12 minute read
What's Happening to Washington's Birds?
The Last Canary in Life's Mine
The massive die-off of birds in the Pacific Northwest should send a message, but no one’s listening
written by Lauren Kramer
EARLY MORNING RISERS like to say they’re up with the birds, but it’s a phrase becoming increasingly irrelevant given the noticeable decline in morning birdsong. Look around for our avian friends and you may sense there are fewer of them than there once were. The release of the State of the Birds USA Report in October 2022 confirms steep declines in bird numbers across every habitat except wetlands, where decades of investment have resulted in some gains.
The bird loss numbers are staggering. The journal Science noted in 2019 that the United States and Canada have lost three billion breeding birds since 1940. That’s one in every four birds. Arid land birds are down 26 percent, sea ducks are down 30 percent, shorebirds are down 33 percent and grassland birds are down 34 percent. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists a whopping 269 bird species that will fall under the Endangered Species Act unless additional conservation measures are taken. And scientists with the Road to Recovery Initiative have identified an additional seventy species they deem at “tipping point.”
Tipping point species have lost two-thirds of their populations in the past fifty years. They’re projected to lose another 50 percent in the next five decades— which means they’re highly vulnerable to extinction— unless immediate conservation actions are taken.
Have you recently seen a golden eagle, a burrowing owl, a tufted puffin or a sandhill crane? What about the ferruginous hawk, the marbled murrelet, the common loon or the white-headed woodpecker? These are just a few of the thirty-three birds in Washington State listed as endangered, threatened or species of concern. If you’ve not seen them, it’s because there aren’t many of them left, and their future is looking bleak.
Common Loon
Derrick Jackson/Audubon Photography Awards
There’s no one reason for the decline in birds—rather, many reasons that together are depleting the populations of these species and many others. Loss of habitat is a big factor, as habitat conversion, tree and shrub encroachment on grasslands and pesticide use wipes out bird numbers. For shorebirds, the draining of shallow wetlands and loss of stopover habitat on coastal beaches and estuaries are a big problem, as is unregulated hunting in Latin America. For arid land birds, the threats to their habitat come from fire, drought, invasive plants, development, unsustainable grazing and energy extraction like mining and logging. Seabirds are being threatened by overfishing of their prey fish, fisheries bycatch, where they are caught and drowned in fishing nets, climate change that’s resulting in warming and rising ocean waters impacting their nesting habitat, and human-induced problems like marine debris pollution. For urban birds in our cities and neighborhoods, the two biggest causes of mortality are predation by cats and collision with glass. We lose 2.4 billion birds annually to predation by domestic cats according to the American Bird Conservancy, and glass collisions kill another billion birds a year.
“If we want to preserve birds for the future, we have to address multiple things simultaneously,” says Joshua Morris, urban conservation manager for Seattle Audubon. “We have to address climate change, because if we can’t get that under control there will be widespread ecological catastrophe, and not just for birds. But we also need to reduce other stressors to keep common birds common.”
The Audubon Society works to educate the public on why cats need to be kept indoors. Morris advocates for Seattle to adopt the kind of bird-safe building regulations that Vancouver and Portland already have in place, to prevent bird collisions with buildings. “Basically, it involves reducing the amount of glass used in a building, or where there is glass ensuring it has patterning that makes it visible to birds,” he explains. “There’s also design options architects can use to minimize the risk, such as sunscreens or external shades intentionally designed to reduce bird collision.”
Chances are you’ve seen bait boxes commonly used to trap rats. They contain a pesticide with an anticoagulant that thins the blood of rodents who consume it, causing hemorrhaging and a long, cruel death. They’re also dangerous for the hawks and owls that eat sick and poisoned rodents, Morris noted. “We’re saturating our neighborhoods with these toxic rat poisons, and as a result, most hawks and owls in the Puget Sound are testing positive for this poison. Even sublethal amounts can affect their ability to mate, find food and fight disease.”
With alternatives on the market that reduce male rodent fertility and have had marked success in a pilot project in the Queen Anne neighborhood, Morris hopes it marks the end of the anticoagulants. “There isn’t a lab in the country that would allow you to kill a rat with a poison like this, yet these bait boxes are everywhere on our streets,” he said. “Where are the animal ethics?”
Birds are canaries of our ecosystem, he observed, and the dramatic fall in their global numbers is a message we need to heed. “Birds are extremely sensitive to environmental change, and their decreases are indicative of widespread ecological loss,” he insists. “But addressing threats to birds also addresses threats to a wide variety of other species. Bird conservation is not just about the birds—it’s also about people who rely on healthy habitats.”
Away from the city and out at sea, Scott Pearson, senior research scientist for the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, has been monitoring the numbers of tufted puffins and marbled murrelets for the past twenty-two years. “Declines have been precipitous for the puffins, and we’ve gone from tens of thousands of them, to just over 1,000 birds,” he said. “The murrelet numbers have also declined significantly on the outer coast and the Salish Sea.”
Both are extremely sensitive to terrestrial and marine factors. The murrelet’s breeding grounds on the branches of old trees have been depleted by logging, while on land their habitat has been eroded as a result of the introduction of European hares. Red foxes have preyed on the puffin population in the San Juan islands, while out at sea they face a number of threats, including scarcer availability of forage fish as a result of marine heat waves that are becoming more numerous and more intense. “In years when conditions are really poor, these birds are starving to death,” Pearson said.
