25 ms·

Bird populations have declined since 1970 across nearly all habitats

122 points by emptybits 7y ago

Pfhreak 7y ago
Outdoor domestic cats, apparently, kill billions of birds annually. Have a cat? Don't let it outdoors.
- andy-x 7y ago
  True. Especially if you like to live with rats and mice.
  - partialrecall 7y ago
    A water-bucket trap can kill dozens of rodents in a single night. Your cat is not that effective.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    I’ve found a slow cat to be fast enough to catch mice, but too slow/obvious to catch birds.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  I wonder what impact it would have if everyone put a collar jingle bell on their cat.
  - xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
    Definitely less than not letting their cats outside.
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    My sister's cats have multiple bells and they still murder all the time.
- trhway 7y ago
  >Outdoor domestic cats, apparently, kill billions of birds annually. who else is going to kill those billions of old and ill weak and dying birds? In wilderness this is done by a plethora of predators. In developed areas pretty much only cats are left to perform that duty. Without cats it would probably be the rats walking around eating the finally fallen dead birds lying around. Your choice. And don't forget another aspect - rats eat bird eggs imparting massive damage at that stage, and the only predator available that can effectively control rats in the areas inside and surrounding human developments is cats.
  - bt848 7y ago
    It is not possible to control rodents by predation.
robocat 7y ago
New Zealand used to have a dawn chorus of birds before it was settled by Europeans. "When Captain Cook came to the Queen Charlotte Sound in 1770, his botanist, Joseph Banks, described the dawn chorus he heard in his journal. 'This morn I was awakd by the singing of the birds ashore from whence we are distant not a quarter of a mile, the numbers of them were certainly very great who seemd to strain their throats with emulation perhaps; their voices were certainly the most melodious wild musick I have ever heard, almost imitating small bells....'. The dawn chorus doesn't exist now for two reasons: forest was felled and converted to farmland, and bird/egg eating mammals were introduced. New Zealand is trying to stop the decline in our bird numbers and threatened species, and we are even succeeding in small areas. We have been leading the world at completely eradicating pests from some islands, and fencing off some forest areas within our cities, and eradicating all mammals (rats/stoats/cats) within them. Fortunately New Zealand is quite progressive on environmental issues (although we need to do way better), and about 5% to 10% of our parliament is the Green Party (who regularly have real power by forming coalition governments or strategic voting on bills). I think much of their policy is whacko, but as a minority they work well to effect change and represent the large number of New Zealanders that care deeply about our environment. I like this summary http://i.stuff.co.nz/environment/8206417/A-deafening-dawn-chorus http://i.stuff.co.nz/environment/8206417/A-deafening-dawn-ch... (although maybe stop reading when she starts rabbiting on about her rooster!).
- jasonless 7y ago
  From what I can tell between 10,000 and 100,000 species are becoming extinct each year. Maybe we should tax the rich to save them all? How can we save 100,000 each year. Do we think Capitalism is causing these extinction?
  - fennecfoxen 7y ago
    Broadly speaking, "people growing food" is causing these extinctions. Ending capitalism might reverse these changes to the ecosystems, insofar as people suffer mass starvation, are killed in revolutionary struggle / civil war, or are exterminated by a dystopian post-capitalist state; aside from this you should, broadly speaking, expect the inferior yields of collectivized agriculture to worsen the environmental degradation (by requiring more farmland), not improve it.
diego_moita 7y ago
There must be something more than habitat loss or pesticides. Outside of Central Asia sparrows are introduced species, adapted to live on remains of our towns. Urban environments is the natural habitat of sparrows, like rats with wings. They don't belong to the wilderness. If sparrows are also disappearing then the loss of natural habitat is not the only answer. Edit: from this graph [0] it seems that the loss is concentrated on introduced species (such as sparrows), shorebirds and insectivores. [0]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silent-skies-billions-of-north-american-birds-have-vanished/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silent-skies-bill...
- filboidstudge 7y ago
  It sounds like you are referring specifically to the House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) which is not native to North America and is indeed strongly associated with urban environments.[0] But the native New World sparrows to which the article refers are a separate group of species and are dependent on natural habitat.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_sparrows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_sparrows [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_sparrow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_sparrow
