"vanished"
Died. They died.
Like in "Pom Poko" the Studio Ghibli film, where they say this out loud: we're not gone, we die.
A third of North America’s birds have vanished
331–340 of 901 posts
Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah when 99% of people don't care about this sort of issue or are unaware of it and keep cutting trees down it doesn't matter if a few people are doing all they can. I go home to my parents' neighborhood in Florida and more and more of the trees are disappearing in a 100-year-old neighborhood. It's not even new houses being built. These are 50-year old houses. There is 1 house in the entire neighborhood (has to be a…
It's common in a 50+ year old neighborhood for trees to be diseased or dead or have a root system that is growing into the foundation of buildings or other infrastructure. It's not that people don't want trees, it's that people don't want trees that are a liability during the next storm (which I'm guessing is especially true in a place like florida).
it doesn't matter why people don't want trees. It's humans sacrificing trees for their needs/wants that matters. It's getting rid of trees and other natural things in general that is the problem. Humans' mere existence causes this.
Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
Change isn't the problem. The velocity of the change is the problem. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08649
I don’t think this paper supports your premise (“climate change is not a problem, but rate of change is”) They are essentially determining the relative temperature rates of change in different environments. They give no indication how fast this velocity is relative to the past, or any predictions as to how it affects anything tangible. For all we know the velocity is less extreme than average (I’m not saying this is…
I don't understand your criticism, you're looking for things that don't need to be there.
The authors of the paper propose a model to measure how much the positions of individual climate environments are changing per year. That seems like a great measure to determine the impact on animal and plant species - they describe that only 8% of environments stay at similar levels for at least 100 years, meaning that all other animals and plants will have to drastically adapt their lives to new environments.
You're looking for comparisons with earlier changes in climate, but the paper is just about proposing a model to determine change in position of environments. Why should such a paper also compare with historical data?
Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished
#334"Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals."[0] [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 Studies show that outdoor cats kill billions of birds annually. Anecdotally, posting anti cat studies on social media leads to real world threats and cat lovi…
It also suggests that up to >20 billion mammals are killed by those cats each year. Quick Google search says that there are fewer than 60 million domestic pet cats in the US, and about the same number of feral cats. So on average domestic cats kill up to >150 mammals a day? And since not all of them are allowed outdoors, those supposed killer outdoor cats would practically kill an animal every few seconds. Looking at…
> It also suggests that up to >20 billion mammals are killed by those cats each year. Quick Google search says that there are fewer than 60 million domestic pet cats in the US, and about the same number of feral cats. So on average domestic cats kill up to >150 mammals a day?
Sorry, but I'm a bit confused by your maths.
20 billion mammals / 60 million cats = 333.33 animals per cat per year, or around 0.91 animals per day. That seems entirely reasonable. How do you get >150/day?
Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished
#335One thing I dislike the most about these problems – and the information/media/activism around them – is the "solutioning". Yes, we should recycle and reduce carbon emissions and learn to live in a more integrated fashion with earth. But the problem is so diffuse and requires substantive work against powerful forces (government, business, apathy). What I'd like to see more of, when presented with these sorts of proble…
I'm a regular individual. I don't have a yard. I live in a city.
Renters all over have restrictions on what they can do with a yard. You simply cannot rent and "build a bird-friendly yard" in most places. Sometimes, you cannot dig to add a garden, let along replace things. And why would you? It would just give the landlord even more money.
And the landlords aren't going to do it without some pressure, which isn't going to come. Renters don't really have power in most places and we can't even get some of the folks to keep up a safe place.
Do you think a neighborhood can just "build a bird friendly park"? Many neighborhoods don't have parks, at least not in the Midwest. Who is going to donate their house or yard to do this? Are poor neighborhoods just out of luck? Where are folks and small towns going to get the money?
Don't architects and urban planners work with these "powerful forces" in general? How are they going to do anything without the government - especially a city planner?
What do you expect small groups to be able to do without a larger force? How do you expect any of these organizations to actually do anything?
All of your suggestions reek of things like "jaywalking", which came from pro-auto propaganda, and "litterbug campaigns", which were propaganda from companies to shift the blame from them to the consumer.
Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think this paper supports your premise (“climate change is not a problem, but rate of change is”) They are essentially determining the relative temperature rates of change in different environments. They give no indication how fast this velocity is relative to the past, or any predictions as to how it affects anything tangible. For all we know the velocity is less extreme than average (I’m not saying this is…
I don't understand your criticism, you're looking for things that don't need to be there. The authors of the paper propose a model to measure how much the positions of individual climate environments are changing per year. That seems like a great measure to determine the impact on animal and plant species - they describe that only 8% of environments stay at similar levels for at least 100 years, meaning that all othe…
I disagree, you can’t tell how useful their model is for assessing impact on animal and plant species because they do not have any animal or plant data in their model. Maybe animals and plants can move faster than we thought so the current velocity doesn’t dictate local extinctions? Maybe temperature velocity is a bad measure of climate change rate with respect to ecosystems?
My criticism is that the paper takes half of the problem, and uses some ambiguous criteria (eg 100 years) so their model is effectively useless on its own.
It’s like writing a paper that describes how long your piece of string is; unless your measurement method is novel it’s useless for anyone else wanting to measure their own string.
Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
If individuals are responsible for just 1% of the issues then even if we eliminate them "bottom-up" completely, we are still left with 99% of issues that should be fixed at another level. For example, consider what would save more water: 10 million people stopping showering completely or one corporation stopping production of water-intensive crops in a desert.
Actually, I think that localized thinking has benefits that are so much better than the status quo of globalization that that 99% the issues you describe would be vacated. Like let's talk about food, how we get bananas from across the globe. Who the hell needs bananas when you can buy fresh, seasonal fruit from the farmer an hour away? Yeah you might not get to have banana cream pie for Christmas, but you made a new…
People want fresh fruit and vegetables year round though.
Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> viable solutions proposed that can be implemented bottom-up Don't have outdoor cats: https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/ From the cited source: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 > We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality. Our findings sugge…
From the quote you cited, it sounds like we need to manage strays much more so than owned cats. Considering that indoor/outdoor cats are indoors some of the time, we would assume that owned cats are not really a priority here. 30-90 birds/cat/year seems extraordinarily high when considering the behavior of all the cats I know who spend time outside.
One to two birds
per week sounds low to me. Cats kill for fun.
Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it might have something to do with feral and outdoor cats killing 1.4-3.7 billion birds per year in the US alone. [1] Individuals can do something here I wager, between education and taking responsibility by spaying and neutering. It’s pretty wild to me that cats aren’t mentioned at all in this article since they’re absolutely massacring wild birds. They’re the leading cause of both bird and small mammal deat…
I agree that cats kill a lot of birds and something needs to be done about this. However, when you also have articles stating that migratory fish and insect populations have declined by 75% over the last 50 years [1,2] (which clearly isn't caused by outdoor cats) it would seem to me there are larger forces at work. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/27/migrator... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/env…
I agree that cats kill a lot of birds and something needs to be done about this.
Outside of birds, cats kill rodents. I live in rural Quebec, near farms, a massive nature preserve, and a national park larger than small US states.
When I first moved here, I had no cat, and several other neighbours were new to the area. Old houses, not fresh builds, just changeover of owners... they too with no cats.
The first year I was here, I became aware of the problem, and started to lay traps. And I caught 100+ mice, sometimes several per day for months, all inside my house.
Once Spring arrived, I tried to find entrances, and did! I blocked them, but anyone that knows rodents, and owns wood houses, that won't help if you have an out of control, local colony, and once the winter comes, do they ever want in!
I spent 3+ years with traps, sometimes reducing the population a bit, but each winter more than 50 mice.
Then a neightbour got a siamese cat.
I now catch a mouse or two a year.
If you look at mouse breeding and brood numbers, and you live in a area with loads of food in the summer (near farms, nature), you need something like cats. It's not an option, it just isn't.
There's a reason farmers have loads of semi-wild cats in their barns. And both the mice they catch, and the cats that catch them, are invasive.
And with the hantavirus often touted as 50% lethal, you do NOT want the moral responsibility of trap and release, nor do you want mice in your house. At all.
And yes, it is in the local population.
Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished
#340One thing I dislike the most about these problems – and the information/media/activism around them – is the "solutioning". Yes, we should recycle and reduce carbon emissions and learn to live in a more integrated fashion with earth. But the problem is so diffuse and requires substantive work against powerful forces (government, business, apathy). What I'd like to see more of, when presented with these sorts of proble…
Rubbish. Individual action is a joke. One might believe big actors put that idiotic notion in to our collective heads to escape responsibility.
One single supermarket with open fridges and unreasonable AC settings nullifies several families’ worth of energy saving efforts. And that is one trivial example.