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The ancient world teemed with birds

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Re: The ancient world teemed with birds

#21

Post by rob74 »

est31 wrote: post #15
darkmighty wrote: post #4

Birds 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. https://www.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x

While that paper singles out cats, any introduced mammal species (rats, foxes, dogs etc.) on an island with ground-nesting and/or flightless birds is a huge problem...

Re: The ancient world teemed with birds

#22

Post by gaoshan »

est31 wrote: post #15
darkmighty wrote: post #4

Birds 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. https://www.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x

This. People in suburban and urban areas should be banned from having outdoor cats, period.

Re: The ancient world teemed with birds

#23

Post by coldtea »

gaoshan wrote: post #22
est31 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://www.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x

This. People in suburban and urban areas should be banned from having outdoor cats, period.

Yes, let's make the life of a pet miserable so we can have urban/suburban birds...

As if the problem is the loss of birds in Manhattan or Queens, and not the loss of birds in millions of acres of rural USA (where cats are not really the problem), for example...

Re: The ancient world teemed with birds

#24

Post by wavefunction »

coldtea wrote: post #23
gaoshan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. People in suburban and urban areas should be banned from having outdoor cats, period.

Yes, let's make the life of a pet miserable so we can have urban/suburban birds... As if the problem is the loss of birds in Manhattan or Queens, and not the loss of birds in millions of acres of rural USA (where cats are not really the problem), for example...

I guess if those are our options then better for all if your cat is inside safe from cars and predators and yay we get birds!

Re: The ancient world teemed with birds

#25

Post by lawlessone »

coldtea wrote: post #23
gaoshan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. People in suburban and urban areas should be banned from having outdoor cats, period.

Yes, let's make the life of a pet miserable so we can have urban/suburban birds... As if the problem is the loss of birds in Manhattan or Queens, and not the loss of birds in millions of acres of rural USA (where cats are not really the problem), for example...

>Yes, let's make the life of a pet miserable so we can have urban/suburban birds...

Responsible people don't let their dogs roam the streets as they can be a threat to strangers, children etc.

why should we treat cat's any differently especially when cats kill far more.

Re: The ancient world teemed with birds

#26

Post by mytailorisrich »

ramzeus wrote: post #11

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.

There are not many birds in any large cities apart from pigeons, which are usually considered a nuisance.

Hongkong has the advantage that it is actually very small and dense with nature (in hills and parks) never far away, which I'm guessing helps a lot in sustaining a more abundant and diverse bird population.

Re: The ancient world teemed with birds

#27

Post by jbotz »

peanutz454 wrote: post #7
kamaal wrote: post #6

Sparrows 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…

What nearly wiped out the vultures wasn't antibiotics... there may be other factors, but the main one was a specific anti-inflammatory drug (diclofenac) which was used liberally in treating any sign of illness in livestock and which turned out to be highly toxic to vultures. It is now banned in India. The thing about livestock medicine today is that diagnosis is generally too expensive for individual cases... if an animal looks sick you basically give an anti-inflammatory and an antibiotic and hope for the best, the former so that it'll feel well enough to eat so it won't get too weak, and the later to hopefully cure the illness. So both anti-inflammatory and antibiotics get used very liberally, to tragic consequences.

Re: The ancient world teemed with birds

#28

Post by A_I »

rob74 wrote: post #21
est31 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://www.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x

While that paper singles out cats, any introduced mammal species (rats, foxes, dogs etc.) on an island with ground-nesting and/or flightless birds is a huge problem...

Yes, that's a massive issue in New Zealand. We have a programme called Predator Free 2050 aiming to address it. There are some very interesting organisations working on solutions, such as the Cacophony Project (https://cacophony.org.nz/)

Re: The ancient world teemed with birds

#29

Post by Angostura »

coldtea wrote: post #23
gaoshan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. People in suburban and urban areas should be banned from having outdoor cats, period.

Yes, let's make the life of a pet miserable so we can have urban/suburban birds... As if the problem is the loss of birds in Manhattan or Queens, and not the loss of birds in millions of acres of rural USA (where cats are not really the problem), for example...

We shouldn't be making like for pets more miserable. We should be explaining to people the damage that cats to to the local ecology and dissuading them from having them. A fun talk I had with my kids.

Re: The ancient world teemed with birds

#30

Post by pessimist »

kamaal wrote: post #6

Sparrows 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.…

Hebbal lake still exists, and does see migrant birds like painted storks and pelicans every winter. You can see for yourself, and BngBirds visits Hebbal Lake on the first Sunday of every month to see birds. The migrant birds that do visit India in winter come from colder parts of Asia and Europe, not Australia btw.

Yes many lakes are destroyed in Bangalore and there are no sparrows. Its doubtful that mobile towers have anything to do with it though.

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