9 ms·

The ancient world teemed with birds

152 points by autokill 7y ago

throwaway-1436 7y ago
This was very good. Thanks for sharing.
ImaCake 7y ago
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. 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.
- emmelaich 7y ago
  I think we're blessed in Australia with variety and number of birds. But even here, especially in larger cities they seem to be fewer and fewer and less diverse.
- Mikeb85 7y ago
  I live downtown in a large Canadian city and there's magpies, pigeons, sparrows, ducks, geese, and the occasional hawk or falcon. That's just downtown. Go to one of our parks and there's more variety. An hour outside of town, even more. No, birds don't seem particularly scarce here.
  - devb 7y ago
    Those are all birds that have been able to adapt very well to urban life. For each one of those, there are scores that haven't been able to do so.
- prawn 7y ago
  I've been in places in the USA and Europe that just feel devoid of birds or often insects. Lift a log in Australia and there are dozens of living things crawling around. In parts of the US, more often than not, there's nothing. I have a pretty routine suburban backyard in South Australia and there are loads of birds, as with your experience - lorikeets, wattlebirds, etc.
  - dmix 7y ago
    Using Australia as the baseline measure for wildlife/insect levels and you're going to find the vast majority of places wouldn't keep up..
    - prawn 7y ago
      That reply got me thinking - thanks.
  - cf141q5325 7y ago
    In Europe you can see some "forests" which are devoid of any life. I lived near one as a kid. They are simply not functioning ecosystems but dead silent wood plantations.
- zdragnar 7y ago
  On my property in the US, I've seen bald eagles, hawks, owls, at least 3 species of woodpeckers, any number of songbirds, hummingbirds, turkey, pheasant, turkey vultures and a half dozen migratory ducks and geese species. The first year here, we didn't feed them at all- there's really no shortage of natural foraging for them. We hardly saw any of the smaller birds, and truth be told I didn't think we had many around. Then we had an unusually brutal winter, and started putting out suet to help. Sure enough, all kinds started showing up. They stuck around through the spring, but we stopped feeding them in part because the suet was attracting unwanted attention from other animals. Since then, they've mostly "disappeared" again, though I know now they're not gone. It's worth pointing out that I live in an area that is predominantly farmland, rural homes, and some nice forested spots. We don't have a shortage of insects or really any other wildlife, either, in spite of the horrors that pesticides are supposedly wreaking upon them.
  - ImaCake 7y ago
    Thanks for the response :) If I go walking in the nearby bushland (in Australia) I will notice small honeyeaters and other bird life that doesn't come into the suburbs at all. It's amazing what secrets life keeps so close to us!
- Ensorceled 7y ago
  Anecdotally, I grew up in Rural Ontario and there are far fewer birds around my home town then there were when I was a kid. Yes, there are still lots of birds, but the winter migrations used to bend the hydro lines down to the ground.
- pmontra 7y ago
  I'm back home after one month in Australia and when I was there I noticed a phenomenal amount of birds everywhere, even in Sydney, even in the City. I think that nobody can keep sleeping past 6 AM in rural areas, but Australia is one of those countries when people wake up early. Compared to Australia, Europe is a wasteland: we do have birds but not as many. I guess you can't have both a lot of people and a lot of animals. When there are many of us there isn't enough space left for them.
  - SllX 7y ago
    > When there are many of us there isn't enough space left for them. Something I’ve always wondered is whether this has to be true, or if we’ve decided as a society that it should be true, and if we decided that we wanted to attract more birds into our world, if we really could. Pigeon spikes are everywhere in San Francisco. I’ve even seen them positioned on security cameras. Now I get that we have a lot of rats with wings flying around, but that seems like a feast for falcons, if we wanted to employ more falcons as we do around City Hall. Around the beach I’ll occasionally see hawks, and generally the biggest danger to them comes from the ravens flying around not wanting any hawks. If you go around Golden Gate Park, there’s an enormous variety of bird species flying around and roosting. I’ve seen a turkey vulture roosting on the signs and a goddamned peacock LARPing as a roadrunner in the morning. I am more amazed it has neither been eaten by coyotes nor hit by a car yet. Seriously, I took my first picture of it two years ago and I still see it a few times a month around the same area. There’s also the parrots of Telegraph Hill, an escaped domestic population that turned wild and has managed to sustain itself. We just built the Transbay Park (“Salesforce Park” since Salesforce owns the naming rights, but I’ll stick with the generic name), the bus terminal below has just entered service, the park has only been open a bit longer than that and already I see numerous small birds up there every time I go up there. Down by the waterfront I saw an owl flying around right by Aquatic Park. I was pretty lucky to see it at all since it was going for a kill and the wings don’t make a sound. This is just in one city! I think if we stopped behaving in an actively hostile way towards birds, save some falconry for population control, we might see the diversity of urban bird populations increase. If we actually introduced niches into our infrastructure for them to roost, managed our urban forests a bit better and planted some more trees while we’re at it, we could maybe even see them thrive here.
darkmighty 7y ago
