{"id":35054,"date":"2018-06-13T06:25:09","date_gmt":"2018-06-13T11:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35054"},"modified":"2018-06-13T06:25:09","modified_gmt":"2018-06-13T11:25:09","slug":"the-plight-of-birds-and-the-hand-of-man-in-the-sixth-great-extinction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35054","title":{"rendered":"The Plight of Birds and the Hand of Man in the Sixth Great Extinction"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Plight of Birds and the Hand of Man in the Sixth Great Extinction<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n
\"\"<\/p>\n

Photo by Mark Gillow | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

As birds become fewer, wildflowers vanish, butterflies disappear, and animals in the wild are threatened, extinction and a grim future haunts.\u00a0 How often did Rumi write about birdsong \u2026 there is a reason.\u00a0 Nature revives the spirit.<\/p>\n

June 5th was\u00a0World Environment Day<\/a>.\u00a0 A UN outreach program hosted by a different country each year, it is designed to draw attention to its environmental challenges and to offer it support.\u00a0 This year the host country is India and the theme is beating plastic pollution.\u00a0 But plastics are not just a blight on the landscape, they are\u00a0in the seas destroying coral<\/a>\u00a0and the species it shelters, painfully\u00a0killing whales<\/a>\u00a0and other creatures \u2026\u00a0including birds<\/a>.\u00a0 Yet, it is far from the only cause of bird distress and\u00a0their sharply declining numbers.\u00a0 One example comes from the Arctic, where receding ice has taken with it the nutritious cod, which favor cold waters, and has\u00a0\u00a0endangered the black guillemot<\/a>\u00a0now forced to feed their chicks on the bony and difficult-to-digest fourhorn sculpin.<\/p>\n

When the EU commissioned a\u00a0State of Nature report<\/a>, they expected bad news but not quite as dire a result.\u00a0 Prepared by the European Environment Agency and sourced from EU-wide data, it found one in three bird species threatened and only a little over half secure.\u00a0 It also drew a bleak picture of European habitats finding over half of those studied to be unfavorable.\u00a0 Habitat loss, pesticides\u00a0particularly neonicotinoids<\/a>, even excessive hunting, notably in southern Europe, are all to blame.<\/p>\n

Earlier, a\u00a0comprehensive study<\/a>\u00a0conducted by University of Exeter (UK) professor Richard Inger and colleagues had analyzed avian biomass across 25 countries over 30 years.\u00a0 Using data from Birdlife International and the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme, they discovered a surprisingly large and troubling decline:\u00a0 from 1980 to 2009 the estimated total avian population had been reduced by 421 million birds.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Plight of Birds and the Hand of Man in the Sixth Great Extinction Photo by Mark Gillow | CC BY 2.0 As birds become fewer, wildflowers vanish, butterflies disappear, and animals in the wild are threatened, extinction and a grim future haunts.\u00a0 How often did Rumi write about birdsong \u2026 there is a reason.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[20493,75,1789,20494],"class_list":["post-35054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-arshad-khan","tag-birds","tag-nature","tag-sixth-great-extinction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35054"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35055,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35054\/revisions\/35055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}