And No Birds Sing

David Morton

2 years ago

from The Atlantic Monthly, September 19, 2019
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
-- John Keats, "La Belle Dame sans Merci"

Above the morning chorus of finches, towhees, and red-wing blackbirds, one bird was making an emphatic statement, screeching out the same pattern over and over again.

It was bread day last Friday morning, and I was preparing the last loaves for Mildrith, the wood-fired oven.

I had tuned out the birdsong. When I first stepped outside that morning in the dim light, it was the usual bird symphony. But I was running late. I was consumed with the busyness of the bake. Flour the baker’s peel. Score the loaf, then slide it into the hot oven. Carrying mounds of hot loaves into the kitchen.

Danger afoot?

But this noisy bird kept shrieking. Something was amiss! As if it was telling the other birds there was danger afoot. A predator, such as an owl? A feral cat? Had something terrible happened? What was it trying to say?

I kept shovelling bread into the oven, but the screeching was hard to ignore. “What the hell’s going on with that bird?” I said. Goosebumps ran up my back.

I tried to identify the bird with a phone app, but by the time I got it working, its brash sounds abruptly ended. There was a brief moment of silence, then gradually, the birdsong resumed. And when I think of it, that moment of silence was eerie.

Over the course of the day, I thought a lot about birds. Was it my imagination that they don’t seem as numerous as they did in my childhood?

A murmuration of starlings

I used to see dozens of sparrows lined up along the telephone lines where I grew up in West Vancouver. There were murmurations of starlings that perched under the Granville Street Bridge, fouling the entrance to Granville Market. 1

Every evening in Vancouver, the fly-by of crows making their way back to Burnaby and their perches is an iconic daily event. But even they seem to have reduced in number.

When Jennifer and I first moved to Pender, a pair of quail were nesting in a thicket of gorse near the rocks on our property. One of them must have died. Next summer, we listened to the tragic call of a male calling out desperately for his mate. (At least that’s the story we told ourselves.)

Three billion fewer birds

Birds are still very much with us, but the sense that their numbers are much lower is strong.

A 2019 study by Cornell University and the American Bird Conservancy confirms this. North American bird population has dropped 30 percent since 1970—nearly three billion birds!

A staggering number, considering that it has happened without many people noticing.

Another study by the National Audubon Society suggests that the most common birds have been hardest hit. The common wisdom was that rare and threatened species would vanish. More common species — those that seem adapted to living among humans — would thrive.

According to the Audubon study, 90 percent of those missing came from 12 bird families. These include sparrows, warblers, blackbirds, finches, and swallows. Even starlings have suffered.

“Right under our noses”

In a 2019 article in the Atlantic Monthly, “The Quiet Disappearance of Birds in North American” 2. A scientist explained why the plummeting bird numbers have been difficult to quantify:

“Abundance obscures decline,” said Kenneth Rosenberg of Cornell University.

“The fact that 24 million eastern meadowlarks still survive hides the fact that 74 million have gone,” he said. “If you have a lot of birds coming to your feeder and they’re reduced by 30 percent, you might not see that. This loss of abundance can be happening right under our noses.”

There is less evidence on the causes, but Rosenberg said it’s widely accepted “that habitat loss and degradation are the largest forces behind the decline of birds.”

Shades of Silent Spring

In a chapter of her landmark work, Silent Spring 3 Rachel Carson talks of this invisible decline notice in some areas of the U.S.:

“Over increasingly large areas of the States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song. This sudden silencing of the song of birds, this obliteration of the colour and beauty and interest they lend to our world have come about swiftly, insidiously, and unnoticed by those whose communities are as yet unaffected.”

Silent Spring was written in the 1960s; the culprit is chemicals, such as DDT, used to battle the ravages of insects. Birds were collateral damage in agriculture’s efforts to eliminate insects that ravaged crops.

Carson’s book led to the banning of DDT and other hazardous chemicals and to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Chemicals and cats

According to the Atlantic article, one of the largest causes is domestic cats, which kill an estimated 2.4 billion birds annually. Window collisions, lights from industrial towers, and wind turbines are other bird-killers.

It is difficult to tie one factor to the decline of any bird species, but cumulatively, they are all important.

With the skies emptying, there are now 3 billion fewer beaks to snap up insects and 3 billion fewer pairs of wings to move nutrients, pollen, and seeds through the world—all the valuable things that birds do.

But after last Friday’s squawking bird experience, I felt a chilling sense that this decline was happening right under our noses.

This leads to the loss of our connection with birds, whose existence we all too easily take for granted.

Until they’re gone.

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