eight birds:

Working in partnership with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, BirdStory  has selected eight birds for eight stories that help us understand the causes and impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss – as well as inspire and connect us to birds, each other and our American landscapes.

BASTION: Northern Gannet

This once endangered bird thrives because of a remote, protected reserve. However, such “fortress conservation” is increasingly challenged by the ubiquity of climate change. Warming sees impact the fish stocks on which gannets – and commercial fisheries – depend, forcing us all to adopt new strategies.

The predicted functional extinction of this iconic grassland bird is a direct result of the on-going, wholesale destruction of prairie landscapes through unfettered development and grazing practices. However, with pressures from prolonged drought, many ranchers are adopting grazing strategies that promote contiguous, healthy prairie because what’s good for the bird is good for the herd.

The tidying of nature, as a practice and ideology rooted in the development of our post-War suburbs, has resulted in pathological, national “lawnification” now endangering species like the Whip-poor-will that prefer “messy” habitat.

Pure human greed nearly put an end to the Whimbrel. Collective, bi-partisan laws like the Migratory Birds Act and preservation of key staging areas in their bi-hemispheric migration are powerful actions of reparation, protecting the multiple “pinch-points” where whimbrels face the most threat. However, with climate change and on-going hunting pressures, global co-operation is needed to ensure this bird’s survival.

The Saltmarsh Sparrow is a canary in the coal mine of climate change: the steady rise in sea-water level is drowning young chicks and pushing the species towards extinction. Even as our own “coastal habitat” of condos and golf courses is under increasingly obvious, measurable threat, we continue to and build (and rebuild).

Three hundred years ago, the Bermuda Petrel, was believed exterminated by Spanish settlers in the Caribbean. Then, in 1951, eighteen pairs were found on rocky Bermudan outcrop by a local boy. Seabirds are particularly elusive to us: albatrosses, shearwaters, terns represent the sublime and illimitable.

We laud the success of the Peregrine Falcon in adapting to cityscapes but ignore the millions of migrating songbirds dying in window strikes. Environmental changes are now occurring so quickly that most species’ adaptions – developed over deep time - cannot possibly keep up. Including Homo sapiens.

Living in complete isolation from humans, this elusive Arctic traveler has been neither adequately filmed nor studied and is bound to the same fate of starvation as the polar bear.  As the pack ice melts, we watch with terrible scientific omniscience how this exquisite wild, white bird vanishes into oblivion.

Fire blasts through a western forest. Oil spills into the sea. Energy-sucking data centers sprawls over ruined desert habitat. What is our adaptive response to this? Do we simply continue? Or do we collectively demand and shape a new approach – a new Manifest Destiny that places planetary health at the center of our value system? We can tell a different story of humanity’s entanglement with the gorgeous, complex lifeforms caught here with us at this place and time.