Where Have All The Birds Gone? Bad News for The Earth.

“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 19^th 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.