In this final post about the BP spill, I talk about the slippery slope from courage through silent resistance, hanging on for survival, and cowardice, all the way down to complicity.
Thank you again, Laura, for your clear-headed insights. We who love birds and believe in their inherent right to protection and rehabilitation from human-caused harm; we who respect the importance of the collective ecosystem services they provide and who deeply appreciate the intrinsic beauty of their mere existence in our world; we who grow tired of the always uphill battles and two steps back; we need to breathe the fresh air of your words, catch our breath, and keep taking those seemingly futile single steps forward…no matter what.
I was not a birder when the BP oil spill happened. Learning all of this today is devastating. To think of all of the suffering and lives lost that were not even mourned is heartbreaking. I very much appreciate the education and history lessons you provide in these posts. Kudos to Drew Wheelan and to you for shining a light on his heroism.
I love Bob Mulvihill's comments. Bird lovers need to stick together!
I cannot improve Bob's attentive and very true assessment of your writing's undeniable value in avian conservation. A hidden, underappreciated gem, I hope it someday receives the even more wide readership it deserves.
As for oil spills, yes, Exon Valdiz released 260,000 of crude oil into Alaska's Price William Sound on March 24, 1989, killing between 100,000 to 300,000 sea birds. The 2010 Gulf-Deep Horizon spill is said to have caused 1,000,000. Unfortunately, and I know you are all too highly aware of it and a constant, adamant proponent of that awareness, windowkill alone accounts for 333 annual Exons and 100 annual Deepwater Horizons. And that is according to the lower, old estimate of 100 million annual deaths due to bird-window collisions in the lower 48 alone annually. Now that lower, 1979 estimate has risen in a March research paper by Dr. Klem and colleagues in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology to 1.28 billion, and as much as 1.92 billion, due to the fashion and esthetic of unobstructed plate glass. 86% of bird glass strikes fly off, and 70% of those succumb later unnoticed without marks on glass, according to field research experiments. The latter figure is probably more like 90% more informally and unofficially. 40% of windowkill occurs from our homes, not the more newsworthy city buildings and skyscrapers. Yet it is technically illegal and quite avoidable. Simple treatments like, and I'm not affiliated with them, Acopian Bird Savers, the most effective, with minimal obstruction, can be implemented. It's an uphill battle like with oil spills. Even colleges and universities, nature centers, and birders who own their own homes, are unaware of it without piles of dead bodies as the evidence, and entire migration subroutes drying up going through their neighborhoods. Only habitat destruction kills more birds by human excesses, inability to politically cooperate for conservation, and downright ignorance.
But the last thing I want to do is invalidate bird deaths, any bird deaths. 1,000,000 avian deaths is 1,000,000 to many, way too many. I feel to me the plain disgusting thing is we simply don't have to political will and cooperative organization yet TO STOP KILLING OUR FEATHERED SIBLINGS. We simply shouldn't be in the business of it, and, call me paranoid, but it seems our constant refusal to cooperate to avoid it is an almost incorporate wall. It certainly remains a huge obstacle as that 70% of bird deaths since 1970-2020 is still increasing as a rate and the general populace remains seemingly unwilling to do anything or even care about it. Probably most do care about it, I hope, but are simply at a loss as to how to cooperate at the speed necessary to avoid total collapse of our avifauna. I have ideas, and I know you do, specific on how we would do that. Maybe all this is an idea for another post, as you may already plan to do so. I hope I've not preempted on it too much.
Way back in 2006, before Cornell, ABC, or Audubon were accepting that windows are a genuine conservation issue, I wrote a book, 101 Ways to Help Birds. I was using Dan Klem's original figure of 500 million to a billion when I wrote about minimizing window strikes. I wrote about the MANY ways conserving energy helps birds, why minimizing meat, especially beef, consumption helps birds--I got into a LOT of issues that took years more for others to consider serious. Some prominent conservation biologists panned the book because they didn't consider early pasture mowing, window collisions, or a host of issues I covered to be legitimate problems for birds. And because the bird got very little attention, it didn't sell well. Now I have the entire text, with a few updates and photos, on my website, under "Ways to Help" at the top of www.lauraerickson.com.
The book is almost 20 years old now--I SO wish someone would write a completely revised second edition, but it was VERY difficult to find a publisher back then. My working title was "Resounding Spring" as an answer to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (I had a lot about pesticides in there, too). Every major publisher warned me that NO publishers would consider any kind of blatant reference to her. We were approaching the centennial of her birth and Republicans put the kibosh on any national day of recognition for her, saying she was responsible for the deaths of "millions" of children from malaria.