lettergram 7y ago
Living in rural Illinois I can attest that bugs have pretty much vanished. You used to be eaten alive outside, not so much near any crop fields (i.e. most of the state). I never even get bit at night. I’m sure that is the largest impact on birds, no food.
- butterfi 7y ago
  Remember when you had to scrape your windshield down after a car trip? I noticed the birds vanishing in my area, but I had no idea it was happening on this scale.
  - lostapathy 7y ago
    A lot of that is aerodynamics improving in newer cars. I drive a Jeep Wrangler and it catches a lot more bugs than our modern Honda
    - newnewpdro 7y ago
      I drive old cars, and have had the same exact model for over a decade, and cross the country often between the west coast and midwest. It used to be that I'd have to clean my windshield at gas stops and the car would need its bumper and hood washed of insect genocide on arrival. These days neither are necessary, it's very apparent.
      - fingerlocks 7y ago
        You obviously haven’t driven through southern Oregon on highway 97 during sunset. Had to use the windshield wipers because I couldn’t see from all the bug carcasses on the windshield.
        StavrosK 7y ago
        He's comparing two different years in the exact same region to show decline, his point isn't that there aren't any insects left on earth.
in_hindsight 7y ago
Tangentially related, but is Scientific American worth subscribing to? I really like reading paper magazines and am a subscriber to Science, but feel like I could use lighter reading if it’s not too sensationalist
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  No. It used to be great but then they went way downmarket about 20 years to increase readership. After several years of declining quality I quite when I noticed they had adjusted the font size and spacing to have about the same number of pages (and ads) in each issue while reducing the actual content by ~20%. I mean, it's not terrible but it used to be solidly educational whereas Nature or Science is relatively hard work to read unless you really love getting into the weeds. Scientific American used to sit in the middle ground between Popular Mechanics or National Geographic and actual journals, but you'll probably find it disappointingly shallow.
  - chemicalnovae 7y ago
    More to the point then, is there anything that sits between the high quality generalist journals and generalist scientific magazines (Nat Geo. and the like)? I can and do read Nature and Science, but outside of my PhD field I find it pretty slow going and often feel like I'm missing out on what could be interesting findings due to not having sufficient background to fully understand the problem space.
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      Not that I'm aware of, sadly. There's New Scientist from the UK but that's more of a weekly newspaper and thus a bit shallow. There's some great online magazines of course (Quanta is pretty good) but for longform writing I still like hard copy cause I'm old.
    - MayeulC 7y ago
      I personally read Ars Technica (and am a subscriber), which I feel fills this niche (maybe that's not what you are looking for?) Even though most of their articles are IT-oriented, they cover quite well major scientific publications in various domains.
kingkawn 7y ago
We ded
ridgeguy 7y ago
Maybe not only birds. Today, I drove home from Las Vegas to Portola Valley. I went 95->6->120 over Tioga pass, then home. I've driven this route over several decades. My recollection (corroborated by a few Kodachrome slides) is that my windshield would be smeared with bug impacts by the time I got to Lee Vining, necessitating a stop at the humongously overpriced gas station so I could use their window cleaners. Since about 15 years ago, not so much. I had a total of three bugs at Lee Vining today. I bypassed the gas station and window cleaning, went over Tioga. If we're really missing the quantities of bugs my anecdote may illustrate, it's no wonder the birds are missing, too.
- quibbler 7y ago
  Seasons might play a role? Summer is almost over.
- bt848 7y ago
  Curious how many times you and millions of others thought you could slaughter all those insects with your cars before it would harm them. Roads are one of the main reasons for declining animal populations and insects are impacted as much as or more than any animals.
  - dhhdhdsbdb 7y ago
    Is this true? I always thought the decline was more often caused by removing habitats. Would be curious to know how this is measured and communicated.
- jay_kyburz 7y ago
  I remember walking through the grass on the way home from school and seeing hundreds of grasshoppers jump out of the way. I saw a grasshopper the other day walking my kids to school and realised it was the first I had seen in many years. Mum used to yell at me all the time to hurry though the screen door so the flies wouldn't get in. Now we could leave the screen open all day and we'd be lucky to see a fly come in.
- robocat 7y ago
FuckButtons 7y ago
I thought the Bay Area was unnervingly devoid of birds, I guess I was right.
merricksb 7y ago
Other live discussion about same topic/study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21018916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21018916

