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It’s more than just the title of Bridget Stutchbury’s
book, Silence of the Songbirds, which evokes the memory of Rachel
Carson and Silent Spring. Stutchbury, like Carson before her, brings
a strong scientific background to her subject and writes with eloquence and
passion about an ecological crisis.
 Stutchbury’s message is simple:
Most neo-tropical migrating songbirds are in decline.We may have lost up to half of the
total population of these birds in the past forty years.
After the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, we
responded, and today the Bald Eagle, Osprey and Peregrine Falcon are back
from the brink. However, in those same forty years, the night skies of
April and May got quieter, with the loss
of millions of songbirds. Songbirds
are not, like eagles and falcons, the mascots of our sports teams, birds
that senators and Rotarians can easily rally around. They are the Cerulean Warblers high in the trees and the Hooded Warblers deep in the bush. Stutchbury is making sure that their remaining voices are being heard.
Since migrating songbirds can’t be studied in a
laboratory, Stutchbury must weave together Breeding Bird Surveys, banding
station reports, radar image comparisons, and studies of individual species
to come up with songbird population trends. Her conclusion is that most
species are declining, with serious losses for at least 28 species, from
Veerys, to Bobolinks, to Kentucky Warblers.
Unlike Rachel Carson, who had her smoking gun—DDT—Stutchbury
has no straightforward explanation for the decline. So, to find the
answers, Stutchbury takes us into the field with her, starting in Soberania
National Park in Panama. There she tricks her students, and her readers,
“…allowing them to experience the joy of the rainforest before letting them
on to the fact that they were actually in a forest remnant surrounded by a
twentieth century landscape.” She ends her book by tracking a mate-less
male Scarlet Tanager in a forest fragment on the US East Coast, telling us
that, “Forest fragments disrupt all aspects of pair formation and mate
choice, and as a result reduce the breeding success of migrants beyond the
big losses they already experience from excessive cowbirds and predators.”
Habitat fragmentation and deforestation are center stage as villains
throughout this story, but in her journey through our hemisphere, she finds
other major causes of songbird decline: monoculture “sun” coffee
plantations; the loss of stopover habitat during migration; skyscrapers,
lights and towers; cowbirds, cats and other predators; and, echoing Rachel
Carson, pesticides.
In the 40th anniversary edition of
Silent
Spring, Linda Lear writes in her introduction that, “…in spite of Rachel
Carson’s apocalyptic call alerting Americans to the problem of toxic
chemicals, reduction in the use of pesticides has been one of the major
policy failures of the environmental era.” Stutchbury gives substance to
this claim, showing how songbirds are poisoned by the liberal use of
pesticides in Latin America that are banned in the United States, and how
pesticides used in the US, like acephate, put on lawns and a variety of food
crops, cause migratory birds to lose their sense of direction.
Stutchbury argues that migratory songbirds are a
critical part of our forests ecosystems, and that these birds play
irreplaceable roles in seed dispersal, pollination, and insect control.
Without them, our forest ecosystems would fall apart. But Stutchbury also
loves birds, and is afraid, someday, she may be telling her grandchildren
about a world that once had thrushes, tanagers and warblers.
In her epilogue, Stutchbury tells us that we need to be
part of the solution, and gives us a list of simple actions that will help
the songbirds: buy shade coffee, buy organic produce from Latin America and
North America, buy Forest Stewardship Council paper and wood, buy recycled
paper not bleached with chlorine, turn lights off during peak migration, and
keep cats indoors.
 Carson put progress, cut off from ecology, in front of
the mirror, and made us look at the poisonous truth. She gave us a
seemingly overwhelming challenge 40 years ago, and now, thanks in part to Silent Spring, we have Earth Day, we have 46 million of us watching
birds, and, most importantly, we have Bald Eagles, Ospreys and Peregrine
Falcons.
Stutchbury has taken out the mirror again and made us
look at how human growth and progress throughout our hemisphere is silencing
the songbirds. Let’s take Stutchbury’s list of things we can do, and go do
them. And let’s do more. Let’s save the songbirds.
Songbird paintings by Louis Agassiz Fuertes (1874 - 1927),
American ornithologist and illustrator.
- from Wikimedia Commons |
