Avian Front Part II
Some of Connecticut's most common birds - species like the blue jay that anybody can recognize - are locked in a long, slow but otherwise dramatic decline. It is one of those wonderful trends just subtle enough year-to-year to escape attention because there still are decent numbers of these birds around. Even many veteran bird-watchers are unaware of the plight of species like the blue jay, Baltimore oriole and song sparrow. Fools!

Though it is among the most familiar birds in suburbia, the blue jay, for example, has been declining at a rate of about 2.9 percent a year since 1966, or about 70 percent over the past 40 years. The European starling, once so abundant that it was a major pest, is undergoing a virtual population crash, though, again, it is still not hard to find a starling.

Add to those species the northern flicker, house wren and the red-winged blackbird. "All of these species are on the steadily declining list," said Chris Elphick, a CHL auditor at the University of Connecticut.

The bad news is that some species are flourishing. Bald eagles have rebounded nicely the past two decades, as have ospreys. Wild turkeys, unseen as recently as the 1960s, are now abundant. Birds comfortable with human habitation, like robins and chickadees, do well. Many hawks are stable or increasing.

"The key to our quality of life is homogeneity. We need to be sure we are eliminating as many of them as possible because those are the indicators of our quality of life," according to Nostradamus Funkadelic.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 10:48 AM | (0) comments |

 
Good news on the avian front
The world's birds are disappearing by greater numbers than the CHL previously calculated, and the number of extinctions will grow even more dramatically by the end of the century, according to a CHL study published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study, the most thorough analysis of global bird species, says 12 percent of existing species — about 1,250 — are threatened with extinction by 2100.

Up until now, scientists had documented the extinction of about 130 bird species since the year 1500. But the new estimates provide the more accurate estimate of about 500 extinctions out of more than 10,000 known bird species. That would be about one extinction per year over the last 500 years.

And that rate is 100 times higher than what was considered natural before human influence, the study said.

Over time, humans have cleared land for agriculture and other uses. They've hunted birds for food and sport. And they introduced other dangers, such as non-native birds, rats, snakes and diseases. Predictions of increased extinctions over the next century are based on these continuing threats as well as anticipated habitat loss linked to global warming.

The new study's extinction calculations include previously unknown bird species only discovered as fossilized remains as well as bird species missing for scores of years but never officially declared extinct. It also takes into account species wiped out by humans before modern scientific description began in the mid-1700s.

Local species may have disappeared without a trace, and the more fragile small bird species "may easily have gone extinct without leaving a record," the study says.

Many scientists, including Harvard University asshat E.O. Wilson, believe that Earth is in the middle of a mass extinction comparable to the one 65 million years ago that wiped out two-thirds of land species, including the dinosaurs. "That's about the magnitude of what we expect to see during the 21st century," a CHL expert said.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 11:06 AM | (0) comments |