What the Warblers are Telling Us

“Nothing gold can stay.” So wrote Robert Frost in 1923.

That phrase and Frost’s poem returned to haunt me last week as I saw a small gold bird – a Wilson’s warbler – staggering across my lawn. I kept one eager cat away, so maybe that bird survived.

There has been a rash of bird deaths recently, so many that both New Mexico State University’s Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Ecology and Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife are looking into causes. The die-off first came to official notice last August when Ecologist Martha Desmond, a professor at New Mexico State University, began investigating a mass bird death at the White Sands Missile Range.

At first, Desmond thought it was an isolated incident.

Gradually, scientists and wildlife officials discovered that the die-off was happening all across New Mexico – with numbers that could be in the hundreds of thousands. It’s now clear that it has reached beyond New Mexico.

I noticed it myself. This summer, I found and buried three dead sparrows in my garden. In years past, I have a times found a single bird – usually one carrying some trauma characteristic of predator attack or a window strike – but never three! None of those three, nor the fourth I found caught and desiccated in my picket fence, showed any sign of injury. (I couldn’t face number four and was grateful to discover that my husband had finally removed its wasted body.)

Wasted. That’s how it’s been with most of the dead birds.

My local birdwatching friends have been seen the deaths here in our valley, and the Vail Daily has written about Eagle County, where it cataloged more than 75 reports from locals. A disproportionate number of the deaths were from Wilson’s warblers. Again: no signs of trauma, just birds wasted away to little more than feathers and bones.

Michelle McBride posted about 50 to 100 dead birds along the Frying Pan River and folks chimed in about dead birds in Redstone, Basalt, Glenwood, Silt, Craig. My friend Jae Gregory noticed dozens at Twin Lakes: dead robins and even a dead duck. “It’s really beyond sad. What we have done to them…”

As ecologist Desmond said, “we honestly do not know” what is killing the birds, and citizens are invited to contribute to data-gathering about the deaths at: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/southwest-avian-mortality-project.

It does appear that the avian deaths are concentrated among insect-eaters. A meta-analysis published this year in the journal Science found that terrestrial insects appeared to be declining at about nine percent per decade, around the world, with water insects dying off a bit faster. The reasons for that include habitat destruction, intensive agriculture, insecticides and introduced species.

Is it, as Jae suspects, due to something we humans have done?

Probably. Desmond suspects that our early Colorado snowstorm pushed the warblers to migrate before they were ready for the trip. It could also be that “fires across the western United States forced some of them to change their migratory routes. Some of them could have some smoke damage” to their lungs. Drought and lack of plants, leading to a lack of insects, could also play a role.

All of that – change of rain patterns, drought, fires, wildly uneven seasons and disruption of ecological food chains – are characteristics of global warming.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

In 2013, in its fifth assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that it is “extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature” from 1951 to 2010 was caused by human activity.

Just this month, Inger Anderson, who heads the United Nations environmental program, commented on mankind’s failure to meet decade-long biodiversity goals set in 2010. “From COVID-19 to massive wildfires, floods, melting glaciers and unprecedented heat,” she stated, “our failure to meet the Aichi (biodiversity) targets — protect our our home — has very real consequences. We can no longer afford to cast nature to the side.”

I am trying not to “sink to grief” but I know that those little gold warblers, dying in their thousands, are messengers of Gaia, the proverbial canaries in a coal mine. They are warning us we have very, very little time. (Last Saturday, the clock on New York City’s Metronome building flashed up the message, “The Earth has a deadline”, followed by the numbers 7:103:15:40:07 — the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds we have to prevent the effects of global warming from becoming irreversible.)

“Nature’s first green is gold,” wrote Robert Frost, “Her hardest hue to hold…leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief. So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.”

 

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This column was originally published in the Sopris Sun newspaper on September 23, 2020