Drunken Owls

This would never happen in a puritanical country like the United States....

German police said on Tuesday they had discovered a paralytic owl that appeared to have drunk too much Schnapps from two discarded bottles.

"A woman walking her dog alerted the police after seeing the bird sitting by the side of the road oblivious to passing traffic," Frank Otruba, spokesman for the police in the southwestern city of Pforzheim, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

The Brown Owl didn't appear to be injured and officers quickly concluded that it had had one too many. One of its eyelids was drooping, adding to the general impression of inebriation.

"It wasn't staggering around and we didn't breathalyze it but there were two little bottles of Schapps in the immediate vicinity," said Otruba. "We took it to a local bird expert who has treated alcoholized birds before and she has been giving it lots of water."

The bird will be released once it has sobered up, police said.

Historical Image of the Day

John James Audubon's drawings of the great auk, a bird of the northwest Atlantic hunted to extinction by 1844.

Silent Spring Again a Threat

In 1962, Rachel Carson published her seminal work on the effects of pesticides upon nature, Silent Spring. The title referred to the lack of birdsong in a future spring when all birds would be dead. This powerful book led to the banning of DDT and other of the most poisonous pesticides and herbicides in the United States, though they are often still used in the developing world.

47 years later, we again face the specter of a silent spring. This time it's not from pesticides though. It's from suburban development, from the destruction of wetlands, from cell phone towers, windows, and other impediments to bird travel that they crash into; and from increasingly intensive industrial farming. Over 1/3 of bird species in the United States are in severe decline. It's possible that some of them will go extinct. Here are some numbers of individual species numbers I quoted in a previous post on the subject.

We have shown that we can bring back individual bird species with effort. This is especially true with birds of prey and wetland birds. When I was born, few bald eagles lived in the lower 48, now almost every state has them and in some places they are almost common. But grassland birds, often small and inconspicuous, suffer potential extinction because their habitat has little emotional value for Americans, because that habitat is often in states with few environmental restrictions, and because of the ideology of unrestricted growth so prevalent in this nation.

Bird Declines

This article on the speeding decline of songbird populations in the East distrubed me greatly, though I had heard this before. Some numbers:

Bobwhite:
40 years ago--31 million
Today--5.5 million

Evening Grosbeak:
40 years ago--17 million
Today--3.8 million

The study suggests a few major reasons for this. Climate change likely has something to do with it. Increasingly industrialized agriculture severely decimates bird habitat and definitely played a part too.

But probably the biggest reason is suburban expansion. The worst culprits are often second home buyers building a home in a previously undeveloped field. They need roads, power lines, and other services. Those roads are deathways for animals, though not birds so much. Moreover, many animals, both birds and others, need undeveloped land. A home, even if it is 1/8 mile away from the next home, destroys that. Suburban development is actually better in many cases than ex-urban development. And of course, animals and humans often like the same habitat, particularly along waterways.

One of the bigger lessons here is that the few people have more of a negative impact on the environment than the middle to upper class person who builds a second home. Ironically, many of these people claim to be environmentalists. They recycle and give money to the Wilderness Society. But they impact the planet far more negatively than the city dweller.