122 points by emptybits 7y ago

Pfhreak 7y ago

Outdoor domestic cats, apparently, kill billions of birds annually. Have a cat? Don't let it outdoors.

andy-x 7y ago
True. Especially if you like to live with rats and mice.
- partialrecall 7y ago
  A water-bucket trap can kill dozens of rodents in a single night. Your cat is not that effective.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  I’ve found a slow cat to be fast enough to catch mice, but too slow/obvious to catch birds.
hombre_fatal 7y ago
I wonder what impact it would have if everyone put a collar jingle bell on their cat.
- xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
  Definitely less than not letting their cats outside.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  My sister's cats have multiple bells and they still murder all the time.
trhway 7y ago
>Outdoor domestic cats, apparently, kill billions of birds annually. who else is going to kill those billions of old and ill weak and dying birds? In wilderness this is done by a plethora of predators. In developed areas pretty much only cats are left to perform that duty. Without cats it would probably be the rats walking around eating the finally fallen dead birds lying around. Your choice. And don't forget another aspect - rats eat bird eggs imparting massive damage at that stage, and the only predator available that can effectively control rats in the areas inside and surrounding human developments is cats.
- bt848 7y ago
  It is not possible to control rodents by predation.

robocat 7y ago

New Zealand used to have a dawn chorus of birds before it was settled by Europeans. "When Captain Cook came to the Queen Charlotte Sound in 1770, his botanist, Joseph Banks, described the dawn chorus he heard in his journal. 'This morn I was awakd by the singing of the birds ashore from whence we are distant not a quarter of a mile, the numbers of them were certainly very great who seemd to strain their throats with emulation perhaps; their voices were certainly the most melodious wild musick I have ever heard, almost imitating small bells....'. The dawn chorus doesn't exist now for two reasons: forest was felled and converted to farmland, and bird/egg eating mammals were introduced. New Zealand is trying to stop the decline in our bird numbers and threatened species, and we are even succeeding in small areas. We have been leading the world at completely eradicating pests from some islands, and fencing off some forest areas within our cities, and eradicating all mammals (rats/stoats/cats) within them. Fortunately New Zealand is quite progressive on environmental issues (although we need to do way better), and about 5% to 10% of our parliament is the Green Party (who regularly have real power by forming coalition governments or strategic voting on bills). I think much of their policy is whacko, but as a minority they work well to effect change and represent the large number of New Zealanders that care deeply about our environment. I like this summary http://i.stuff.co.nz/environment/8206417/A-deafening-dawn-chorus http://i.stuff.co.nz/environment/8206417/A-deafening-dawn-ch... (although maybe stop reading when she starts rabbiting on about her rooster!).

jasonless 7y ago
From what I can tell between 10,000 and 100,000 species are becoming extinct each year. Maybe we should tax the rich to save them all? How can we save 100,000 each year. Do we think Capitalism is causing these extinction?
- fennecfoxen 7y ago
  Broadly speaking, "people growing food" is causing these extinctions. Ending capitalism might reverse these changes to the ecosystems, insofar as people suffer mass starvation, are killed in revolutionary struggle / civil war, or are exterminated by a dystopian post-capitalist state; aside from this you should, broadly speaking, expect the inferior yields of collectivized agriculture to worsen the environmental degradation (by requiring more farmland), not improve it.

diego_moita 7y ago

There must be something more than habitat loss or pesticides. Outside of Central Asia sparrows are introduced species, adapted to live on remains of our towns. Urban environments is the natural habitat of sparrows, like rats with wings. They don't belong to the wilderness. If sparrows are also disappearing then the loss of natural habitat is not the only answer. Edit: from this graph [0] it seems that the loss is concentrated on introduced species (such as sparrows), shorebirds and insectivores. [0]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silent-skies-billions-of-north-american-birds-have-vanished/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silent-skies-bill...

filboidstudge 7y ago
It sounds like you are referring specifically to the House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) which is not native to North America and is indeed strongly associated with urban environments.[0] But the native New World sparrows to which the article refers are a separate group of species and are dependent on natural habitat.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_sparrows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_sparrows [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_sparrow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_sparrow

lettergram 7y ago

Living in rural Illinois I can attest that bugs have pretty much vanished. You used to be eaten alive outside, not so much near any crop fields (i.e. most of the state). I never even get bit at night. I’m sure that is the largest impact on birds, no food.

