Migratory Species, Esp. Birds, Facing Longer Odds, Higher Mortality Rates - Globe & Mail

[hatrack]

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No Way Home is both an ode to the spectacle of animal migration — the passenger pigeons that once blackened the skies over Eastern Canada, the bison that roamed the central plains of North America — and a lament for the millions of animals still on the move. If you pick the right night in the spring or fall, Dr. Wilcove says, and a place away from the noise of urban life, you can hear the soft chirps and whistles of migrating songbirds overhead. He has been watching and listening to birds since he was a child. An avid birder by the age of 6, he remembers the adults on Audubon Society outings in his native Buffalo complaining that migrations were not what they used to be. As a young scientist, he collected evidence to prove that the old-timers were right, receiving his doctorate at Princeton in 1985 for his work on the disappearance of songbirds in the Eastern United States.

Now, he says in an interview, evidence suggests that migratory-bird populations are plummeting around the world. There is no comprehensive monitoring program, but local studies show just how precipitous the decline has been — even in the U.S. capital. Since 1940, two species of migratory songbirds have stopped nesting altogether in Washington's Rock Creek Park and the populations of two more have dropped by 90 per cent. At the same time, numbers for non-migratory species — such as the Caroline chickadee and the tufted titmouse — have remained steady, or even gone up.

In time, Dr. Wilcove came to realize that birds were not the only migrants in danger of going the way of the passenger pigeon. Illegal logging threatens the hillside colonies in central Mexico where the monarch butterfly spends the winter. Overfishing, dam building, farming and livestock grazing have reduced the once-mighty runs of Pacific and Atlantic salmon to a trickle. All seven species of sea turtle are endangered and North American right whales are on the edge of extinction.

Part of the problem is that, while all species need a habitat, those that migrate depend on more than one. Birds, for example, have breeding grounds, wintering grounds and crucial stopover sites when travelling between the two. It's a chain, and if you destroy one of the links, the species is likely to suffer. For example, the red knot — a bulky-looking sandpiper the size of a robin — relies on a big feed of horseshoe crab eggs in Delaware Bay every spring en route to the Arctic from Tierra del Fuego. But the feast is not as lavish as it used to be. In the 1990s, commercial crab fishing increased dramatically in the bay, and the number of knots has dropped by 70 per cent.

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080328.wmigration29/BNStory/Science/home

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. there goes the "canary in the coal mine"

not much use to us since there is no getting out of this coal mine.

[NNadir]

2. Just wait 'till we're done running them through our new wind powered blenders.

They'll be Whooping Crane soup dropping from the skies in Texas.