Birds have been in significant and will probably continue to decline due to human activity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_extinction 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. 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/biological pest control.
- hailk 7y ago
  Biological pest control has always been practiced historically. It's always good to have frogs in the paddy fields. Insect eating birds for the most part tend to be omnivores, hence dangerous for crops as well, unfortunately. I'm not aware of any existing solutions that benefit both birds and farming. I would love to be proven wrong about this statement, but under most cases Farming and Birds are antithetical to each other.
- mikorym 7y ago
  Just by using pesticides and herbicides more precisely you can have a major remedial impact. Many farmers would apply either the wrong pesticide against an insect or at a stage that makes it less effective against its target. However, we have a myriad of weather data available, and together with insect life cycle data you can create a model that tells you 1) when to spray 2) the epicenter if applicable and 3) dynamic feedback as the weather changes. I have a early stage startup that has this as one of its long term goals. But to be honest there are other lower hanging fruit in agriculture that makes more sense to start with—the startup is more of an "idea" bank than a business at this point—and I won't be quitting a job in finance for a risky "smart farm" idea any time soon. EDIT: By the way, Johannesburg and Pretoria are bird paradises. There are even feral populations of lovebirds (indigenous to Namibia) that fly around outside my office as we speak.
- est31 7y ago
  Cats, as cute as they are, are a major contributor as well. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/cat-birds-australia/595048/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/cat-bird... > Feral cats on islands are responsible for at least 14% global bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions and are the principal threat to almost 8% of critically endangered birds, mammals, and reptiles. https://www.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x https://www.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x
kamaal 7y ago
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. You won'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's lakes are gone. There was a lake called Hebbal Lake where migratory birds would visit from Australia every year. They've stopped coming. Unmitigated disaster.
- peanutz454 7y ago
  Vultures man, those are things that we nearly lead to extinction recently in India. I remember when I was a kid there used to be a road in Delhi with the dead tree and vultures sitting all over it. But by the time I was an adult there were no Vultures in most of India. The heavy use of antibiotics we realised too late was causing the decline. The Parsi people (zorastrians) were impacted badly because their religious practice is to let the body be eaten away by animals, and without vultures the bodies were just rotting very badly.
  - jbotz 7y ago
    What nearly wiped out the vultures wasn't antibiotics... there may be other factors, but the main one was a specific anti-inflammatory drug (diclofenac) which was used liberally in treating any sign of illness in livestock and which turned out to be highly toxic to vultures. It is now banned in India. The thing about livestock medicine today is that diagnosis is generally too expensive for individual cases... if an animal looks sick you basically give an anti-inflammatory and an antibiotic and hope for the best, the former so that it'll feel well enough to eat so it won't get too weak, and the later to hopefully cure the illness. So both anti-inflammatory and antibiotics get used very liberally, to tragic consequences.
  - kamaal 7y ago
    We had a Parsi tower of silence in Bangalore as well. It was in the outskirts back in the day. The city consumed those areas and they are now in the heart of the city. I wonder where the facility is these days.
- 7y ago
ramzeus 7y ago
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.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  Mao had a policy of bird extermination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign "birds are public animals of capitalism"
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  There are not many birds in any large cities apart from pigeons, which are usually considered a nuisance. Hongkong has the advantage that it is actually very small and dense with nature (in hills and parks) never far away, which I'm guessing helps a lot in sustaining a more abundant and diverse bird population.
codesushi42 7y ago
Bird populations are almost literally the canaries in the coal mine. And they are dropping rapidly. The future does not look so good for us.
tmb 7y ago
If there exists better evidence of our tendency to read the comments before the article, I’ve yet to see it. Might need a headline change back to its original “Birds are ‘winged words’“, though I probably wouldn’t have read it then honestly.
CalRobert 7y ago
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) "everything is dying" article, it's not. Although, it is sad we don't notice the decline of birds, or anything else. The book "Whittled Away" has a fantastic description of how ridiculous it is people where I live think the fisheries are abundant. They're a wasteland compared to what once was, but since humans have short lives and shorter memories we don't know what we're missing. Same goes for light pollution (how many stars is a lot? I still can'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?) https://books.google.ie/books?id=XQiWDwAAQBAJ https://books.google.ie/books?id=XQiWDwAAQBAJ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline
goda90 7y ago
Concerning passenger pigeons[0], which went 100% extinct in 1910 due to hunting: "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." [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon

152 points by autokill 7y ago

This was very good. Thanks for sharing.

