This is sad to watch in real time our planet dying.
The one bird I noticed doing very well this year is black crows. I keep a bag of nuts and throw some out my car window when ever I see a crow. This year it seems as if there are many more around eating from me. But they are a very resilient bird and can use tools and scavenge for food in places other birds can not.
Bird populations declining fast across North America
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Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can we better communicate the urgency with people who do not find it an issue?
Outspend dozens of large deep-pocketed industries in lobbying and misinformation.
I'm not sure we can match those many $Billions year after year. How about some kind of campaign finance reform? (a longshot, I know in the current political climate, but something that needs to be considered)
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#33> 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"…
It’s an estimate based on fairly thorough research, which includes attaching collar cameras to outdoor cats. The carnage they wreak is impressive.
Cats belong indoors, period.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#34Until 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…
> the pandemic and my society's inability to deal with it To put the doom and gloom in context, we had a novel virus go from virtually zero to pandemic in the course of a few months. Within weeks we had working treatments. Within a year, effective vaccines. Less than two years from first publication, and over 4 billion people have been inoculated. All within the systems of abstractions you decry. We're messing up a l…
Well, there's a lot to quibble about in this rosy portrayal of the COVID clusterfuck, particularly anti-rationality's rearing of anti-Science conspiracy theories and "hesitancy"--but I won't.
> When we focus on something, we get it done
Yeah, great. Can we focus on not ruining this planet for the stock market? Climate change, deforestation and plastic pollution are seriously damaging the one planet in the known universe that can sustain human life.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#35Windmills 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.
The ranked list of human-associated stuff that kills birds goes something like windows >> cats >> pollution >> cars >> windmills.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#36Doesn't seem very surprising, less bugs = less birds.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#37Maybe this is related to declines in insect populations? I mean, if birds eat insects and there aren't as many insects, you'd expect there to be less birds as well.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#38Until 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…
> the pandemic and my society's inability to deal with it To put the doom and gloom in context, we had a novel virus go from virtually zero to pandemic in the course of a few months. Within weeks we had working treatments. Within a year, effective vaccines. Less than two years from first publication, and over 4 billion people have been inoculated. All within the systems of abstractions you decry. We're messing up a l…
> When we focus on something, we get it done
That's true.
What's also true is that some things simply can't be done. If a species goes extinct, it's over (Jurassic Park fantasies nonwithstanding). It's not like they will respawn if we fix the ecosystem, the damage is permanent.
If we get too far into climate change, it won't get undone in time, no matter what crazy geoengineering efforts we undertake.
In between there's a window where we can act. That is closing.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#39I 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…
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Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#40This quote is eerily similar to net result of one of the Four Pests Campaigns during the Great Leap Forward, where sparrows were targeted for extinction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign “Researchers also found that common birds from just 12 families, such as blackbirds, sparrows and finches, account for over 90 percent—or over 2.5 billion birds—of total population decline. Experts believe that hab…
> it seems big Ag is on a similar path, but in a wildly different context.
Big Ag is indeed on a worse path, as they are literally depleting soils and biodiversity, engineering a monoculture propped up by fertilizers synthesized from fossil fuels. It's a completely unsustainable system that is sucking the Earth dry and carpeting it over with astro turf.