None flew over the cuckoo's nest: A world without birds

[n2doc]

Could we be facing a future without birds? Our reliance on pesticides has cut a swathe through their numbers. We must act now, argues Kate Ravilious


Scanning the sky with his binoculars, he searches carefully for any sign of movement: the steady beat of a blackbird's wings, the fluttering of a flock of starlings. It has been a week now since he saw the starlings: just four of them flitting from tree to tree, feasting on the autumn berries.

Birds are a real rarity these days. In his boyhood, he recalls, he would watch the acrobatics of entire flocks as they ducked and dived after insects. But now the skies are silent, barring the hum of the odd airplane. Turning back to his fruit and vegetable patch, he continues the laborious task of pollinating the raspberry plants by hand, gently brushing pollen onto the slender stigmas inside the flowers. In the past, bees, wasps, butterflies and flies would have done this job for him; nowadays such insects are likewise a rarity. Farmers instead resort to robot bees to pollinate their crops: tiny motors, encased in fuzzy fabric, which hover from flower to flower.

Will this bleak outlook be a reality for future generations? It is nearly 50 years since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, the book that warned of environmental damage the pesticide DDT was causing. Today, DDT use is banned except in exceptional circumstances, yet we still don't seem to have taken on board Carson's fundamental message.

According to Henk Tennekes, a researcher at the Experimental Toxicology Services in Zutphen, the Netherlands, the threat of DDT has been superseded by a relatively new class of insecticide, known as the neonicotinoids. In his book The Systemic Insecticides: A Disaster in the Making, published this month, Tennekes draws all the evidence together, to make the case that neonicotinoids are causing a catastrophe in the insect world, which is having a knock-on effect for many of our birds.

more

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/none-flew-over-the-cuckoos-nest-a-world-without-birds-2134031.html

[Taverner]

1. We killed the dinosaurs

Depressing

[DainBramaged]

2. I had NO hummingbirds this summer for the first time in 5 years feeding them

and the suet feeders are out and look new even though it's been a couple of weeks. Not even sparrows, nothing.

We used to have bees wasps hornets butterflies, carpenter bees, bumble bees, now nothing.


And the birds have gone too. And a couple of years ago I brought this exact subject up here, but it won't be remembered. And it like so many other really really important subjects here will be forgotten again.


And I blame Bayer more than anyone.

[CurtEastPoint]

3. My front yard bird pop. is lower; also not many butterflies this year.

Yep. Our fault totally.

[n2doc]

4. kick n/t