Thank you again, Laura, for your clear-headed insights. We who love birds and believe in their inherent right to protection and rehabilitation from human-caused harm; we who respect the importance of the collective ecosystem services they provide and who deeply appreciate the intrinsic beauty of their mere existence in our world; we who grow tired of the always uphill battles and two steps back; we need to breathe the fresh air of your words, catch our breath, and keep taking those seemingly futile single steps forward…no matter what.
I ditto Robert Mulvihill's comments...especially our need to breathe the fresh air of your words Laura!!
I was not a birder when the BP oil spill happened. Learning all of this today is devastating. To think of all of the suffering and lives lost that were not even mourned is heartbreaking. I very much appreciate the education and history lessons you provide in these posts. Kudos to Drew Wheelan and to you for shining a light on his heroism.
I love Bob Mulvihill's comments. Bird lovers need to stick together!
I cannot improve Bob's attentive and very true assessment of your writing's undeniable value in avian conservation. A hidden, underappreciated gem, I hope it someday receives the even more wide readership it deserves.
As for oil spills, yes, Exon Valdiz released 260,000 of crude oil into Alaska's Price William Sound on March 24, 1989, killing between 100,000 to 300,000 sea birds. The 2010 Gulf-Deep Horizon spill is said to have caused 1,000,000. Unfortunately, and I know you are all too highly aware of it and a constant, adamant proponent of that awareness, windowkill alone accounts for 333 annual Exons and 100 annual Deepwater Horizons. And that is according to the lower, old estimate of 100 million annual deaths due to bird-window collisions in the lower 48 alone annually. Now that lower, 1979 estimate has risen in a March research paper by Dr. Klem and colleagues in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology to 1.28 billion, and as much as 1.92 billion, due to the fashion and esthetic of unobstructed plate glass. 86% of bird glass strikes fly off, and 70% of those succumb later unnoticed without marks on glass, according to field research experiments. The latter figure is probably more like 90% more informally and unofficially. 40% of windowkill occurs from our homes, not the more newsworthy city buildings and skyscrapers. Yet it is technically illegal and quite avoidable. Simple treatments like, and I'm not affiliated with them, Acopian Bird Savers, the most effective, with minimal obstruction, can be implemented. It's an uphill battle like with oil spills. Even colleges and universities, nature centers, and birders who own their own homes, are unaware of it without piles of dead bodies as the evidence, and entire migration subroutes drying up going through their neighborhoods. Only habitat destruction kills more birds by human excesses, inability to politically cooperate for conservation, and downright ignorance.
But the last thing I want to do is invalidate bird deaths, any bird deaths. 1,000,000 avian deaths is 1,000,000 to many, way too many. I feel to me the plain disgusting thing is we simply don't have to political will and cooperative organization yet TO STOP KILLING OUR FEATHERED SIBLINGS. We simply shouldn't be in the business of it, and, call me paranoid, but it seems our constant refusal to cooperate to avoid it is an almost incorporate wall. It certainly remains a huge obstacle as that 70% of bird deaths since 1970-2020 is still increasing as a rate and the general populace remains seemingly unwilling to do anything or even care about it. Probably most do care about it, I hope, but are simply at a loss as to how to cooperate at the speed necessary to avoid total collapse of our avifauna. I have ideas, and I know you do, specific on how we would do that. Maybe all this is an idea for another post, as you may already plan to do so. I hope I've not preempted on it too much.
Way back in 2006, before Cornell, ABC, or Audubon were accepting that windows are a genuine conservation issue, I wrote a book, 101 Ways to Help Birds. I was using Dan Klem's original figure of 500 million to a billion when I wrote about minimizing window strikes. I wrote about the MANY ways conserving energy helps birds, why minimizing meat, especially beef, consumption helps birds--I got into a LOT of issues that took years more for others to consider serious. Some prominent conservation biologists panned the book because they didn't consider early pasture mowing, window collisions, or a host of issues I covered to be legitimate problems for birds. And because the bird got very little attention, it didn't sell well. Now I have the entire text, with a few updates and photos, on my website, under "Ways to Help" at the top of www.lauraerickson.com.
The book is almost 20 years old now--I SO wish someone would write a completely revised second edition, but it was VERY difficult to find a publisher back then. My working title was "Resounding Spring" as an answer to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (I had a lot about pesticides in there, too). Every major publisher warned me that NO publishers would consider any kind of blatant reference to her. We were approaching the centennial of her birth and Republicans put the kibosh on any national day of recognition for her, saying she was responsible for the deaths of "millions" of children from malaria.