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A third of North America’s birds have vanished

nautil.us

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Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#341

Post by arcticbull »

b112 wrote: post #339
idleproc wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

If they only killed mice that would be a fun fact, but they also kill 20 billion small mammals a year, lol. The point was though that cats are killing all the birds, that they help a few people with a mouse problem is tangential at best to the topic at hand. I can accept that mice are a problem and cats are killing all the birds and small mammals at the same time. It’s kind of like saying DDT is fine actually because it helps a few farmers improve their crop yields. That it does, but it nukes the eagles from orbit too, and we have to look at this systemically.

Once we accepted DDT as a problem we found alternative solutions. But there’s also localized solutions. A few spayed/neutered farm cats aren’t the end of the world.

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#342

Post by Timon3 »

brutusborn wrote: post #336
Timon3 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

Are they making any judgement on this? I can't see it. I just see a proposed model for the change of position of environments. They're not saying "and this will lead all animal species to die out" or "we must act now", they just say "this is how the environments change positions". So why are you looking for more?

> 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.

What use are you looking for? They proposed a useful model that other papers can build upon. That is how science works. Why must they look at this problem from every angle you want for the paper to be useful?

> 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.

No, it's more like a paper that describes a model to determine the length of a piece of string by showing it for a specific example. You find it useless because you say "hey, you guys didn't look at my string!".

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#343

Post by zerodensity »

bmitc wrote: post #306
bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, no one cares about the planet, and rightfully so. The planet will be fine. It's humankind that's at stake.

> The planet will be fine. It's humankind that's at stake. This is oft repeated, but it fails short of anything meaningful. The planet, as in a rock floating around in space, will be fine, yes. But what about the untold amount of species of plants and animals that are suffering and will continue to suffer in our wake?

They will adapt or die and something will replace them. Diversity will go down for a while and then back up again. It's almost impossible to sterilize Earth and as long as something lives on it will eventually flourish again. It will never be the same but something else will flourish.

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#345

Post by mintaka5 »

23B1 wrote: post #35

One 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 know your intentions are good here, but honestly the less human interference the better. we didn't design their habitats, and i highly doubt we'd get it better than mother nature did. we humans are an self-excluding and blameless bunch. we constantly lust for providing solutions for ecology, but no matter how much "solutioning" we throw at it, the problem cannot, and will never be fixed by human involvement. the best thing we can do is live our lives simpler, and start to think how we can lessen our impact on the environment. i am willing to bet all my money that not a single person on this planet, is willing to do this 100%. yes, it is hard to go back to our roots, but living as an exclusive being, that considers itself deserving of reaping the benefits of industrialization and high-tech, at the same time not realizing the enormous impact our daily lives have on things, is not acceptable behaviour.

we are like bacteria in a petri dish of agar. eventually we will consume all and destroy our own thriving habitat. it's inevitable. go to any developed area of the US! watch the highways in that area everyday! tell me that we don't have an impact after seeing how many cars pass you that day (i bet you couldn't even count them all)! the massive amounts of energy consumed, toxic chemicals that enter the water tables, runoffs, and larger bodies of water, the emissions from each vehicle, and the amount of natural resources consumed to make each car. this is just one example of our gigantic impact we have, yet we treat it as if it was nothing.

1. don't build bird friendly yards! you draw in predators to a centralized location, and can lead to a large localized food-source dependency that is detrimental avian health, and what happens when that location is no longer maintained? stop building!!!

2. see #1 and don't draw natural beings into an artificial environment, but do the reverse. these are beings of nature, not downtown.

3. these things already exist and is not helping (i birdwatch while hiking. good for me, useless to ailing birds).

4. see #1 and #2

this is solutioning. sorry to point that out. my point being, lessen your impact don't increase it

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#346

Post by 23B1 »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #208
23B1 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people have been doing this since the 60s and it hasn't had much of an effect, which is my point. If the political solution is ineffective, pivot.

This is a myopic, self defeating view of recent American history.

Do you believe that the American people, by focusing on change via government, have been sufficiently effective in preventing a forthcoming (or probably currently underway) environmental collapse?

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#347

Post by [deleted] »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #144
d0mine wrote: post #80

Earlier 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.

What if politicians do not have the political support to stop the one corporation because 9.99 million people like to consume the water intensive crops grown in the desert?

[deleted]

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#348

Post by throwaway290 »

bmitc wrote: post #114
23B1 wrote: post #35

One 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…

Individuals cannot solve this. I leave trees up, dead or alive. I plant native plants. I remove invasive species. I only keep invasive bushes if they house birds. I don't spray for insects except around the base of my house, I don't kill off chipmunks, voles, squirrels, rabbits, etc. How can this compete with the dozens of neighbors in a half-mile radius that have removed in excess of hundreds of trees, big ones like…

No, individuals is the only way this works. Individuals started it and they can stop it.

But ideally in addition to doing things yourself and being an example you should also try to convince and encourage others to do it by raising awareness, supporting legislation, not using suppliers and not working for companies that violate those rules etc.

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#349

Post by pvaldes »

Reminds me the paragraph in Jurassic park about the normal distribution of some dinosaur sizes, that was suspicious because it was a perfectly normal curve explaining not normally distributed events

What this man found is not logical in deeper aspects that the journalist shows. Either the paper has more substance that can be pushed in this resume and we are discussing a cartoon of the real work, or something is very wrong here. Statistically wrong. Ecosystems don't work like that.

From my couch position and before blindly accepting the bold proposition than a third of the places with nature in North America had vanished; I would test first a few hypothesis that:

A) Either a good chunk of the data collectors has vanished

(Those people are retired or dead now, or changed jobs in the last anti-science years or the project suffered from too much volunteering dependence), or...

B) The data has been poisoned for several reasons, including

--1. Several Covid years in a row with everybody closed at home. (Who were out watching birds in 2020, 2021 or 2022?. I hope this is addressed in the article. If not, this factor needs to be addressed and fixed)

--2. The data has been greased for publication

--3. The data has been pre-beautified for following some agenda

--4. use volunteers, receive a polished Turdus... volunteers stop caring after a while when the novelty is worn out

or...

C) The computer has mangled a part of the data in the process

Re: A third of North America’s birds have vanished

#350

Post by defrost »

1over137 wrote: post #295
defrost wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other twist on water 'waste' is where does it go afterwards for recovery? Cities often have systems, we're in rural Australia and are water conscious- as far as dish and clothes washing go that's grey water discharge which goes onto a near house mulch pit for household rottables and garden waste, the water that reaches the pit bottom hits a crushed stone bed with slotted pipe that drains water to above the vegeta…

Does that filter all the microplastics from washed clothes?

Microplastics shed from synthetic fibre clothes probably stay in the mulch, crushed rock and sand and don't reach the roots of the vegetables and trees and don't feature in the runoff (from sub surface water travel) at the base of the slope.

Mulch on garden with microplastics is likely ok as plants extract the minerals | elements they need.

I'd have to sample and check.

A great deal of our clothing, bedding, towels, etc is natural fibre in any case.

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