Linda Hall Library Examines Climate Change Quandary. The birds of North America are dying. Their fading songs are a disquieting alarm for the health of the environment.
“We are in an absolute global crisis of biodiversity, and we haven’t quite realized it yet,” said Dr. Eric Dorfman, president of Linda Hall Library and director of the exhibition, Chained to the Sky: the Science of Birds, Past & Future.
“Birds are just one of the casualties. But just like the fabled canary in a coal mine, if the birds are falling over pretty much everything else is too.”
A wildlife ecologist and former director of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Dorfman dedicated his inaugural Linda Hall Library exhibit to humanity’s 17,000-year history with birds. The exhibit opened Nov. 10 and runs through April 26, 2024.
Taxidermied specimens, on loan from the Field Museum of Chicago, are arranged within the context of Western anthropology. Beginning with the Lascaux cave painting “Bird Man” found in France and ending with the illustration-rich first edition of “The Sibley Guide to Birds” from the year 2000, the exhibit is his tribute to the birds man has loved and lost.
According to Dorfman, the exhibition was inspired by the 2019 Science research article “Decline of the North American Avifauna,” one of the most comprehensive assessments of North America’s birds in 50 years.
The data was devastating. The article reported a population loss of nearly 3 billion birds since 1970. From urban landscapes to coastal forests, the continental United States and Canada had lost an estimated 29% of its feathered residents. The authors of the report noted this was a conservative estimate, and the actual figure could be much higher.
Although extinction is a natural process of life on earth, the Science article noted that human activity has accelerated the phenomenon by “a thousandfold” compared to estimated pre-human rates. Dorfman said the devastating decrease in bird populations is symbolic of a much larger problem.
How Can We Help Birds?
The good news is that both Missouri and Kansas have track records for successful bird conservation and rehabilitation.
Fittingly for the Thanksgiving holiday, the Linda Hall Library exhibition applauds the Missouri Department of Conservation for resurrecting the state’s turkey population. Through habitat preservation and regulations that promoted sustainable hunting practices, the state’s wild turkey population recovered from an estimated 2,500 individuals in the wild in 1950 to 300,000 today.
The final segment of the Linda Hall Library exhibit is devoted to providing information on how individuals can make a positive impact on their local bird populations. Dorfman said simple things, such as putting up stickers on windows and keeping bird feeders away from glass can significantly reduce bird strikes in urban and residential areas.
“If you have a garden space, plant native grass and flowers that will attract insects and the birds that eat them,” Dorfman said. “If you notice more birds in your backyard, you can expect a positive ripple effect across the food chain that is not as visible.”
Excerpted from FLATLAND 11/22/2023. Read More HERE.
