The ancient world teemed with birds

This was a nice read, and I thought it would be more of a statement on our current planetary catastrophe. If you were worried it was another depressing (if accurate) &quot;everything is dying&quot; article, it&#x27;s not.<p>Although, it is sad we don&#x27;t notice the decline of birds, or anything else.<p>The book &quot;Whittled Away&quot; has a fantastic description of how ridiculous it is people where I live think the fisheries are abundant. They&#x27;re a wasteland compared to what once was, but since humans have short lives and shorter memories we don&#x27;t know what we&#x27;re missing.<p>Same goes for light pollution (how many stars is a lot? I still can&#x27;t quite make out the milky way in a field an hour from the city), or noise pollution (how many birds were driven from the city by the infernal noise of cars?) or just... sight pollution, I guess (how few leaves do you see in a day?)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.ie&#x2F;books?id=XQiWDwAAQBAJ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.ie&#x2F;books?id=XQiWDwAAQBAJ</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shifting_baseline" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shifting_baseline</a>

Birds have been in significant and will probably continue to decline due to human activity.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bird_extinction" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bird_extinction</a><p>The main drivers I think are plain habitat loss, pesticide use (associated decline in insect population), and large scale change in available food and climate.<p>I think the easiest to address would be pesticide and herbicide use -- widely known to have other negative side effects, such as effect on bees, possible human effects, biodiversity loss, etc. Hopefully it can be replaced by techniques like crop diversification and maybe robotic&#x2F;biological pest control.

Are birds actually so scarce elsewhere in the world? My experience in a small city on the east coast of Australia is that birds are everywhere and in great variety. On a recent morning, I counted 10 different species of bird walking 500m to the shops and back. And it is hard to ignore the noise from the large flocks of sulfur crested cockatoos and rainbow lorakeets that frequent my town.<p>I understand that what I see is already a pale comparison compared to 200 or 10,000 years ago, but the numbers are still impressive. I am also aware of how little attention my fellow citizens pay to the variety of bird life around them. But it is still surprising to me that people can talk about cities having few birds and little diversity.

Sparrows were every where in Bangalore when I was growing up. After the city grew crazy, the pollution grew and so did the Mobile phone towers.<p>You won&#x27;t be able to find a single sparrow today. Not one. There is a also a noticeable decline in other bird population and diversity. Mostly because Bangalore&#x27;s lakes are gone. There was a lake called Hebbal Lake where migratory birds would visit from Australia every year. They&#x27;ve stopped coming.<p>Unmitigated disaster.

I was living in Chengdu for a year and I remember that I was surprised by the almost total lack of birds. In Hong Kong, where I am at the moment, there are more birds, but seems less than what we have back home in Northern Europe.

Concerning passenger pigeons[0], which went 100% extinct in 1910 due to hunting: &quot;in 1866, one flock in southern Ontario was described as being 1.5 km (0.93 mi) wide and 500 km (310 mi) long, took 14 hours to pass, and held in excess of 3.5 billion birds.&quot;<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Passenger_pigeon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Passenger_pigeon</a>

Bird populations are almost literally the canaries in the coal mine. And they are dropping rapidly.<p>The future does not look so good for us.

If there exists better evidence of our tendency to read the comments before the article, I’ve yet to see it.<p>Might need a headline change back to its original “Birds are ‘winged words’“, though I probably wouldn’t have read it then honestly.

This was very good. Thanks for sharing.