61–70 of 73 posts
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Source on that? Most kids don't make a habit of killing local wildlife. Or are you using "kids" as a proxy for "habitat loss from rising human population"?
I'm including indirect kills over their lifetime, not just direct kills over the childhood (kittens aren't capable of killing that much either), but otherwise, it's a fairly 1:1 comparison, nothing to do with whether the human population is rising or not.
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I'm including indirect kills over their lifetime, not just direct kills over the childhood (kittens aren't capable of killing that much either), but otherwise, it's a fairly 1:1 comparison, nothing to do with whether the human population is rising or not.
What are you calling "indirect kills"?
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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...
Are 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…
I'm back home after one month in Australia and when I was there I noticed a phenomenal amount of birds everywhere, even in Sydney, even in the City. I think that nobody can keep sleeping past 6 AM in rural areas, but Australia is one of those countries when people wake up early. Compared to Australia, Europe is a wasteland: we do have birds but not as many. I guess you can't have both a lot of people and a lot of ani…
Something I’ve always wondered is whether this has to be true, or if we’ve decided as a society that it should be true, and if we decided that we wanted to attract more birds into our world, if we really could.
Pigeon spikes are everywhere in San Francisco. I’ve even seen them positioned on security cameras. Now I get that we have a lot of rats with wings flying around, but that seems like a feast for falcons, if we wanted to employ more falcons as we do around City Hall.
Around the beach I’ll occasionally see hawks, and generally the biggest danger to them comes from the ravens flying around not wanting any hawks. If you go around Golden Gate Park, there’s an enormous variety of bird species flying around and roosting. I’ve seen a turkey vulture roosting on the signs and a goddamned peacock LARPing as a roadrunner in the morning. I am more amazed it has neither been eaten by coyotes nor hit by a car yet. Seriously, I took my first picture of it two years ago and I still see it a few times a month around the same area.
There’s also the parrots of Telegraph Hill, an escaped domestic population that turned wild and has managed to sustain itself. We just built the Transbay Park (“Salesforce Park” since Salesforce owns the naming rights, but I’ll stick with the generic name), the bus terminal below has just entered service, the park has only been open a bit longer than that and already I see numerous small birds up there every time I go up there.
Down by the waterfront I saw an owl flying around right by Aquatic Park. I was pretty lucky to see it at all since it was going for a kill and the wings don’t make a sound.
This is just in one city! I think if we stopped behaving in an actively hostile way towards birds, save some falconry for population control, we might see the diversity of urban bird populations increase. If we actually introduced niches into our infrastructure for them to roost, managed our urban forests a bit better and planted some more trees while we’re at it, we could maybe even see them thrive here.
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I'm back home after one month in Australia and when I was there I noticed a phenomenal amount of birds everywhere, even in Sydney, even in the City. I think that nobody can keep sleeping past 6 AM in rural areas, but Australia is one of those countries when people wake up early. Compared to Australia, Europe is a wasteland: we do have birds but not as many. I guess you can't have both a lot of people and a lot of ani…
> When there are many of us there isn't enough space left for them. Something I’ve always wondered is whether this has to be true, or if we’ve decided as a society that it should be true, and if we decided that we wanted to attract more birds into our world, if we really could. Pigeon spikes are everywhere in San Francisco. I’ve even seen them positioned on security cameras. Now I get that we have a lot of rats with…
Speaking of current attitudes towards wildlife, I find it interesting how we are so keen to promote biodiversity but usually unwilling to consider invasive or introduced species as a way of achieving more stable biodiversity. I think with the ongoing threats to our environment and how this impacts us, we will turn more and more to using invasive species to save our natural and urban environments. I hope we stop thinking of nature as a static thing unable to adapt in ways beyond the limited scope of human imagination.
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> When there are many of us there isn't enough space left for them. Something I’ve always wondered is whether this has to be true, or if we’ve decided as a society that it should be true, and if we decided that we wanted to attract more birds into our world, if we really could. Pigeon spikes are everywhere in San Francisco. I’ve even seen them positioned on security cameras. Now I get that we have a lot of rats with…
>There’s also the parrots of Telegraph Hill, an escaped domestic population that turned wild and has managed to sustain itself. Speaking of current attitudes towards wildlife, I find it interesting how we are so keen to promote biodiversity but usually unwilling to consider invasive or introduced species as a way of achieving more stable biodiversity. I think with the ongoing threats to our environment and how this i…
In short, we simply don’t understand the ecosystems that exist well enough to begin to try to make any positive changes to it. However, I think the Parrots are okay if they stay in the city because San Francisco is an almost entirely built environment.
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Allowing one damaging thing isn't a good enough reason for allowing another damaging thing. In both cases the costs and benefits need to stand on their own merits.
Actually, no, I don't agree with that. It's more of a balancing act than a piecemeal analysis. Being generally frugal leaves you more space to waste a few resources on specific things. Now, some things are over the limit regardless of how frugal you are generally, and pet cats may or may not be one of those.
I understand the argument and it’s reasonable, but in the case if each activity under consideration, they have to be assessed relative to the total harm to the environment, not to directly against each other individually. But there could be a hierarchy of comparison.
Still, as I said this is the inverse case to the one I was replying to, which I still think is completely unreasonable.
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 ha…
More like Hebbal Pool. You call that a lake? It was way bigger when I was a kid. The other side where Lumbini gardens exists now is literally reduced to a recreational pool.
And yes birds from Australia indeed used to visit Hebbal Lake. I guess that very memory is erased and sounds largely alien to people now.
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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.
Kids are far more destructive for the environment than cats, though.
Sorry, what point were you trying to make?
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Well, an urban centre doesn't have much "local ecology" to begin with...
The only birds in my city are pidgeons (that defecate everywhere), sparrows and crows. At least the only ones I actually see.