People and Place

The Western meadowlark - Oregon’s state bird - is disappearing fast, reported The Oregonian last month, in a story that saw local variants all around the country.

For the Miami Herald (Florida), it was the American kestrel, black skimmer and rusty blackbird; for the Stamford Times (Connecticut), the brown thrasher, blue winged warbler and yellow breasted chat. Populations of common birds are crashing - some by as much as 80% since 1967.

The data comes from 40 years of passionate citizen science coordinated by the National Audubon Society. “All 20 birds on the national Common Birds in Decline list lost at least half their populations in just four decades,” Audubon reports.

One odd piece about the Audubon website is the “what you can do” page. Protect local habitat, promote sound agricultural policy, support sustainable forests, protect wetlands, fight global warming, combat invasive species: All crucially important issues, without a doubt. But one of the biggest threats to backyard birds doesn’t make the list - the family cat.

A 1997 paper by biologist John Coleman and University of Wisconsin professors Stanley Temple and Scott Craven estimates that Wisconsin’s free-ranging domestic cats kill 39 million birds each year. “Keep only as many pet cats as you can feed and care for,” they urge. “If at all possible, for the sake of your cat and local wildlife, keep your cat indoors.”

The most thoughtful writing I came across in connection with this story was a piece by New York Times editor Verlyn Klinkenborg.

The Audubon Society portrait of common bird species in decline is really a report on who humans are. Let me offer a proposition about Homo sapiens. We are the only species on earth capable of an ethical awareness of other species and, thus, the only species capable of happily ignoring that awareness. …

The trouble with humans is that even the smallest changes in our behavior require an epiphany. And yet compared to the fixity of other species, the narrowness of their habitats, the strictness of their diets, the precision of the niches they occupy, we are flexibility itself.

We look around us, expecting the rest of the world’s occupants to adapt to the changes that we have caused, when, in fact, we have the right to expect adaptation only from ourselves.

(Thanks to Alan Weisman for mentioning the Wisconsin bird kill studies when he was speaking in Portland the other day.)