Oh My God, You Thrilled Kenny!

Tons of things have changed since the '70s in American culture. For one personally relevant example, hitchhiking was an acceptable means of travel then; there were tens of thousands of us traveling that way, and drivers were accustomed to picking us up. Today you seldom see hitchhikers at all, and it wouldn't be an effective (or safe) way of getting around.

A major frustration for many of us is the fact that these supposed millions of birders and naturalists have essentially no political clout. As one friend of mine puts it, birders are voiceless and largely clueless. This is another situation in which the bird-watching community could take lessons from the hunters' and anglers' groups in the U.S. These organizations have worked the political angle for years, and they know how to make their voices heard in Washington and in the state capitals. Last fall, I spent some time in Washington hanging out with people from Ducks Unlimited, and those very sharp individuals definitely had the respect and the attention of people at several government agencies. Birders' groups have not cultivated such connections, and only a few have recently made their first tentative steps in this direction. It won't happen in a serious way until some organization makes this a priority.

You mean, how do we change human nature? Peer pressure may help, and in fact it has already begun to make a difference. Twenty years ago, some bird-listers' orgs like the American Birding Association were emphatically uninterested in conservation -- not opposed to it, just insisting that it wasn't part of their mission. Today the ABA is very active in bird conservation, and we're getting to the point where birders with no involvement in conservation are starting to feel self-conscious about that. But we still have a long way to go.

We can't protect every acre of land that's left, so we need to focus our attention on saving the most important pieces. That's why the science is so important -- we need to identify those habitats that are most critical to preserving maximum biodiversity. So buying land is only part of the solution; the research that precedes such purchases is important too. I support organizations that do effective work in identifying and protecting such critical habitats. Another thing we can all do every year is to buy the duck stamp, and encourage other birders to do the same. It's not just for hunters. Money from the duck stamp program goes directly into purchasing and preserving wetlands that host numerous species of plants and animals.

The amount of land being cleared for wind farms doesn't seem to be huge, so I'm more concerned about wind power's impacts (literally) on birds themselves than on bird habitats. Obviously wind is a "clean and green" source of power, and in general I'm very much in favor of it, but in terms of the effect on birds, it's all about location. Some sites that have strong and consistent winds are also major passage sites for migrating or foraging birds, and there's the potential for lots of bird mortality at those sites. So we have to look at wind power on a site-by-site basis, and gather data at all times of year, to know whether a wind farm at a particular spot is going to be a big bird killer. Incidentally, birds aren't the only potential victims; some wind farms in the Appalachian region have killed far more bats than birds, and of course bat conservation is an issue of concern as well.

That's a good point to consider. In this case, though, I believe that a major percentage of the money to be spent would go toward protecting a big block of high-quality habitat. This habitat -- old-growth southern swamp forest -- would automatically support a whole host of lesser-known and less-glamorous species, so the ivory-bill is not the only creature that stands to benefit from this action. Protecting habitat of any kind has broader positive effects than, say, a captive-breeding program for one species.

This is a devil's-advocate position, and of course we're all concerned for the safety of the species, but I'd say the woodpecker is doing a good job of protecting itself. Consider: teams of searchers already have spent months, with thousands of hours of field time, to get a total of seven plausible glimpses of the bird, and still it has been seen only in flight. The only material evidence of the bird is a four-second fuzzy video that was shot almost by accident more than a year ago. If the potential hordes of birders seriously consider the odds, they'll have second thoughts about just running down to Arkansas for the weekend.

In my opinion, the Bush administration has done more to damage forests than to protect them. For example, the so-called "Healthy Forests" initiative was mostly designed as a giveaway to lumber companies, and the recent opening up of formerly roadless areas in the national forests will cause serious damage in some areas. And this administration has shown no support for the Endangered Species Act in general. But if they're willing to take steps to protect ivory-bill habitat, we should be as quick to praise good actions as we are to criticize bad actions.

I'm neutral on the question of keeping birds as pets as long as those birds have been bred in captivity and hand-raised, not taken from the wild. The pet trade has had a devastating effect on the populations of some parrots and other tropical birds, because so many of the birds are taken out of the wild, either captured as adults or taken as nestlings, sometimes with the nest trees even being cut down so that the thieves can get to the young more easily. If someone is going to keep pet birds, they have a responsibility to be absolutely positive that those birds were not stolen from the wild.