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. 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.

emmelaich 7y ago
I think we're blessed in Australia with variety and number of birds. But even here, especially in larger cities they seem to be fewer and fewer and less diverse.
Mikeb85 7y ago
I live downtown in a large Canadian city and there's magpies, pigeons, sparrows, ducks, geese, and the occasional hawk or falcon. That's just downtown. Go to one of our parks and there's more variety. An hour outside of town, even more. No, birds don't seem particularly scarce here.
- devb 7y ago
  Those are all birds that have been able to adapt very well to urban life. For each one of those, there are scores that haven't been able to do so.
prawn 7y ago
I've been in places in the USA and Europe that just feel devoid of birds or often insects. Lift a log in Australia and there are dozens of living things crawling around. In parts of the US, more often than not, there's nothing. I have a pretty routine suburban backyard in South Australia and there are loads of birds, as with your experience - lorikeets, wattlebirds, etc.
- dmix 7y ago
  Using Australia as the baseline measure for wildlife/insect levels and you're going to find the vast majority of places wouldn't keep up..
  - prawn 7y ago
    That reply got me thinking - thanks.
- cf141q5325 7y ago
  In Europe you can see some "forests" which are devoid of any life. I lived near one as a kid. They are simply not functioning ecosystems but dead silent wood plantations.
zdragnar 7y ago
On my property in the US, I've seen bald eagles, hawks, owls, at least 3 species of woodpeckers, any number of songbirds, hummingbirds, turkey, pheasant, turkey vultures and a half dozen migratory ducks and geese species. The first year here, we didn't feed them at all- there's really no shortage of natural foraging for them. We hardly saw any of the smaller birds, and truth be told I didn't think we had many around. Then we had an unusually brutal winter, and started putting out suet to help. Sure enough, all kinds started showing up. They stuck around through the spring, but we stopped feeding them in part because the suet was attracting unwanted attention from other animals. Since then, they've mostly "disappeared" again, though I know now they're not gone. It's worth pointing out that I live in an area that is predominantly farmland, rural homes, and some nice forested spots. We don't have a shortage of insects or really any other wildlife, either, in spite of the horrors that pesticides are supposedly wreaking upon them.
- ImaCake 7y ago
  Thanks for the response :) If I go walking in the nearby bushland (in Australia) I will notice small honeyeaters and other bird life that doesn't come into the suburbs at all. It's amazing what secrets life keeps so close to us!
Ensorceled 7y ago
Anecdotally, I grew up in Rural Ontario and there are far fewer birds around my home town then there were when I was a kid. Yes, there are still lots of birds, but the winter migrations used to bend the hydro lines down to the ground.
pmontra 7y ago
I'm back home after one month in Australia and when I was there I noticed a phenomenal amount of birds everywhere, even in Sydney, even in the City. I think that nobody can keep sleeping past 6 AM in rural areas, but Australia is one of those countries when people wake up early. Compared to Australia, Europe is a wasteland: we do have birds but not as many. I guess you can't have both a lot of people and a lot of animals. When there are many of us there isn't enough space left for them.
- SllX 7y ago
  > When there are many of us there isn't enough space left for them. Something I’ve always wondered is whether this has to be true, or if we’ve decided as a society that it should be true, and if we decided that we wanted to attract more birds into our world, if we really could. Pigeon spikes are everywhere in San Francisco. I’ve even seen them positioned on security cameras. Now I get that we have a lot of rats with wings flying around, but that seems like a feast for falcons, if we wanted to employ more falcons as we do around City Hall. Around the beach I’ll occasionally see hawks, and generally the biggest danger to them comes from the ravens flying around not wanting any hawks. If you go around Golden Gate Park, there’s an enormous variety of bird species flying around and roosting. I’ve seen a turkey vulture roosting on the signs and a goddamned peacock LARPing as a roadrunner in the morning. I am more amazed it has neither been eaten by coyotes nor hit by a car yet. Seriously, I took my first picture of it two years ago and I still see it a few times a month around the same area. There’s also the parrots of Telegraph Hill, an escaped domestic population that turned wild and has managed to sustain itself. We just built the Transbay Park (“Salesforce Park” since Salesforce owns the naming rights, but I’ll stick with the generic name), the bus terminal below has just entered service, the park has only been open a bit longer than that and already I see numerous small birds up there every time I go up there. Down by the waterfront I saw an owl flying around right by Aquatic Park. I was pretty lucky to see it at all since it was going for a kill and the wings don’t make a sound. This is just in one city! I think if we stopped behaving in an actively hostile way towards birds, save some falconry for population control, we might see the diversity of urban bird populations increase. If we actually introduced niches into our infrastructure for them to roost, managed our urban forests a bit better and planted some more trees while we’re at it, we could maybe even see them thrive here.

