something I worry about
(Now, I'm not turning this into a politics/culture/commentary blog; there are too many of those out there already and I tend to shy away from the sort of things that make people angry and make people decide that they don't want to be your friend any more because of what you believe. But anyway)
What's going to happen to the birds?
There's been a lot of talk - on the news and elsewhere - about the Avian Flu. About how we all should have a couple months' worth of food stockpiled in case we all have to hole up in our houses to avoid getting sick and dying. Lots of speculation on the potential of the virus to mutate into a form that can transmit from human to human. Lots of questions about whether a vaccine can be made in time, and if so, how will it be rationed.
But you don't hear anything much about the birds, other than that some poultry may be being vaccinated against the disease. What about the wild birds? What will become of them? Are there species with natural resistance? It seems to be that waterfowl are most the ones you hear about but I've not heard if the songbirds seem to be immune or not.
And one of the things I was thinking of: could we be looking at a new Silent Spring, a Silent Spring we did not directly cause (but may have contributed to through the various concentrations of birds in poultry farms) and about which we can do nothing? In the 1960s, when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, she was trying to educate people on the dangers of indiscriminate pesticide use - and people cut back, and in the US at least, banned the use of things like ddt. And there have been gains - the Bald Eagle may be taken off the Endangered Species List (unless you were a kid of the 70s growing up in an ecoconscious home, that may not give you a feeling of wonder, as it does me). But it looks like there's nothing we can do about this - other than maybe culling or ring-vaccinating populations.
And so I wonder - will our children walk through nearly-silent forests? Are there species of birds today that we will think of in the future like people think of the American Chestnut - gone, not quite forgotten, a species that once ranged widely and was a part of people's lives? (I remember having an Uncle Wiggly book as a child where some of the characters went out to pick chestnuts and had to remove the burrs, and I didn't know what they were talking about - as far as I was concerned, it was a mythical tree the author made up).
Anyway - I haven't seen much from the ecologists or environmentalists on this. Is it really not as big a threat to wild birds as I fear? Or are the concerns for other species being squashed down by the flood of information and misinformation about amantadine and vaccines for humans and talk of closing the borders and all that? I realize some self-interest for our species in this matter is important, but I can't help but feel this might be another "year 2000" thing, where everyone panics but nothing actually happens.