Habitat loss is far more serious than the cat problem, since habitat loss affects the most specialized species while cats kill mostly common suburban birds. But outdoor cats still do a lot of damage, and this is especially true in places like parks where feral cats are being fed by well-intentioned but misguided people. Well-fed cats don't lose their hunting instinct -- they're just in better shape so they're more efficient predators. The American Bird Conservancy (as you mentioned) has an active program, called Cats Indoors!, to discourage pet owners from letting their cats roam outside freely. There's good evidence that indoor cats are healthier and live longer anyway, so it may be possible to appeal to cat lovers on that front even if they don't care about the survival of our wild birds. Public education is the key.

Thanks for the question! The guide covers mainly the U.S. and Canada, so it won't include all the tropical birds in southern Mexico, but it does include all those of a substantial area of northern Mexico. There's an organization called Birders' Exchange that does a lot of good work in Latin America, collecting used binoculars, telescopes, and other equipment from birders in North America to distribute to researchers and ecotourism workers in the tropics, and they've agreed to help distribute copies of my Spanish guide in northern Mexico and other areas where it might be useful. I'll be working with Birders' Exchange myself, helping to provide them with the books at low cost, and I'll work with anyone else who wants to give the books away. For this kind of thing, I can arrange to get copies of the books from the publisher at approximately half the cover price. The whole point is to get the books into the hands of the people who can get the most good out of them.

In looking at bird-life, we see massive evidence of the truth of climate change. Not only are there dozens of species that are steadily spreading northward, but in places where long-term records have been kept, we know that spring migrants are returning earlier, reflecting the overall warming of the climate. Still, it's hard to establish the connection to declines of specific species. There's so much that we don't know yet, and that's part of what makes this issue scary and hard to deal with. Of course, lots of people are scared by the issue, but they react in different ways. Most unfortunately, the Bush administration deals with its fear by going into denial, twisting the available science and twisting the arms of scientists to keep them from speaking up about climate change. I can understand Mr. Bush being afraid to confront the issue -- after all, dealing with the causes of climate change could turn out to be inconvenient for some of his biggest corporate supporters -- but he needs to start showing some backbone, to stand up to these powerful corporate interests, for the good of the American people and all other living things.

One thing that keeps me feeling positive is to hear about individuals like you, who took up birding and became concerned about the environment as a result! And I try to take a long-term view. I'm sure there are environmental disasters ahead, and I'm sure that things will get worse before they get better, but I know that some diversity will survive no matter what we humans do to the earth. I think that we can work to lessen the effects of disaster and to increase the number of species that will survive past any environmental bottleneck, so I'm working toward maximum biodiversity a century from now, not just in the short term.

I know that negative motivation, i.e., motivation through fear, works for some environmental problems involving immediate threats to humans. But for preserving biodiversity, the threat posed by the loss of diversity is too nebulous for most people to understand, so I try to focus on positive motivation. Get people to experience nature for themselves, give them an encounter with wild things that are magnificent or beautiful or captivating, and maybe they'll develop an emotional commitment to work for the continued survival of those species. There's nothing wrong with using charismatic standard-bearers like pandas or cheetahs or whales, but it's great if you can get people to connect with things they've actually seen in the wild, not just on television.

The only things we can really do are to document the problem and educate both the public and the policy-makers about the possible effects of such feeding. With most birds, of course, it doesn't create a problem (see next question, though). But with large predatory birds like eagles or ravens, there will be side effects of any activity that increases their local populations. I understand that common ravens survive through the winter on Alaska's North Slope by foraging at the garbage dumps at places like Barrow and Deadhorse, and I've seen these ravens ranging over the surrounding tundra in summer, raiding the nests of shorebirds and other migratory species. The artificially high numbers of these predatory ravens are undoubtedly hard on the populations of other species. The question is: at what point does this become enough of a problem that it requires remedial action from us? Constant monitoring of the situation is an essential first step.

House sparrows and European starlings probably had a serious impact on native species when their introduced populations were first spreading across North America, but by now they've achieved balance in most areas. They're probably suppressing local numbers of some other birds, but they're not driving anything toward extinction. Cowbirds, which parasitize the nests of other birds, represent a more serious problem. They're native, but human activities have greatly increased their survival, so they're having much more impact on other native songbirds than they did historically. If there's a point when your feeder is mainly supporting a big flock of cowbirds, it would be best to stop feeding for a while.