Sherry Chandler

Birds in decline

Here awhile back, I was sitting in my dentist’s office looking for something to read besides out-of-date issues of Good Housekeeping when I came upon a copy of an Audubon magazine. Pretty pictures, thought I, and picked it up.

That’s when I discovered Audobon’s list of Birds in Decline. Turns out our little population of bobwhite quail, the ones I photographed in the yard at Thanksgiving, are not just local color. They have the status of refugees, their population in the U.S. down 82% in the last 40 years. Our own little covey has been here for years and is perhaps the best justification I know for refusing to clean up our fencerows.

We have not been so lucky with meadowlarks, population down 72%. When we first moved to the farm, 25 years ago, we had meadowlarks in abundance. Now we rarely hear one singing.

Even grackles, who used to be a real nuisance roosting in our trees at dusk, are conspicuously absent here nowadays. Their population is down 61%.

The whippoorwills that used to sing on my mother’s doorstep are gone now.

There are too many of us and too many of us think we have to take up a lot of space, that somehow because we can appreciate a view, we deserve to have a hummer of a house. Yesterday we drove from our house to my mother’s house, across three counties, over back country roads and found ourselves depressed at the amount of farmland being sacrificed to housing developments.

On a more cheerful note, thanks to Donna Rhae Marder, I can share with you a link to this eaglecam provided by Audobon Florida. We have had some success bringing species back. I watched for a while yesterday but saw only the chicks. I think I’ll go back now and see whether the grownups have come home.

Possibly related posts:

Weaponizing space

Pie in potentio

Good to be first in something??

“A Conflict between Two Nations of Mourners”

House Writers at Fauntleroy’s Tonight

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.