
The ancient world teemed with birds - autokill
https://aeon.co/essays/the-ancient-world-teemed-with-birds-now-we-think-with-them
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CalRobert
This was a nice read, and I thought it would be more of a statement on our
current planetary catastrophe. If you were worried it was another depressing
(if accurate) "everything is dying" article, it's not.

Although, it is sad we don't notice the decline of birds, or anything else.

The book "Whittled Away" has a fantastic description of how ridiculous it is
people where I live think the fisheries are abundant. They're a wasteland
compared to what once was, but since humans have short lives and shorter
memories we don't know what we're missing.

Same goes for light pollution (how many stars is a lot? I still can't quite
make out the milky way in a field an hour from the city), or noise pollution
(how many birds were driven from the city by the infernal noise of cars?) or
just... sight pollution, I guess (how few leaves do you see in a day?)

[https://books.google.ie/books?id=XQiWDwAAQBAJ](https://books.google.ie/books?id=XQiWDwAAQBAJ)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline)

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darkmighty
Birds have been in significant and will probably continue to decline due to
human activity.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_extinction](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, such as effect on bees, possible
human effects, biodiversity loss, etc. Hopefully it can be replaced by
techniques like crop diversification and maybe robotic/biological pest
control.

~~~
est31
Cats, as cute as they are, are a major contributor as well.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/cat-
bird...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/cat-birds-
australia/595048/)

> 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](https://www.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x)

~~~
rob74
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...

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A_I
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/](https://cacophony.org.nz/))

~~~
chiefalchemist
I added this up the thread, but here again so you don't miss it.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/the-
end...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/the-end-of-cats-
an-interview-with-the-new-zealand-economist-calling-to-eliminate-all-
kitties/272474/)

~~~
Kaiyou
What a madman. Cats > birds.

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ImaCake
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 is already a pale comparison compared to 200 or
10,000 years ago, but the numbers are still impressive. I am also aware of how
little attention my fellow citizens pay to the variety of bird life around
them. But it is still surprising to me that people can talk about cities
having few birds and little diversity.

~~~
prawn
I've been in places in the USA and Europe that just feel devoid of birds or
often insects. Lift a log in Australia and there are dozens of living things
crawling around. In parts of the US, more often than not, there's nothing.

I have a pretty routine suburban backyard in South Australia and there are
loads of birds, as with your experience - lorikeets, wattlebirds, etc.

~~~
dmix
Using Australia as the baseline measure for wildlife/insect levels and you're
going to find the vast majority of places wouldn't keep up..

~~~
prawn
That reply got me thinking - thanks.

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kamaal
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. They've stopped coming.

Unmitigated disaster.

~~~
peanutz454
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 practice is to let the body be eaten
away by animals, and without vultures the bodies were just rotting very badly.

~~~
jbotz
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.

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ramzeus
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.

~~~
goatinaboat
Mao had a policy of bird extermination
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign)

"birds are public animals of capitalism"

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goda90
Concerning passenger pigeons[0], which went 100% extinct in 1910 due to
hunting: "in 1866, one flock in southern Ontario was described as being 1.5 km
(0.93 mi) wide and 500 km (310 mi) long, took 14 hours to pass, and held in
excess of 3.5 billion birds."

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon)

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codesushi42
Bird populations are almost literally the canaries in the coal mine. And they
are dropping rapidly.

The future does not look so good for us.

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tmb
If 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.

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throwaway-1436
This was very good. Thanks for sharing.