Tufted Puffin
Tom Ingram/Audubon Photography Awards
While you might not care much for murrelets or puffins, two species most Washingtonians haven’t seen and aren’t likely to encounter on an average day out, they’re indicator species, Pearson noted. “They’re providing insight into the health of our oceans, which are vitally important to us as a species. And they’re telling us that we need to do whatever we can to slow down and stop human-caused climate change, because it’s really clear that it’s happening.”
Pearson said long-term monitoring of species is crucial in that it provides significant data and insight. “Without it we don’t know how things are doing in the natural world,” he explained. “Monitoring helps us identify what locations are important to specific species, so we know how to protect them. And it helps us figure out why things are happening in a specific place so we can get insight into the causes of the declines and hopefully, do something about it.”
While the number of bird losses are staggering, it’s important to retain perspective, offered Dr. John Marzluff, professor of environmental and forest sciences at the University of Washington. “To say that globally all birds are going to hell in a handbasket is not really a useful statement. It’s better to identify the areas and birds that are most sensitive to our activities,” he said.
Where conservation work has been done, the results have been good. “Raptor population numbers have increased since the insecticide Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was banned in the United States in 1972. We now see more peregrine falcons, ospreys, red tailed hawks and cooper’s hawks,” he said. But other arid land and sagebrush steppe birds continue to suffer from the use of lethal neonicotinoids, an insecticide applied to crop seeds.
It’s the pinyon jay that keeps Marzluff up at night. It was a common bird when he studied this species in graduate school in the 1980s, but today it’s proposed to be listed as an endangered species. “When I hear about species like that, I worry a lot that a species once so common and resilient, able to use feeders in and around small towns, would succumb to the challenges of drought, diseases and habitat clearing,” he said.
In his own neighborhood, he’s witnessing the phenomenon of invasive species depleting native bird species in the fight for territory between native northern spotted owls, and invasive barred owls. “Barred owls came across from the Eastern Seaboard and now they’re all over parts of the West Coast,” he said. “I see one in my backyard in Seattle.”
Barred owls are bigger and more aggressive than the native northern spotted owls, and they’re usurping the territory and food source of their native relatives. Spotted owls have been listed as near threatened under the Endangered Species Act since 1990, and their numbers are now close to extinction. “In some areas, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services was shooting the barred owls on federal and private forest land, and what they saw is that if you take out the barred owls, the spotted owls return,” he said.
In Washington State, fire destruction and the logging of old growth forests has caused a massive decline in the spotted owl population. An analysis done last year concluded that only by preserving the best remaining habitat, managing forests to avoid the most serious wildfires and controlling the barred owl population, can the northern spotted owl be saved.
The question is, will we act in time to save this and other threatened bird populations?
Dr. Trina Bayard, director of bird conservation for Audubon Washington, is optimistic. “There’s a lot of incredible work underway focused on protecting and conserving birds and biodiversity, like the Puget Sound Biodiversity Partnership, which brings stakeholders together to work on shared goals,” she said. “In 2020, our state legislature approved $2.35 million in funding to create a strategy for conservation projects like fire resilience. That’s being focused on the sagebrush steppe, in the eastern part of our state, where habitat loss and degradation has been accelerated by severe and large fires.”
“Washington state does a great job of bringing people together to leverage each other’s strength and resources for our shared values of conservation,” she noted. “That’s an area where we’re strong and that gives me hope for our ability to protect birds in the state.”
This year’s legislature budget request from The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is $47.6 million and by far exceeds its requests from previous years. “It’s a really big ask, and it’s hard to say if they will get it,” said Bayard. “We have a lot of work to do to convince our legislators and the governor that this is a priority for Washington State and that the people really want this.”
In his 2020 book In Search of Meadowlarks, Marzluff argues that what humankind has failed at is sharing the land with wildlife generally and birds specifically. “We’ve spared some of it by creating reserves, which are okay and necessary for some species, but it’s not enough in today’s world, where more active management is necessary,” he said.
Just in his lifetime, he noted that we’ve already lost up to twenty-five species to extinction. “I think we’ll lose more,” he lamented. “There are many things that need to happen, and I don’t see change happening quickly—or at least, fast enough. It’s an uphill battle because society doesn’t understand or value the need for change as much as those of us who work with birds. Still, if people do simple things, they can have a big effect.”
Those actions include keeping cats indoors, marking windows that are dangerous in terms of bird collisions, banning insecticides and herbicides from agricultural settings, and doing land conversion in agricultural areas, Marzluff said.
“We need some bird habitat interspersed between our farms, which is something that’s done in Europe but not in the U.S., where we farm fence row to fence row and plough it all,” he observed. “The work of big multinational corporations in agriculture makes this hard to regulate, but we need to incentivize farmers to be able to afford to do the right thing.”
Still, he has reason for hope. “Many of today’s young people are returning to the land to farm, using wildlife-friendly approaches including avoiding chemicals, resting land, not tilling and setting aside some land for wildlife,” he said. Customers at farmer’s markets or larger grocery stores are supporting these efforts in increasing—though still small—numbers. I’m hopeful because small things done by many people do add up.”
Ferruginous Hawk
Timothy Shore/Audubon Photography Awards
