.”
--John Burroughs, Naturalist, essayist
It’s been quiet at my backyard bird feeder these past few
springs and summers.
The boisterous and noisy crowd of bright red cardinals and squawking
blue jays and nimble yellow finches and sharp beaked woodpeckers: they just
don’t visit as often, or as frequently, as in past years. Once I could not keep
the feeder filled fast enough to keep up with demand. Now, year after year, the
feeder stays full, longer. The backyard is hushed, some days with little or no
bird song. It’s eerie, this silence.
The birds have fled.
Now I know this absence is not just in my imagination. The
birds are in fact dying off and in larger numbers than ever before in modern
natural history. Those are the findings of a report released last week in the
journal and magazine “Science”. “We were astounded by this net loss across all birds on our
continent, the loss of billions of birds,” said Cornell University Lab of
Ornithology conservation scientist Ken Rosenberg. He headed up an international
team of scientists that analyzed population trends for 529 bird species. The
results: since 1970, the number of wild birds in North America has collapsed,
the total population declining by some 30 percent, or 2.9 billion of our winged
friends. Almost one in three birds gone. This mass species wide die-off is
unprecedented.
Individual species have gone extinct. In the 19th
century the passenger pigeon was the most abundant bird in North America,
possibly the whole world. Its numbers
were so huge that newspapers reported it could take a day or more for a flock
to pass by a given spot, millions of birds blanketing the sky, blotting out the
sun. But the pigeon became so popular for hunting and eating that within just
two generations, the last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati
Zoo in 1914.
The last bird.
And all for human development, human growth, human appetites,
human “progress”. Today’s birds are dying, not because of hunting, but largely because
of the loss of habitat. All those new
houses going up on the next street or block over? High rise apartments?
Oversized McMansions? The stand of trees felled for those developments once
hosted the birds. And the new farmlands dotting the landscape to feed a growing
world? Those meadows and forests were home for the birds, the places where they
once lived and raised their young.
Humanity marches forward.
And the birds flee. And the birds die.
This news of this environmental collapse should not have
shocked me, I suppose. We are living in bad times for God’s Creation. The
current regime in Washington, D.C. gleefully, unashamedly, is rolling back
decades of environmental regulations that protect the earth. We once led the
world in caring for the planet. Now we are encouraged as citizens to use as
much energy as we want, to build as big as we want, to exploit any and all
natural resources, as if Mother Earth can just absorb all of this overuse.
Something’s got to give.
The birds.
Their loss breaks my heart, makes me fear deeply for the
future of this third rock from the sun, and brings to mind a prescient Bible
passage. The writer has an apocalyptic vision of living in a world desolate and
de-created, a land devoid of any life, a land ravaged. He writes, “I looked on the earth, and lo, it
was waste and void....I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the
birds of the air had fled.” (Jeremiah 4)
What will it be that will finally wake us up as a species to
the truth that we are slowly but surely destroying our own home, this precious
gift that God has given us? What will it take for the science deniers and the
moneymakers to finally admit that when profits trump the planet, every species,
including homos sapiens, is in danger of mass extinction? What
will be the tipping point, the place at which there is no turning back, no hope
for the earth?
For me, it’s the birds. The birds that have fled. The birds
that have died.
I so miss hearing them sing.
