When the little bluebird
Who has never said a word
Starts to sing Spring
...
It is nature, that is all,
Simply telling us to fall in love.
-- Cole Porter, "Let's Do It"
The immortal refrain of an old Cole Porter chestnut -- "birds do it; bees do it" -- has taken on an ominous ring. Evidently, songbirds have followed honeybees by engaging in a massive die-off. (Bats, whose mating rituals evidently didn't capture Porter's fancy, are dying off as well.)
According to a New York Times op-ed by biologist Bridget Stutchbury:
Bobolinks, called skunk blackbirds in some places, were once a common sight in the Eastern United States. In mating season, the male in his handsome tuxedo-like suit sings deliriously as he whirrs madly over the hayfields. Bobolink numbers have plummeted almost 50 percent in the last four decades, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey.
Stutchbury links the problem directly to pesticide use in South and Central America, where farm operations widely use chemicals now banned in the U.S. And the explosion of pesticide use in those areas can be directly linked to the U.S. and European appetite for out-of-season produce. Stutchbury:
Since the 1980s, pesticide use has increased fivefold in Latin America as countries have expanded their production of nontraditional crops to fuel the demand for fresh produce during winter in North America and Europe.
The phenomenon is not only killing songbirds, but it's also poisoning us :
Testing by the United States Food and Drug Administration shows that fruits and vegetables imported from Latin America are three times as likely to violate Environmental Protection Agency standards for pesticide residues as the same foods grown in the United States. Some but not all pesticide residues can be removed by washing or peeling produce, but tests by the Centers for Disease Control show that most Americans carry traces of pesticides in their blood.
Stutchbury ends by appealing to consumers to mend their ways to save the birds. She calls for shade-grown coffee, organic bananas, and avoiding out-of-season fruits and veggies.
I have no objection to her use of birds as charismatic minifauna in the battle to end the practice of dousing crops with poison. I want to live in a world in which the beautiful birds sing. But I also invite Stutchbury and everyone else to investigate what the pesticides that are wiping out songbirds are doing to the farm workers down south.
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Colin Wright Posted 3:04 pm
31 Mar 2008
"It looks like the entire (Northwest) Pacific Coast is being affected."
Research has shown scientists that:
Deformed beaks occur in resident and migratory birds.
A study of black-capped chickadees in Alaska showed "significantly higher" concentrations of a pesticide breakdown product, heptachlor epoxide, in adults with beak deformities than in normal adults. The same goes for a form of polychlorinated biphenyl, PCB, an industrial chemical.
Baby birds from deformed parents in Alaska had higher concentrations of two of the most toxic forms of PCBs.
Beak deformities were a feature of a syndrome that affected birds in the Great Lakes area in the 1970s that was associated with exposure to contaminants, including PCBs, dioxins and dibenzofurans. The same thing happened to birds exposed to high concentrations of selenium in California in the 1980s.
The Alaska chickadees with the deformity had a "highly significant" amount of damage to their DNA.
Alarming! Could nature be trying to tell us something? (Also I have recently observed protracted nose growth in Bush administration officials.)
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caniscandida Posted 3:52 pm
31 Mar 2008
Why ask if shad do it?:
Waiter, bring me shad roe!
(Notice that "eels" and "add" alliterate, in precisely the way it was done by Old English poets, e.g. the author of "Beowulf.")
So OK, Tom, different singers choose different parts of these lyrics to sing:
http://sozluk.sourtimes.org/show.asp?t=let+s+do+it
We happen to like the musical soundtrack from the wonderful 2004 movie "De-Lovely," starring Kevin Kline as Cole Porter, on which Alanis Morissette sings "Birds Do It, Bees Do It."
Cf. another Cole Porter song about sex, "Let's Misbehave," which Woody Allen used as the opening anthem of his 1972 classic (OLD Woody Allen!, pre-"Annie Hall"), "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask":
When Adam won Eve's hand,
He wouldn't stand
For reason;
He never cared about
Those apples out
Of season.
I happen to have been working as an usher in a movie theater in Wildwood, New Jersey, that summer, and got to see that movie over and over and over again.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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caniscandida Posted 5:05 pm
31 Mar 2008
I vaguely remember a story in our fourth-grade readers (or thereabouts), about a bobolink. Or was it a bobwhite -- a quite different kind of bird? It just goes to show, natural history was not a great strength of Catholic parochial elementary education.
It is also an important quality of our civilization, that we are short-sighted, profit-oriented and anthropocentric, and do nothing to save non-human animals such as bobolinks, and do not even recognize their plight most of the time; but then, when they are gone, we cry over them and behave with great sensitivity.
We are such fools!
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Pangolin Posted 5:08 pm
31 Mar 2008
Like the song says...."Nobody loves you, when you're down and out."
Should those nasties disrupt your endocrine system the way mine is disrupted you pretty much won't care either. "Not tonight I have chronic liver pain, a back in siezure and arthritis" isn't going to get you another request anytime soon.
Wierdly enough eating healthy and staying away from all of those easily avoided vices won't help you all that much. Simply breathing or taking a shower can be enough to load your system with toxics in some areas. It's like an evil lottery.
Good luck with that.
Put the Carbon Back
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caniscandida Posted 7:39 pm
31 Mar 2008
But really, I am sorry to hear about your troubles. We need to be up and leaping about, to keep these kids in line, and sometimes we can only do so much: hopefully that is an education in itself, for them, to get them to be patient with our decrepitude.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Pangolin Posted 6:56 am
01 Apr 2008
Put the Carbon Back
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Colin Wright Posted 2:16 pm
01 Apr 2008
Or, is that the wrong image? :)
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:33 pm
01 Apr 2008
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