I've started going to Corpus Christi more recently for the spring migration and have been amazed by it. While birding elsewhere I met older folks who used to visit Corpus or Houston every year for the migrations but have stopped going, since to them it's depressing to see the scale of the decline of the migration and witness that loss.
Bird populations declining fast across North America
21–30 of 322 posts
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#22> The U.S North American Bird Conservation Initiative estimates that our pet felines kill some 2.6 billion birds annually in the U.S. alone.
The 100M pet cats in US on average kill 26 birds/yr? Doesn't seem right. When I track the source[1] of research, the estimates include both "own" and "unowned" cats and rely on some assumptions like "a correction factor to account for owned cats not returning all prey to owners", amongst others.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#23Until human society stops serving abstractions (like money) over things that are real, then real things will continually face consequence. These will still over into our lives in a multitude of ways until we no longer have real systems to support these abstractions. Loss of natural life is such a failure. Today we speak of stock markets, governments, businesses. Someday, our main concern will not be these shared drea…
That seems a bit of a dichotomous view on a complex web of interconnected "realities" and "abstractions", and I'm not sure if "real" is a great term for an opposite of an abstraction, which is also real in a lot of ways. Otherwise you are getting _very_ close to the N/S dichotomy in Jungian psychology and the Myers-Briggs type model :D and the growth idea there is transcendence of the dichotomy, bringing strengths of…
The difference between abstraction and reality is all the little details that get excluded from abstractions. Consider, people cooking at home are creating real value that doesn’t get captured in GDP, which means maximizing GDP may is not maximizing the actual economy.
The difference is not so critical when people are starving, but the difference continues to grow until maximizing GDP starts harming the economy.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#24I think this and many of the similar problems plaguing the earth will only be solved with a drastic reduction of people on the planet. Get the population down to 1 or 2 billion of us and a lot of these issues go away. Deforesting, not an issue if the demand for lumber is cut down by 80%. Same for coal, oil, paving, lithium... It all gets solved with just less people. 8 billion people is just too much, even if we all…
2 billion people consuming as much as the average American does right now gets you in a much worse situation than the current one.
The only solution is strong government action to reduce emissions and environmental consequences of consumption. It's not completely un precedented: the hole in the ozone layer was the unavoidable apocalypse in the late 90s and is an almost solved problem right now.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#25I've been counting the flocks of Canadian Geese sizes that stop by our local ponds. Last head count was 8 individuals together. I thought I recall seeing 20 years ago dozens of head counts, maybe 24?
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems a bit of a dichotomous view on a complex web of interconnected "realities" and "abstractions", and I'm not sure if "real" is a great term for an opposite of an abstraction, which is also real in a lot of ways. Otherwise you are getting _very_ close to the N/S dichotomy in Jungian psychology and the Myers-Briggs type model :D and the growth idea there is transcendence of the dichotomy, bringing strengths of…
The difference between abstraction and reality is all the little details that get excluded from abstractions. Consider, people cooking at home are creating real value that doesn’t get captured in GDP, which means maximizing GDP may is not maximizing the actual economy. The difference is not so critical when people are starving, but the difference continues to grow until maximizing GDP starts harming the economy.
There are a lot more differences than that. You are communicating a subjective model of reality, one model of many, many models.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#27A literal canary in a coalmine situation, writ large. What is doubly distressing is that we collectively could be addressing issues such as these if we wanted to.
"if we wanted to."
It's unfortunate, but people are too obsessed with their short term comfort and prosperity to consider making sacrifices for saving the environment, nature and future generations.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#28Because they've been outed: https://birdsarentreal.com
While the joke's entertaining, there's an important related truth: birds are far more real than many things we imagine are real.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#29Windmills
https://abcbirds.org/blog21/wind-turbine-mortality/
edit: yes cats do too, let's try to talk about it all, cat genocide if you want, windmill improvements too.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#30Pigeons seem to be doing well.