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A Quiet Spring Colonel Bob Reed Ever since Racheal Carson wrote Silent Spring, I guess we've always had the question in our minds: Could it really happen? I hope the spring AOS meeting was just an anomaly, but we saw far less birds on Dauphin Island than in past springs. Usually, Dauphin Island in April is covered with birds, hundreds of thousands of thrushes, tanagers, warblers, shorebirds and buntings arriving from their long migration flight across the Gulf of Mexico. It's not uncommon for the bird group to which we belong to see 215 or more species on a three-day weekend. This year we had 199 (which was later increased to 207, pending rulings by the Records Committee) but the numbers of each species were down dramatically. Where we were seeing dozens of a species last year, we saw one or two. Where we saw hundreds or thousands last year, we saw dozens this year. There are many explanations possible. One theory is that the winds were more out of the southeast instead of the south, and the birds simply came ashore in Louisiana and Texas instead of Alabama. Another possibility is that the winds off the Yucatan peninsula were remaining out of the north and the birds were simply stacking up on the beach, so to speak, waiting for favorable winds, and they will be here, but later than normal. Another possibility was that, because the winds along the Alabama coast were out of the south at night, the birds simply overshot the coast, choosing instead to go on to the Tensaw Delta, where the food and cover were more abundant. All these conditions existed at some point during the migration season, so all these explanations were reasonable for at least part of the time. There is a darker side to all this. There are several species which have been declining at alarming rates -- from 2% to 5% per year! It doesn't take rates like that very long before there simply aren't enough birds of a particular species to sustain a viable population. Wood Thrushes are one of those species. Remember when we were young, we saw these birds frequently, and we heard their marvelous woodland song all spring and much of the summer. About 90% of those birds are gone, just in the past twenty years. Cerulean Warblers used to breed in much of Alabama. Now they breed in only one place in the whole state, an area of a few square miles in one national forest. Cerulean Warblers are one of the most beautiful birds in North America. The sky is cerulean blue. That tells you what color these tiny birds are. They are breathtaking, mostly blue, set off by black wings and tail edged in white and blue. I am very much afraid that my granddaughter, who is two, will never see one of these birds alive. Will that be the end of the world? Of course not. Just as loosing the Grand Canyon or the redwood forests would not be the end of the world. But it would be a part of our heritage that our descendants would never enjoy. They, and we will be poorer for the loss. On a brighter side, the program Saturday night was fantastic. Dwight Peake, from Galveston, Texas, gave us a neat glimpse of the tons of avian life out beyond the beach. Most of us left with our appetites whetted for one of our pelagic trips coming up this summer. The meetings were well attended, and pointed out the growing concern that we are about to outgrow our meeting hall. Then what do we do? A perplexing problem, but one that many organizations would be happy to have, but then, they don't have birds to enjoy at their meetings. This page
was last updated on September 14, 2001. | |||||
