Tag Archives: birds

Some facts and figures on how birds die

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This article on a site called ZME Science has some facts and figures on how many birds are killed (in the U.S., I think) by wind turbines compared to other causes.

  • wind turbines: 140,000-680,000 birds per year; 0.3 – 0.4 birds per GW-hr of power production
  • power lines: 12-64 million birds per year [Daddy, how can the birds sit on the power lines without being electrocuted? Well, I guess the answer is that the ones you see on the power lines are the ones that didn’t get electrocuted.]
  • vehicle collisions: 89 million – 340 million birds per year
  • glass buildings: 1 billion birds per year [well, the article says “up to almost”. Rounding is fine with me, but they are oddly precise on some numbers and willing to round on others.]
  • cats: 1.3 billion – 4 billion birds per year [I happen to like cats just fine, but if you consider yourself a friend of animals in general it is really kind of immoral and hypocritical to have an unsupervised outdoor cat.]
  • fossil fuels: 5.2 birds per GW-hr of power produced “through habitat destruction, mercury poisoning, and acid rain” [presumably, the study referenced here followed some pretty different methods than the ones that looked at birds running into stuff and getting disemboweled by cat claws. But still, you can say this is an order of magnitude more than the wind turbines per unit of energy supplied, controlling for the fact that fossil fuels are supplying more energy in an absolute sense.]

There are some things you can do to make the wind turbines less bad for birds. But really, it’s the cats and the cars and just the general wanton destruction/displacement of nature by our civilization. Now I’ve depressed myself, as I often do.

how to get rid of robins???

In my experience, robins can tear up grass, scatter mulch while foraging for food, and even eat fruit or crops from your garden. Moreover, their nests can harbor parasites and insects, which can put your family, pets, and home at risk. The smell of robin droppings can also be incredibly unpleasant, particularly if the birds manage to get inside your walls.

todayshomeowner.com

This left me speechless – It honestly never occurred to me that robins could have enemies. Could this person maybe be thinking of pigeons? Or is this person even a person? If this is an AI concluding that a harmless bird is a threat that needs to be gotten rid of, it may be a cautionary tale for other species, like ours.

census reveals massive Philadelphia population loss – for pigeons

The (paywalled) Philadelphia Inquirer reports on a citizen science bird count showing a massive drop in the pigeon population over the last few years. At the same time, raptor populations like red-tailed hawks and Peregrine falcons are up. There are reasons the data are uncertain, but this is still pretty cool.

I’ve had some memorable raptor sitings in Philly over the years. Recently, I heard a significant commotion and looked up to see a red-tailed hawk in a tree very close to my front door. This was early spring before there were leaves on the trees, so I imagine it had a good line of site to the ground. Mice and rats were the first prey species that popped into my mind, but yeah there are pigeons around too.

Peregrine falcons are not very shy in urban environments. I remember seeing one sitting on a street map above a busy street, next to a park that I know from personal experience is full of mice, rats, and pigeons.

Once I saw a falcon that had trapped a squirrel under a bench in Rittenhouse Square. Like I said, they are not shy around people, but when the park is busy they will tend to be hire up in the trees or on buildings. This was very early in the morning, and the falcon was just sitting there on the bench with the squirrel underneath. The squirrel would try to run out, and the falcon would swoop out and try to get its talons around the squirrel, and the squirrel would slip out and dart back under the bench. Falcons are big birds. I gave this one a respectful distance, but it took no notice of me whatsoever.

Go Birds!

It’s the morning of Super Bowl Sunday as I write this, and I don’t know if the Philadelphia Eagles will win tonight. If you are reading this, you will probably know or you can look it up. In the meantime, if you want to watch eagles on TV there are at least two live streams of bald eagle nests in Pennsylvania. When I checked just now, one had an eagle in it and one was empty. Even an empty bald eagle nest is an impressive structure worth a look.

Audubon native garden designs

For people like me with limited artistic sense (visual anyway, and you don’t want me to dance in public, although I was once upon a time a well-trained and active musician), these visual garden designs from Audubon are helpful. Basically, you put the tall plants and flowers in the middle and shorter ones more toward the edges, I think, and then you can consider colors and timing of the flowers. Easy to think about, harder to do.