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Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

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Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#121

Post by micw »

pif wrote: post #53
hug wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not particularly useful as a scientific method, and obviously not attempting to counter your broader point asking for more detailed analysis, there’s incredibly compelling evidence: Go for a 100 mile drive at night, and count the bugs on your windshield. Ask your parents about it. Ask every 70 year old you know. Bugs are in decline. There’s absolutely no lack of evidence. We know it’s real. We just haven’t cata…

Could this effect be caused, or enhanced, by the aerodynamics of the modern cars?

You can see the effect on the very same car very clearly. We have been traveling with a camping car from germany to romania. In germany we did not need to clean the windscreen at all. In romania we did it almost every day.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#122

Post by myshpa »

We could immediately reduce the negative impacts of farming by 75%, just by switching to plant based diets.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

The industrial farming practices / propaganda making us reliant on overuse of poisons in our food chains makes us sick, is poisoing/destroying nature, destroying soil microbiomes, biodiversity, waters and air.

We have to find ways to farm without poisons, and teach farmers to use those methods - it won't be easy and it won't change with one law and it will take maybe decades, but the methods exists, it's possible and should be done.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#123

Post by kuschku »

HeckFeck wrote: post #71
kuschku wrote: post #22

This is why all those "don't have outdoor cats, they kill all the birds" stories annoy me. At best they're misguided, at worse they're intentionally misleading to hide the fact that pesticides and farming practices are actually at fault. (In Europe, on other continents the story may be different) Similar to the CO2 footprint, it's another way to individualize social issues and distract from large corporate sources of…

We can't discount the effect of the increase in cat ownership and roaming: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/14/cats-kil... "A study published in April estimated that UK cats kill 160 to 270 million animals annually, a quarter of them birds. The real figure is likely to be even higher, as the study used the 2011 pet cat population of 9.5 million; it is now closer to 12 million, boosted by the pandemic…

Quoting your own linked article:

The UK’s largest bird charity, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), is not particularly concerned about the impact of cats on the British mainland. Instead it focuses on what it says is driving UK bird declines: global warming, intensive agriculture and expanding towns and cities leading to habitat and food loss. “While we know that cats do kill large numbers of birds in UK gardens, there’s no evidence this is affecting decline in the same way that these other issues are,” said a spokesperson.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#124

Post by himinlomax »

CalRobert wrote: post #36
himinlomax wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pasture farming on marginal land is part of the solution. Industrial meat farming is part of the problem. They're two different things.

"Pasture farming on marginal land is part of the solution" Can you elaborate? I don't see how this is superior to leaving it fallow? I have a few acres fallow and am right next to a quaint organic farm and I do see quite a few more bees in my tall grass and wildflowers than I do in their grazed land...

Dairy is important for human nutrition because it has an excellent level of production of valuable proteins per acres and that can be done on marginal land that can't really be used for anything else anyway. You could get those proteins from soy, but that would have to be done on farm land, with fertilizer, irrigation and so on. How are those bees going to fare there? And that's assuming grazing is entirely hostile to bees, which it's arguably not that much considering how it doesn't require pesticides. You know, the thing that kills insects.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#125

Post by pif »

micw wrote: post #121
pif wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could this effect be caused, or enhanced, by the aerodynamics of the modern cars?

You can see the effect on the very same car very clearly. We have been traveling with a camping car from germany to romania. In germany we did not need to clean the windscreen at all. In romania we did it almost every day.

Your anecdote is very interesting, thank you!

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#126

Post by eggsmediumrare »

boredhedgehog wrote: post #89

Why should I care about animals that have no use for me? Stories about wolves, bears, and now birds and insects, seem to presume that I feel some automatic emotional connection to them, or that there's some self-evident moral argument why they need to kept alive. I won't deny that they have some intrinsic value, but if there are competing interests and hidden costs, that value really needs to be put into perspective.

You live in nature. You might not be able to draw a straight line from bears to your quality of life, but everything is connected and if the rest of the web collapses, you will go with it.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#127

Post by psiops »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #80
jillesvangurp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some counter intuitive economical things going on as well. A lot of bad farming practices are heavily subsidized. For example a lot of Spanish land is not exploited. But to claim the subsidies, farmers still work the land, which leads to a lot of top soil erosion for no good reason whatsoever. In the same way a lot of dairy production is misaligned with actual demand. And you get weird surpluses of things l…

> Instead of boosting their economies by importing stuff from those countries we kill their exports with subsidized local produce and then spend a lot on development aid. I think a key takeaway from the pandemic is that you don’t want to be reliant of import from strategic ressources and food is priority number one. European subsidies are mostly going to France which is a huge wheat producer. Farming is an area where…

It'll be a lot easier to feed everyone if we grow food for humans rather than cattle.

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#128

Post by mschuster91 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #98
CalRobert wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's not just Brazil. A lot of meat in Europe is grown on burned or cut-down forest, it just happens to be the case it was done centuries ago.

Yes, the entire talk of destruction of rain forests comes across as a little hypocritical when it's coming from countries with like 6% forest cover. I was up in scottish highlands recently and many hills are bold like someone just shaved them. Looks weired. The only solution O see is to habe a global forestly fund, so developing countries can get paid but dont have to destroy forests.

> The only solution O see is to habe a global forestly fund, so developing countries can get paid but dont have to destroy forests.

That just incentivizes scammers and fraud, just like many of the "CO2 offset certificates" based on paying people not destroying forests they wouldn't have destroyed anyway [1].

[1] https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2023-01/co2-certificates-frau...

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#129

Post by mschuster91 »

elzbardico wrote: post #23
mschuster91 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem: both approaches drastically reduce agricultural productivity. We're overproducing anyway, with massive environmental followup issues. Switching to less meat would free up a lot of grain production and help get nitrate runoff from all the poo used as fertilizer under control, but that's politically untenable and the markets would just adapt to import more Brazilian meat grown on burned-down rainforest f…

Please, stop this fake news of meat growing in burned-down rainforest farms. Most of the cattle in brazil is raised on biomes that were never rainforests to start, no matter what the lie the NYT told you. Free-ranged cattle are also usually raised in regions that are very marginal in arable land. And in fact, bovines filled an ecological niche in the "Pantanal" region that was once occupied by native herbivores, exti…

Many sources, spanning many years, and both private (such as newspapers or NGOs) as well as governmental (e.g. the UN), have found that an overwhelming percentage of razed rainforest in Brazil was used for cattle farming [1][2], with a large part of the remainder going to large-scale soy farms, and a tiny bit for small-scale subsistence farming.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_ra...

[2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/09/14/devastating-burning-seas...

Re: Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

#130

Post by DrBazza »

taneq wrote: post #9

> Common bird time series in Europe have shown a general decline in abundance between 1980 and 2016 (−25.4% ± 2.8) In case anyone else was skimming through to find over what time period this occurred.

When I was a kid growing up in the London suburbs in the 70s and 80s I could remember flocks of all types of birds especially starlings and blackbirds being common place, and then, reading this article, it reminded me that I stopped seeing flocks.

Even now, living outside London, I rarely see flocks of birds, and if I do, nowhere near as large as I remember, and I don't think its observer bias either.

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