from Sunday Herald, 09 January 2011
They’re biblical, they’re big news and they provide plenty of fodder for the doom-saying conspiracy theorists. But they might actually be warning signs of things to come.
When thousands of birds suddenly fall out of the sky, it’s eerie. People get unnerved and scared. They leap to conclusions about the wrath of god, the cruelty of nature, or even the end of the world.
Tabloid editors and online bloggers invent a word for it – aflockalypse – to make it more of a phenomenon. Scientists hold their heads in their hands, and complain that it’s all being twisted out of proportion.
And yet, there may something deeply disturbing going on behind it all - something that should worry every one of us. Are the mass bird deaths just a random freak of nature? Or are they, as some experts now suggest, another indication of the way we are irreversibly poisoning our planet?
It’s raining birds
It all started on Hogmanay in Beebe, Arkansas. Thousands of blackbirds fell from the sky, littering the highways and backyards of the small bible-belt town and shocking its 5,000 residents.
Then it emerged that 500 red-winged blackbirds and starlings had been found dead on a highway near Labarre in Louisiana. Then reports started rolling in of 200 dead birds on a bridge in Texas, hundreds of dead starling and robins in Gilbertsville, Kentucky, and 50 dead jackdaws on a street in Sweden.
As if that were not enough, newspapers added stories about thousands of fish dying around Florida, Brazil and New Zealand. And they revealed that 40,0O0 lifeless devil crabs had been washed up in Kent on the south coast of England.
The first thing that scientists point out about these mass animal deaths is that they are not a new phenomenon. They have happened for millennia, and can often be attributed to natural causes, like storms, cold weather or diseases.
“The number of recent events is probably just a coincidence,” said Dr Andy Douse, an ornithologist from Scottish Natural Heritage, the government’s conservation agency. “Mass die-offs of birds occur with considerable frequency on a global scale.”
He pointed out that up to 50,000 guillemots and 5,000 shags had died in a “seabird wreck” on the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth in 1994, probably through lack of food. In 2005, more than 6,000 birds were killed by avian flu at Lake Qinghai in China.
But sometimes the causes are indisputably man-made. In the winter of 1974-75 hundreds of greylag geese were found dead in Angus and Perthshire after eating wheat seeds treated with toxic pesticides.
According to Douse, such “mass poisoning” incidents are rare, but they showed the potentially harmful impact of human activities. Some of the recent episodes in the US have been blamed on fireworks frightening the birds, and causing them to collide into buildings.
“We tend to notice mass mortalities, and think that the world is coming to an end,” Douse said. “But it is the chronic mortalities that we don’t see that we should really be worried about.”
The slow death of birds
Birds are disappearing across the world because the insects on which they depend for food are being wiped out by toxic pesticides, according to new evidence from scientists.
Nicotine-based chemicals widely used by farmers to kill pests which damage crops also kill bees and a host of other insects, they say. This deprives birds of vital protein, and is blamed for the populations of many species crashing in recent years.
It is a real “ecological apocalypse” in the making, according to the Dutch toxicologist, Dr Henk Tennekes, who has written a book on the subject. He warns that the dire prediction of a “silent spring” made in the 1960s could yet come true.
“Declining bird species appear to be short on insect food, their prime protein source, because insects are being killed on a massive scale by modern pesticides,” he told the Sunday Herald.
“This leads to failing reproduction and an increased vulnerability of birds to stress factors, such as fireworks, extreme cold and storms.” In the UK, the number of house sparrows has dropped by 67% since 1977, and there have been big falls in swifts, starlings and other farm and woodland birds.
Several recent studies have suggested that insect populations are declining, though not everyone agrees that this can be blamed for plummeting bird numbers. Multinational pesticide companies also dispute that their products are to blame.
But the evidence implicating one class of pesticides is mounting. “It is highly likely that neonicotinoid pesticides are reducing the abundance of a wide range of insects,” said Matt Shardlow, the chief executive of Buglife, which campaigns to protect insects.
“Almost all birds rely on insects for the protein in their diet. Hungry or weakened birds are more likely to forage in inappropriate weather, take risks and become diseased – and hence pesticides could be associated with these ‘bird-fall’ events.
Playing bird games
You can always rely on the bookies to try and make a fast buck out of others’ misfortunes. Paddy Power, Ireland’s biggest bookmaker, has started taking bets on which country will suffer the next mass bird death.
The UK is said to be favourite at 2/1, with Ireland second favourite at 4/1. Spain and Italy are the least favourites at 20/1.
The betting company has also produced odds on which marine species will be the next to suffer. Jellyfish are the 6/4 favourites, ahead of starfish at 3/1, turtles at 8/1 and squid at 10/1. Little science is thought to have been involved in making these predictions.
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