I was living in Chengdu for a year and I remember that I was surprised by the almost total lack of birds. In Hong Kong, where I am at the moment, there are more birds, but seems less than what we have back home in Northern Europe.
The ancient world teemed with birds
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Re: The ancient world teemed with birds
#12Birds have been in significant and will probably continue to decline due to human activity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_extinction The main drivers I think are plain habitat loss, pesticide use (associated decline in insect population), and large scale change in available food and climate. I think the easiest to address would be pesticide and herbicide use -- widely known to have other negative side effects, s…
Biological pest control has always been practiced historically. It's always good to have frogs in the paddy fields. Insect eating birds for the most part tend to be omnivores, hence dangerous for crops as well, unfortunately. I'm not aware of any existing solutions that benefit both birds and farming. I would love to be proven wrong about this statement, but under most cases Farming and Birds are antithetical to each other.
Re: The ancient world teemed with birds
#13Bird populations are almost literally the canaries in the coal mine. And they are dropping rapidly.
The future does not look so good for us.
Re: The ancient world teemed with birds
#14Birds have been in significant and will probably continue to decline due to human activity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_extinction The main drivers I think are plain habitat loss, pesticide use (associated decline in insect population), and large scale change in available food and climate. I think the easiest to address would be pesticide and herbicide use -- widely known to have other negative side effects, s…
Just by using pesticides and herbicides more precisely you can have a major remedial impact. Many farmers would apply either the wrong pesticide against an insect or at a stage that makes it less effective against its target. However, we have a myriad of weather data available, and together with insect life cycle data you can create a model that tells you 1) when to spray 2) the epicenter if applicable and 3) dynamic feedback as the weather changes.
I have a early stage startup that has this as one of its long term goals. But to be honest there are other lower hanging fruit in agriculture that makes more sense to start with—the startup is more of an "idea" bank than a business at this point—and I won't be quitting a job in finance for a risky "smart farm" idea any time soon.
EDIT: By the way, Johannesburg and Pretoria are bird paradises. There are even feral populations of lovebirds (indigenous to Namibia) that fly around outside my office as we speak.
Re: The ancient world teemed with birds
#15Birds have been in significant and will probably continue to decline due to human activity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_extinction The main drivers I think are plain habitat loss, pesticide use (associated decline in insect population), and large scale change in available food and climate. I think the easiest to address would be pesticide and herbicide use -- widely known to have other negative side effects, s…
Cats, as cute as they are, are a major contributor as well.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/cat-bird...
> Feral cats on islands are responsible for at least 14% global bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions and are the principal threat to almost 8% of critically endangered birds, mammals, and reptiles.
Re: The ancient world teemed with birds
#16Birds have been in significant and will probably continue to decline due to human activity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_extinction The main drivers I think are plain habitat loss, pesticide use (associated decline in insect population), and large scale change in available food and climate. I think the easiest to address would be pesticide and herbicide use -- widely known to have other negative side effects, s…
> The main drivers I think are plain habitat loss
Fragmentation is also an issue people don't think enough about. You see percentages of forested ground and think "well that looks pretty good" but when you go check it out it's disparate strands with fields inbetween, or thin rows of trees a few meters wide. This means only "edge" species have a habitat, and even for them their domain is not really a boundary with a flux between different ecosystems anymore, they've got identical open areas on both sides. It also means the bigger species don't have the room to live there anymore.
Re: The ancient world teemed with birds
#17If there exists better evidence of our tendency to read the comments before the article, I’ve yet to see it.
Might need a headline change back to its original “Birds are ‘winged words’“, though I probably wouldn’t have read it then honestly.
Re: The ancient world teemed with birds
#18Are birds actually so scarce elsewhere in the world? My experience in a small city on the east coast of Australia is that birds are everywhere and in great variety. On a recent morning, I counted 10 different species of bird walking 500m to the shops and back. And it is hard to ignore the noise from the large flocks of sulfur crested cockatoos and rainbow lorakeets that frequent my town. I understand that what I see…
On my property in the US, I've seen bald eagles, hawks, owls, at least 3 species of woodpeckers, any number of songbirds, hummingbirds, turkey, pheasant, turkey vultures and a half dozen migratory ducks and geese species.
The first year here, we didn't feed them at all- there's really no shortage of natural foraging for them. We hardly saw any of the smaller birds, and truth be told I didn't think we had many around.
Then we had an unusually brutal winter, and started putting out suet to help. Sure enough, all kinds started showing up. They stuck around through the spring, but we stopped feeding them in part because the suet was attracting unwanted attention from other animals. Since then, they've mostly "disappeared" again, though I know now they're not gone.
It's worth pointing out that I live in an area that is predominantly farmland, rural homes, and some nice forested spots. We don't have a shortage of insects or really any other wildlife, either, in spite of the horrors that pesticides are supposedly wreaking upon them.
Re: The ancient world teemed with birds
#19Sparrows were every where in Bangalore when I was growing up. After the city grew crazy, the pollution grew and so did the Mobile phone towers. You won't be able to find a single sparrow today. Not one. There is a also a noticeable decline in other bird population and diversity. Mostly because Bangalore's lakes are gone. There was a lake called Hebbal Lake where migratory birds would visit from Australia every year.…
Vultures man, those are things that we nearly lead to extinction recently in India. I remember when I was a kid there used to be a road in Delhi with the dead tree and vultures sitting all over it. But by the time I was an adult there were no Vultures in most of India. The heavy use of antibiotics we realised too late was causing the decline. The Parsi people (zorastrians) were impacted badly because their religious…
We had a Parsi tower of silence in Bangalore as well. It was in the outskirts back in the day. The city consumed those areas and they are now in the heart of the city. I wonder where the facility is these days.
Re: The ancient world teemed with birds
#20I was living in Chengdu for a year and I remember that I was surprised by the almost total lack of birds. In Hong Kong, where I am at the moment, there are more birds, but seems less than what we have back home in Northern Europe.
Mao had a policy of bird extermination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
"birds are public animals of capitalism"