Birds are disappearing

Bobwhite

Avian enthusiasts, environmentalists and nature lovers everywhere read with a heavy heart the reports of the National Audubon Society study on Common Birds in Decline released on June 14. The study showed dramatic declines in populations of 20 common bird species in the U.S.

The Audubon Society summed up the 40-year study: “Since 1967 the average population of the common birds in steepest decline has fallen by 68 percent; some individual species nose-dived as much as 80 percent. All 20 birds on the national Common Birds in Decline list lost at least half their populations in just four decades.”

Field sparrow.

Among the nationally diminishing species are the whippoorwill, down 57 percent; four types of sparrows, including lark and field sparrows, which declined an average of 64 percent; the eastern meadowlark, down by 72 percent; evening grosbeaks, reduced 78 percent; and the biggest loser of all, the northern bobwhite, down 82 percent. The northern bobwhite’s population, now just 5.5 million birds, was 31 million only four decades ago.

Individual states have seen dramatic declines in other bird species. California, for instance, has documented declines of 75 percent to 96 percent for several species, including the northern pintail, horned lark and loggerhead shrike.

Eastern meadowlark.

The Audubon Society avows: “Birds are important indicators of the overall health of our environment. Like the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, they send an urgent warning about threats to our water, air, natural resources, climate and more.”

The Audubon study was based on over 40 years of data collected by the organization’s annual winter bird counts and summer censuses conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey. Thousands of volunteers over many decades meticulously collected data. The Audubon bird counts have taken place for more than 100 years, and the USGS census began in 1967.

Evening grosbeak.

The devastating decline in bird populations is blamed on several factors, including loss of grassland and shrub habitat from “suburban sprawl” and other development; the expansion of corporate agriculture, including the drive to produce more ethanol, a corn-based fuel alternative; and effects of global warming.

In the dominant capitalist system, production and development of every kind is motivated by the drive for ever-increasing profits, the so-called “bottom line.” Every year, each privately owned company has to try to show an increase in its profits, no matter what the cost to the environment, human beings or any living species. Even the potential destruction of life on earth is no barrier to the capitalists’ plans to expand in order to raise their profits.

This class of super-rich individuals is what stands between the great mass of humanity and true social progress.

Only socialism, a social and economic system based not on profit but on planning to meet people’s needs, can truly protect birds and all the myriad forms of life on earth. It takes social ownership of production to plan and implement a sustainable economy, to work out how people can live comfortably but efficiently, how they can travel from place to place without polluting the environment, how life in general can be reorganized so the long-term needs of the people are met, with every precaution taken to safeguard the natural environment and diverse ecological systems and species.

Hamel is a member of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Detroit Audubon Society.