theinformedvegan:

Humans in India have encroached on wildlife and their habitats to the point that tigers are now developing a taste for human prey and elephants are seeking revenge.

Scientists warn that if humans in India continue to take more natural habitat away from tigers, the attacks could become more frequent.  We are already seeing cases where adult tigers are teaching their young to hunt humans and the number of attacks continue to rise.  Tiger attacks in India are up 30% over the last decade.

Farmers use weapons to chase elephants and even poison elephant mothers and their calves. Elephants, typically peaceful vegetarians, have started fighting back. When chased, the elephant herds often panic and end up trampling farmers.  In one case, a mother of a tortured elephant calf attacked and ate the remains of her child’s tormentor.

As more and more land is taken, the animals that live there begin to starve.  They’re driven to extremes in order to survive.  I guess we should let this be a warning.

This is just ridiculous. We destroy their habitat, then the animals fight back, so we outright kill them. We blame them for attacking humans, when in reality we started the fight. (I’d also like to point out that the title is misleading; elephants are not eating humans but they are attacking them).

mohandasgandhi:

At the beginning of this month when about 5,000 red-winged blackbirds fell from the sky in one night in Arkansas, biologists were called on to put a damper on public speculation about pesticides and secret military tests by reminding everyone how many birds there are and how many die. They often do so as a result of human activity, but in far more mundane and dispiriting ways than conspiracy buffs might imagine.

“Five billion birds die in the U.S. every year,” said Melanie Driscoll, a biologist and director of bird conservation for the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi Flyway for the National Audubon Society.

That’s from “Conspiracies Don’t Kill Birds. People, However, Do,” a NY Times story on the hot eco-topic du jour.  The five billion number may seem high, but Birds Etcetera did a literature review in 2002 that seems consistent with it.  A 1997 Biodiversity and Conservation study, “How many birds are there?” found “different methods yield surprisingly consistent estimates of a global bird population of between 200 billion and 400 billion individuals.”

Here’s more of the NYT story:

That means that on average, 13.7 million birds die in this country every day. This number, while large, needs to be put into context. The federal Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that a minimum of 10 billion birds breed in the United States every year and that as many as 20 billion may be in the country during the fall migratory season.

Even without humans, tens of millions of birds would be lost each year to natural predators and natural accidents — millions of fledglings die during their first attempts at flight. But according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, people have severely complicated the task of survival. Although mortality rates are difficult to calculate for certain, using modeling and other methods like extrapolation from local research findings, the government has come up with estimates of how many birds die from various causes in the United States.

Some of the biggest death traps are surprising. Almost everyone has an experience with a pet proudly bringing home a songbird in its jaws. Nationally, domestic and feral cats kill hundreds of millions of birds each year, according to the government. One study done in Wisconsin found that domestic rural cats alone (thus excluding a large number of suburban and urban cats) killed roughly 39 million birds a year.

Pesticides kill 72 million birds directly, but an unknown and probably larger number ingest the poisons and die later unseen. Orphaned chicks also go uncounted.

And then there is flying into objects, which is most likely what killed the birds in Arkansas. The government estimates that strikes against building windows alone account for anywhere from 97 million to nearly 976 million bird deaths a year. Cars kill another 60 million or so. High-tension transmission and power distribution lines are also deadly obstacles. Extrapolating from European studies, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimates 174 million birds die each year by flying into these wires. None of these numbers take into account the largest killer of birds in America: loss of habitat to development.

All of this explains why about a quarter of the 836 species of birds protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act are in serious decline. For a third of the other birds there is not enough information to be sure about the health of their populations.

(Read more)

Why is human activity an issue for birds?  Here are a few facts:

• 85% of forest habitats in the United States have been destroyed.
• 95% of grasslands, prairies, meadows, etc. in the United States have been destroyed.
• More than 50% of the wetlands in the United States have been destroyed.
• More than half of all the areas identified as critical for endangered species are contained in wetlands.
• Over the last 500 years, 95% of the forests in the United States were cut for logging purposes.  While North America is experiencing forest regrowth, the quality of the forests is quite poor, restricting migratory birds of a proper habitat. 
• Nearly 1/3 of the more than 800 bird species in the United States are endangered, threatened or in decline due to climate change, habitat loss, and invasive species.  The worst is in Hawaii where 71 species have gone extinct since humans started living on the island.
• The collapse of fisheries across the world due to overfishing has significantly impacted birds who rely on seafood.

Important resources: [1], [2], [3], [4]

Click here to find out how you can help.  The welfare of birds typically shows how healthy an entire ecosystem is.  Doing our part to save our birds is essential to maintaining biodiversity and ensuring a brighter future.