CONSERVATION
Hot Coffee's In the Shade
Are you drinking only coffee from beans that grew in the shade? All of us who value wild birds and their contribution to the environment should be. Twenty-some years ago much of the cultivation of coffee bushes moved from its traditional site beneath the rainforest canopy into the sun because more beans could be produced. This required mass deforestation. One effect was the loss of food and shelter in the southern hemisphere that neotropical migratory birds depend on during northern winters. The Breeding Bird Survey found a decline in songbirds throughout Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America ranging from 10 to 30%, depending on species, in the nine-year period from 1978 to 1987. Coffee is the world's most valuable legal crop, and Americans consume one-third of it -- more than any other people. We can make a difference simply by asking our local retailers to carry shade grown coffee and being willing to perhaps pay a little more for it.
Law Change Would Help Improve the Clean Air Act
Legislation may yet be reintroduced in Congress that could greatly improve breeding and living conditions for wild birds, as well as people, from coast to coast. However, President Bush recently changed his mind about endorsing it, due to existing and looming power shortages.
The law would close a loophole in the Clean Air Act that appeared when the law was amended in 1977. It allows existing coal-fired power plants to continue to operate without adding pollution control devices. Utilities have been able to keep these outdated plants, some more than 60 years old, operating beyond their normal retirement age. They can produce from 4 to 10 times as much pollution as modern plants.
The Environmental Protection Agency says that, along with generating electricity, these old plants generate way too much:
-- Nitrogen oxide -- forms ground-level ozone when it reacts with sunlight and oxygen. One casualty: the endangered Kirtland's warbler, which nests only in jack pines in northern Michigan that are being negatively impacted by ozone.
- Sulfur dioxide -- a key component of acid rain, which continues to harm forests in the Midwest and beyond. Affected are fish-eating birds and those that feed on water-borne insects.
- Carbon dioxide -- a major contributor to global warming that appears to be changing climates and precipitation. Birds suffer as well. Minnesota could lose 14 species of warblers to global warming.
- Mercury -- easily assimilated by fish, mercury threatens fish-eating birds, such as loons, ospreys, eagles, herons, ducks and kingfishers. Even low levels have deleterious effects on birds and their eggs.
If the Federal government could retire the nearly-25-year-old grandfather clause in the Clean Air Act, overall air and water quality would improve along with the habitat and environment for wild birds.
Passing of the Passerines
Should we be worried about the decline of bird species around the world?
Taking the long view, birds are presumed by many evolutionary biologists to be the only remaining dinosaurs of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction from 65 million years ago.
They were doing pretty well until humans came along. Consider that some 2,000 species -- one fifth of the world's inventory -- have disappeared just from Pacific islands since human colonization began 2,000 years ago.
For the most part, the passing of passerines and other species has taken place quietly. The end of some, however, has been more finitely marked. For example, the end of the heath hen prairie chicken happened in the 1930s. The passing of the final Carolina parakeet was in February of 1918. The last of billions of passenger pigeons flew on September 1, 1914.
In one way or another, we have been the cause of the demise of many bird species, now to be seen only in history books. Some were killed for food or feathers. Others because they were a "nuisance." Changes now being wrought by man through global warming and the clear cutting of mountain tops and rain forests do not help.
Overall, according to BirdLife International, one in eight existing species is in danger of becoming extinct during the next 100 years.
But all is not lost. During the past 20 years, more new bird species have been found than have become extinct. Plus, some thought to be gone forever have turned up around the world. The possibility exists that others may reappear.
For instance, there's word that the ivory-billed woodpecker of the southern swamps may still be with us. While it has not been seen for decades, unconfirmed sightings of this largest woodpecker in North America -- nearly 24 inches long -- continue.
Perhaps the best we can do is provide a positive environment and safe sanctuary around our homes. And, of course, speak out and work on behalf of the birds whenever the opportunity arises.
For more information, read “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers” by Christopher Cokinos.
President Teddy Roosevelt True Champion of Wildlife
As you head west out of Boulder, Colorado toward Theodore Roosevelt National Forest, you pass through some of the most scenic and majestic vistas in the country. There couldn't be a more fitting tribute. With the rekindled fascination of Roosevelt in our nation's capital, Teddy Roosevelt's life is back in the public eye.
By exercising executive powers unlike any president since Abraham Lincoln, Roosevelt's government transferred 125 million acres of public land into forest reserves and wildlife refuges during his term as the 26th president.
By executive order, in March 1903 he set aside Pelican Island in Florida as a refuge for egrets, pelicans, and terns. It was the first of what now includes 51 national bird sanctuaries. Roosevelt's efforts during the early 20th century also marked the beginning of international regulations to protect migratory birds. "The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem," he said presciently. "Unless we solve that problem it will avail us little to solve all others.
TR's fascination with birds started early. A voyage early in his life up the Nile valley -- a vast flyway in winter -- exposed him to kestrels, doves, larks, cranes and hawks. In the 1870s, he started bird watching with Harvard friends in the woods surrounding Cambridge (spotting Swainson's thrushes and red-breasted nuthatches).
Treks through the Adirondacks seeking rare species led to the publishing of his first book, Summer Birds of the Adirondacks, which listed 97 different species (and was favorably reviewed by a local ornithological journal).
Roosevelt's firm belief in and commitment to conversation and the protection of wildlife helped set the example to which most modern presidencies have since been compared.
Where the Wild Things Are
For some years we have been hearing about the ongoing destruction of the tropical rain forests and the logging and urbanization of North American forests. But what does this really mean, in terms of its impact?
The canopy -- think treetops -- is where most of the world's 30 million species live. Bugs eating leafy sugars and birds eating the bugs. This is a huge food factory containing most of the productive tissue for the entire forest.
More than half of the planet's species -- plants, animals, birds, bacteria, fungi etc. -- reside in tropical rain forests, primarily in the canopy. They provide critical ecological, economic and aesthetic benefits.
The forest canopy is an irreplaceable home, providing food, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, even serving as a source of medicine.
But it is disappearing. The collective fallout from the damage we are doing around the world, such as deforestation, could one day rival the earlier episodes of extinction. The window of opportunity is closing on our ability to avoid major ecological damage.
For example, consider Easter Island. Its entire human population disappeared after the natural resources were irreparably exploited.
How fast is this catching up with us? Tropical forests are disappearing worldwide at a rate of about 100 acres a minute. And other living organisms are going with them.
It used to be that a couple of species were lost each year. By the 1970s it was a species a day. In the 1980s it accelerated to one per hour. It soon may become 100 a day, due primarily to human ignorance and appetites.
What is being done? Awareness is growing through the efforts of conservationists, educators, some governmental agencies and others. And a new science, canopy ecology, has been growing out of this concern during the past decade.
Hopefully progress will be sufficient and in time. Otherwise our future will be diminished as all these species, including the neo-tropical migrants such as most warblers, disappear.
Wild Bird Center Stores Selling Shade-Grown Coffee
There is good news on the good coffee front. Wild Bird Center stores stock organic, shade-grown coffee beans. These beans, known as Arabica, indirectly benefit our backyard songbirds. They are grown beneath the forest canopy in Central America that provides a sanctuary for some 150 species of birds, especially the insect-eaters that migrate during the summer to northern breeding grounds. Most grocery-store mass-marketed brands began using beans from "sun plantations" in the 70's because the price was lower and the supply larger. This led farmers to cut down trees and use chemicals to meet demand. Since the U.S. consumes one-third of the world's coffee, consumers can drive environmental change and slow down or even stop the loss of bird habitat. With the continuing disappearance of the rain forest, shaded coffee farms often are the last refuge for literally millions of migratory birds.