darkmighty 7y ago

Birds have been in significant and will probably continue to decline due to human activity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_extinction 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. 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/biological pest control.

hailk 7y ago
Biological pest control has always been practiced historically. It's always good to have frogs in the paddy fields. Insect eating birds for the most part tend to be omnivores, hence dangerous for crops as well, unfortunately. I'm not aware of any existing solutions that benefit both birds and farming. I would love to be proven wrong about this statement, but under most cases Farming and Birds are antithetical to each other.
mikorym 7y ago
Just by using pesticides and herbicides more precisely you can have a major remedial impact. Many farmers would apply either the wrong pesticide against an insect or at a stage that makes it less effective against its target. However, we have a myriad of weather data available, and together with insect life cycle data you can create a model that tells you 1) when to spray 2) the epicenter if applicable and 3) dynamic feedback as the weather changes. I have a early stage startup that has this as one of its long term goals. But to be honest there are other lower hanging fruit in agriculture that makes more sense to start with—the startup is more of an "idea" bank than a business at this point—and I won't be quitting a job in finance for a risky "smart farm" idea any time soon. EDIT: By the way, Johannesburg and Pretoria are bird paradises. There are even feral populations of lovebirds (indigenous to Namibia) that fly around outside my office as we speak.
est31 7y ago
Cats, as cute as they are, are a major contributor as well. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/cat-birds-australia/595048/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/cat-bird... > Feral cats on islands are responsible for at least 14% global bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions and are the principal threat to almost 8% of critically endangered birds, mammals, and reptiles. https://www.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x https://www.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x

kamaal 7y ago

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. You won'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's lakes are gone. There was a lake called Hebbal Lake where migratory birds would visit from Australia every year. They've stopped coming. Unmitigated disaster.

peanutz454 7y ago
Vultures man, those are things that we nearly lead to extinction recently in India. I remember when I was a kid there used to be a road in Delhi with the dead tree and vultures sitting all over it. But by the time I was an adult there were no Vultures in most of India. The heavy use of antibiotics we realised too late was causing the decline. The Parsi people (zorastrians) were impacted badly because their religious practice is to let the body be eaten away by animals, and without vultures the bodies were just rotting very badly.
- jbotz 7y ago
  What nearly wiped out the vultures wasn't antibiotics... there may be other factors, but the main one was a specific anti-inflammatory drug (diclofenac) which was used liberally in treating any sign of illness in livestock and which turned out to be highly toxic to vultures. It is now banned in India. The thing about livestock medicine today is that diagnosis is generally too expensive for individual cases... if an animal looks sick you basically give an anti-inflammatory and an antibiotic and hope for the best, the former so that it'll feel well enough to eat so it won't get too weak, and the later to hopefully cure the illness. So both anti-inflammatory and antibiotics get used very liberally, to tragic consequences.
- kamaal 7y ago
  We had a Parsi tower of silence in Bangalore as well. It was in the outskirts back in the day. The city consumed those areas and they are now in the heart of the city. I wonder where the facility is these days.
7y ago

ramzeus 7y ago

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.

goatinaboat 7y ago
Mao had a policy of bird extermination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign "birds are public animals of capitalism"
mytailorisrich 7y ago
There are not many birds in any large cities apart from pigeons, which are usually considered a nuisance. Hongkong has the advantage that it is actually very small and dense with nature (in hills and parks) never far away, which I'm guessing helps a lot in sustaining a more abundant and diverse bird population.

codesushi42 7y ago

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

tmb 7y ago

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

CalRobert 7y ago

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) "everything is dying" article, it's not. Although, it is sad we don't notice the decline of birds, or anything else. The book "Whittled Away" has a fantastic description of how ridiculous it is people where I live think the fisheries are abundant. They're a wasteland compared to what once was, but since humans have short lives and shorter memories we don't know what we're missing. Same goes for light pollution (how many stars is a lot? I still can'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?) https://books.google.ie/books?id=XQiWDwAAQBAJ https://books.google.ie/books?id=XQiWDwAAQBAJ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline

goda90 7y ago

Concerning passenger pigeons[0], which went 100% extinct in 1910 due to hunting: "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." [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon