EnviroStewardship: For the Birds

My father writes a monthly column on caring for the environment for the newsletter at his church. The following is the November column by John Berge, PhD.

Last month, I discussed the ELCA’s Social Statement, "Caring for Creation: Vision, Hope and Justice," which lists principles of solidarity, sufficiency and sustainability in very general terms. Recent information on the severe decline in the bird population of North America would suggest we are not doing a very good job in caring for the avian portion of creation. The Bible tells us that God notes the death of a single sparrow, and yet there are nearly three billion fewer birds now in North America than there were in 1970.

The tendency has been for us to look at the decline or recovery of individual species rather than the overall picture. As ecologist Hillary Young of the University of California, Santa Barbara was quoted in Science News, “Individual birds play an important role in ecosystems, including pollinating plants, dispersing seeds and controlling pests. Often it’s the common, abundant birds that keep these ecosystems ticking.”

Three major sources of this decline are generally blamed for the die off, all of which we as individuals can make a significant contribution to reducing. There are differences of opinion on the order of these three, so this list is not intended to say which is worse.

Predation by cats is certainly one of the top three — and possibly the top — that we can influence. Our pet cats do not have to be put out every night to “do their thing”; cats will quite easily adapt to a litter box. If every cat owner would make sure their cats are never outside unsupervised, we could greatly reduce this predation.

Another one of the top three is collision with windows. We used to have a few such incidences at our house every year until I put some of those self sticking decals on the windows near the bird feeders. Bird fatalities due to their seeing their reflection or a possible route to the other side dropped to zero. I am sure that most of these fatalities involve high rise buildings and migrating birds, but our experience would say that single family homes, by their sheer number, also contribute.

The third top cause is loss of habitat. We can blame farmers for planting right up to the edge of the field rather than leaving wild strips and trees along those edges, but our yards can be designed for birds or not. The robin is one of the few birds that really appreciate the large expanse of lawns, especially if we don’t kill off the worms with excessive chemicals and pesticides. Plants with seeds and fruits that the birds like, trees and shrubs for protection and nesting can improve their habitat as well as ours.

An interesting study recently showed that small, non-lethal doses of an insecticide used on seeds and nursery plants (a neonicotinoid) caused weight loss and delayed the migration of these birds by several days, enough to put them at a disadvantage in breeding and possibly out of sync with their food supply. The most  given to each bird was only one tenth of that used to coat an individual corn seed.

The effect of climate change on bird populations is still to be determined. The Audubon Society has reported that 389 North American bird species are vulnerable to extinction from climate change. So all our efforts to reduce green house gas emissions are helpful to the birds.

A speaker I heard the other night on wind power admitted that birds and bats are susceptible to collisions with rotating turbine blades. (The tips can be going over 150 miles per hour.) But his company can install a device to temporarily stop the turbines when migrating birds are detected approaching by radar. Good stewardship from an industrial giant.

A Little Bird Told Me

Sometimes you find yourself in a Disney movie. Sometimes it's Hitchcock.

Cooper's Hawk

The Cooper's hawk is a daily visitor at our place these days -- and why not, when there is such a rich buffet in our back yard?

We have a couple of bird feeders and a birdbath by our patio out back, and we've enjoyed the regular visits of goldfinches, house finches, red-wing blackbirds, mourning doves, robins, chickadees, juncoes and sparrows (plus a few less enjoyable visitors such as cowbirds, rabbits and mice). Cardinals and downy woodpeckers occasionally check out the place, and we get excited about the rarer visits of hummingbirds, European goldfinches, indigo bunting and bluebirds.

There are plenty of hawks around, too, so it shouldn't have come as a surprise that our back yard would get the attention of at least one of them.

For a while, he was dropping in daily between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. He zipped in front of my car as I was about to pull into the driveway the other day. He made a beeline into "the bistro" (a sheltered area next to the front door), shot up over the roof and dove down toward the back patio. When I got out of the car, I could see him being hectored by smaller birds as he left northward.

He came by on his usual round while I was mowing the front lawn Saturday afternoon. A dozen or so downy brown and gray feathers by the vegetable garden suggested that a sparrow had come to an untimely end.

Last night, as I ate dinner outside in our bistro, he came toward the house -- a few hours late? Perhaps because I was in the bistro, he decided to go around the south side of the house instead. I ran around the house in time to see a small flock of goldfinches fleeing ahead of him toward the evergreens up the road.

Weeks ago, I came home to find him standing in the middle of the back yard amid a mess of large gray feathers. It didn't seem that he had caught anything, so I thought perhaps he'd been in a fight or a testy mating attempt. Or perhaps he tried to seize one of the little metal bird statuettes welded to the new shepherd's hook, and shook loose several of his own feathers.

Usually, if one of us spots him in the back yard, just looking up is enough to prompt him to take off immediately. But this time, he stood there for several minutes -- long enough for me to get a camera and take four pictures.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Hope you had an enjoyable Father's Day yesterday.

Our back yard was visited by a family of European goldfinches yesterday -- two adults and a juvenile. At least, I think that's what we had, judging from the behavior of the three; the one I take to be a juvenile did not have red on its head like the other two but did have a yellow patch on its wing. 


One adult started eating at our finch sock while the other went to the bird bath and the juvenile sat on top of the shepherd's hook that holds the finch sock. Then a red-winged blackbird swooped through on its way to another feeder, and the two adults flew to the back of the yard. The juvenile stayed in place until I tried to take its photograph, whereupon it flew to where the other two were waiting, and the three flew away together. (Alas, I did not get a photo.)


European goldfinches are not native to the Western Hemisphere; apparently, a Chicago area pet dealer released some into the wild a few years ago. We have usually seen them only in the early part of spring, and up to now, only one or two at a time.