Birds

The ancients understood the concept of evolution, but they took it as a political concept rather than as an ecological or geological one. The biblical Book of Daniel, for example, returns in three different chapters (twice explicitly and once allusively) to the notion that nations rise and fall, that the super-powers of any given generations are almost by definition the successor-states to earlier powers that ran their course and then, after a period of decline, either disappeared entirely or else turned back into being “just” one among the many other nations of the world. The version of that vision in the seventh chapter of the book is particularly stirring in that it depicts each successive nation as a fantastic beast emerging from the sea and taking its predecessor’s place on the shore. First, a lion with eagle’s wings steps onto the beach only to be forced to stand erect on its back legs while its wings are ripped off and its leonine heart replaced with a puny human one. And then it is replaced on that same beach by a man-eating bear that has also stepped out of the sea and which briefly takes its turn dominating the scene…until being itself replaced by a terrifying four-headed winged leopard that takes over when “dominion is given unto it.” But even that doesn’t last, because, soon enough, the winged leopard is replaced by a new beast, a true monster “dreadful and terrible and exceedingly strong” possessed of teeth made of iron and crowned with ten different horns sprouting from its giant head, which stomps whatever remains of its predecessors into dust.

It’s a long, weird vision and there’s been endless speculation among scholars regarding identities of the specific nations the author of Daniel had in mind. But the key point is that the concept that nation-states rise and fall—and that the world as we know it is specifically not as it was a century, or a dozen centuries, ago—was well known to the ancients. Nor was this all solely about the succession of super-powers: for the Greeks, the notion of successor states on earth nicely mirrored the history of the gods on high—Hesiod’s Theogony is all about how the Olympian deities eventually succeeded the different generations of gods that preceded them and came to rule the world. And there were similar ideas afoot across the ancient Near East as well.

But those were all political ideas and the notion that the physical world, the world we see all about us along with its fauna and its flora—the notion that what appears to be true of nation-states could also be true with respect to the environment, that appears not to have been known to the ancients. As a result, they imagined the world they saw all around them to be precisely as the world was when the Creator created it, both unchanged and—more to the point, unchangeable. Indeed, the story of creation in the first chapter of the Bible, less nuanced than the retelling in Genesis 2 but really just as stirring to consider, imagines God creating the physical world, then using the irresistible force of divine speech to fill the seas with fish and the skies with birds, and to create at once the animals of the world in all their diversity and also a world full of human beings, male and female, “to control the environment and to subdue it” when it for some reason seems unresponsive to human needs or wants.

All this by way of introducing my topic this week, one I first read about a few weeks ago but which has been weighing on me particularly just lately in the wake of all the Earth Day essays and articles I’ve been reading, and also in light of Steve Goldstein’s pre-Shabbat presentation last Friday about (among other things) the first Earth Day held back in 1970 when I was a senior in high school and could practically feel the earth moving under my feet as the age of Aquarius dawned and the new rushed in to sweep away the old. (That that perception was completely, or almost completely, false only became clear to me years later. But that’s not what I want to write about today.)

Here I want to write about birds and discuss one of the most shocking pieces of scientific writing I’ve seen in a long time, possibly ever. According to an essay published just before the pandemic in the journal Science, there has been an almost unfathomable decline of about 2.9 billion in the bird population of North America in the last fifty years—a decline that started precisely with the year in which the first Earth Day was observed. In other words, there are almost 30% fewer birds in North America today than there were when I was a senior in high school, an almost unimaginable decline.

What has caused this remains a matter of debate, but all the scientists whose works I’ve consulted seem to agree that the destruction of traditional bird habitats and the widespread use of toxic pesticides are major factors, as also is—albeit in a more subtle, less easy explainable way—climate change itself. Also of interest is the fact that, of the 2.9 billion birds that have vanished, about 90% belong to just about a dozen avian families, including finches, swallows, warblers, and sparrows. But there are losses across the board that affect every region of the continent and almost every species. (It is true that some species have come back almost from the brink of extinction, which list famously—or semi-famously—includes the American bald eagle, the Trumpeter Swan, and the Peregrine Falcon. But those success stories are all rooted in the massive efforts of scientists and environmentalists to pull a specific species back from the brink of extinction; as far as I know, no almost-extinct species has ever turned back from the precipice all on its own.) Forest birds alone account for almost one billion of the losses, but grassland birds have declined by about 700 million—which number leaves us now with about half the original population. No matter how you work the statistics, something terrible has happened to the world while more or less no one was looking…and those few who were looking were unable to fathom the scope of the debacle. Until now.

It’s easy not to care. So there are 862 million fewer sparrows in the world, so what? I mean…in the end, I didn’t know how many sparrows there were in the first place, they play no specific role in my life, I have been—at best—vaguely aware of their existence over the years of my own lifetime…so how does any of this affect me? That’s the question most will ask when confronting the number of missing sparrows…or the loss of 182 million larks or 618 million warblers. After all, the Passenger Pigeon went extinct and the world endured! (The Passenger Pigeon was once the most abundant bird in North America with a population before their decline set in of somewhere between 3 and 5 billion. And then, once deforestation destroyed most of its natural habitat, the decline began and ended only when the sole remaining Passenger Pigeon in the world died on September 1, 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. For a very interesting NPR podcast about the demise of the Passenger Pigeon, click here.) Like I said, it would be easy not to care. Or to care a little, but not quite enough to respond meaningfully to the news that so many of the most familiar birds are in danger of having no North American presence at all. But the reality is that this is one, large, interconnected biosystem we occupy…and we are not its sole residents. Birds, including the most common ones, control pests, pollinate flowers, spread seeds, regenerate forests, and are vital, productive members of the ecosystem in dozens of other ways as well. What will happen if they vanish in serious enough numbers to leave those vital tasks unaddressed, no one knows. But we’re about to find out. To read more, click here, here, here, here, or here. Pouring a whiskey before you start reading would probably be an excellent idea.

I admit that my first response, like most people’s I’m sure, was to turn the page and worry about something else. But then, when I returned to the topic over the last few weeks and started reading and rereading the many, many published essays responding to the original article in Science (the first of the “click here’s” at the end of the preceding paragraph), I began to understand how serious we all need to take this. We age mostly imperceptibly…and then, one day, the universe forces us to take stock of where we are and how we are or aren’t watching over our own best interests. This is more like that, I think: something that happens imperceptibly, but which has the capacity eventually to alter the course of human history. Yes, we will survive the decline of the Redwing Blackbird population (down from 270 million to a mere 160 million in just fifty years). But, taken all together, a picture begins to form…and it is not one we dare look away from. As we live our lives, and as society develops along its way, we are bringing about irreversible changes to the biosystem and, at least eventually, to the planet itself. What shape those changes will take, who can say? But to imagine that these issues are unimportant because they don’t all affect the way we live on a daily basis…that seems to me the definition of narrowminded folly. For better or for worse, we’re all in this together—us and the grackles and, yes, the sparrows.