butterfi 7y ago
Remember when you had to scrape your windshield down after a car trip? I noticed the birds vanishing in my area, but I had no idea it was happening on this scale.
- lostapathy 7y ago
  A lot of that is aerodynamics improving in newer cars. I drive a Jeep Wrangler and it catches a lot more bugs than our modern Honda
  - newnewpdro 7y ago
    I drive old cars, and have had the same exact model for over a decade, and cross the country often between the west coast and midwest. It used to be that I'd have to clean my windshield at gas stops and the car would need its bumper and hood washed of insect genocide on arrival. These days neither are necessary, it's very apparent.
    - fingerlocks 7y ago
      You obviously haven’t driven through southern Oregon on highway 97 during sunset. Had to use the windshield wipers because I couldn’t see from all the bug carcasses on the windshield.
      - StavrosK 7y ago
        He's comparing two different years in the exact same region to show decline, his point isn't that there aren't any insects left on earth.

in_hindsight 7y ago

Tangentially related, but is Scientific American worth subscribing to? I really like reading paper magazines and am a subscriber to Science, but feel like I could use lighter reading if it’s not too sensationalist

anigbrowl 7y ago
No. It used to be great but then they went way downmarket about 20 years to increase readership. After several years of declining quality I quite when I noticed they had adjusted the font size and spacing to have about the same number of pages (and ads) in each issue while reducing the actual content by ~20%. I mean, it's not terrible but it used to be solidly educational whereas Nature or Science is relatively hard work to read unless you really love getting into the weeds. Scientific American used to sit in the middle ground between Popular Mechanics or National Geographic and actual journals, but you'll probably find it disappointingly shallow.
- chemicalnovae 7y ago
  More to the point then, is there anything that sits between the high quality generalist journals and generalist scientific magazines (Nat Geo. and the like)? I can and do read Nature and Science, but outside of my PhD field I find it pretty slow going and often feel like I'm missing out on what could be interesting findings due to not having sufficient background to fully understand the problem space.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    Not that I'm aware of, sadly. There's New Scientist from the UK but that's more of a weekly newspaper and thus a bit shallow. There's some great online magazines of course (Quanta is pretty good) but for longform writing I still like hard copy cause I'm old.
  - MayeulC 7y ago
    I personally read Ars Technica (and am a subscriber), which I feel fills this niche (maybe that's not what you are looking for?) Even though most of their articles are IT-oriented, they cover quite well major scientific publications in various domains.

kingkawn 7y ago

We ded

ridgeguy 7y ago

Maybe not only birds. Today, I drove home from Las Vegas to Portola Valley. I went 95->6->120 over Tioga pass, then home. I've driven this route over several decades. My recollection (corroborated by a few Kodachrome slides) is that my windshield would be smeared with bug impacts by the time I got to Lee Vining, necessitating a stop at the humongously overpriced gas station so I could use their window cleaners. Since about 15 years ago, not so much. I had a total of three bugs at Lee Vining today. I bypassed the gas station and window cleaning, went over Tioga. If we're really missing the quantities of bugs my anecdote may illustrate, it's no wonder the birds are missing, too.

quibbler 7y ago
Seasons might play a role? Summer is almost over.
bt848 7y ago
Curious how many times you and millions of others thought you could slaughter all those insects with your cars before it would harm them. Roads are one of the main reasons for declining animal populations and insects are impacted as much as or more than any animals.
- dhhdhdsbdb 7y ago
  Is this true? I always thought the decline was more often caused by removing habitats. Would be curious to know how this is measured and communicated.
jay_kyburz 7y ago
I remember walking through the grass on the way home from school and seeing hundreds of grasshoppers jump out of the way. I saw a grasshopper the other day walking my kids to school and realised it was the first I had seen in many years. Mum used to yell at me all the time to hurry though the screen door so the flies wouldn't get in. Now we could leave the screen open all day and we'd be lucky to see a fly come in.
robocat 7y ago

FuckButtons 7y ago

I thought the Bay Area was unnervingly devoid of birds, I guess I was right.

merricksb 7y ago

Other live discussion about same topic/study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21018916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21018916