[ImaCake]

Are birds actually so scarce elsewhere in the world? My experience in a small city on the east coast of Australia is that birds are everywhere and in great variety. On a recent morning, I counted 10 different species of bird walking 500m to the shops and back. And it is hard to ignore the noise from the large flocks of sulfur crested cockatoos and rainbow lorakeets that frequent my town.

I understand that what I see is already a pale comparison compared to 200 or 10,000 years ago, but the numbers are still impressive. I am also aware of how little attention my fellow citizens pay to the variety of bird life around them. But it is still surprising to me that people can talk about cities having few birds and little diversity.

[zdragnar]

On my property in the US, I've seen bald eagles, hawks, owls, at least 3 species of woodpeckers, any number of songbirds, hummingbirds, turkey, pheasant, turkey vultures and a half dozen migratory ducks and geese species.

The first year here, we didn't feed them at all- there's really no shortage of natural foraging for them. We hardly saw any of the smaller birds, and truth be told I didn't think we had many around.

Then we had an unusually brutal winter, and started putting out suet to help. Sure enough, all kinds started showing up. They stuck around through the spring, but we stopped feeding them in part because the suet was attracting unwanted attention from other animals. Since then, they've mostly "disappeared" again, though I know now they're not gone.

It's worth pointing out that I live in an area that is predominantly farmland, rural homes, and some nice forested spots. We don't have a shortage of insects or really any other wildlife, either, in spite of the horrors that pesticides are supposedly wreaking upon them.

[ImaCake]

Thanks for the response :)

If I go walking in the nearby bushland (in Australia) I will notice small honeyeaters and other bird life that doesn't come into the suburbs at all. It's amazing what secrets life keeps so close to us!

[pmontra]

I'm back home after one month in Australia and when I was there I noticed a phenomenal amount of birds everywhere, even in Sydney, even in the City. I think that nobody can keep sleeping past 6 AM in rural areas, but Australia is one of those countries when people wake up early.

Compared to Australia, Europe is a wasteland: we do have birds but not as many. I guess you can't have both a lot of people and a lot of animals. When there are many of us there isn't enough space left for them.

[SllX]

> When there are many of us there isn't enough space left for them.

Something I’ve always wondered is whether this has to be true, or if we’ve decided as a society that it should be true, and if we decided that we wanted to attract more birds into our world, if we really could.

Pigeon spikes are everywhere in San Francisco. I’ve even seen them positioned on security cameras. Now I get that we have a lot of rats with wings flying around, but that seems like a feast for falcons, if we wanted to employ more falcons as we do around City Hall.

Around the beach I’ll occasionally see hawks, and generally the biggest danger to them comes from the ravens flying around not wanting any hawks. If you go around Golden Gate Park, there’s an enormous variety of bird species flying around and roosting. I’ve seen a turkey vulture roosting on the signs and a goddamned peacock LARPing as a roadrunner in the morning. I am more amazed it has neither been eaten by coyotes nor hit by a car yet. Seriously, I took my first picture of it two years ago and I still see it a few times a month around the same area.

There’s also the parrots of Telegraph Hill, an escaped domestic population that turned wild and has managed to sustain itself. We just built the Transbay Park (“Salesforce Park” since Salesforce owns the naming rights, but I’ll stick with the generic name), the bus terminal below has just entered service, the park has only been open a bit longer than that and already I see numerous small birds up there every time I go up there.

Down by the waterfront I saw an owl flying around right by Aquatic Park. I was pretty lucky to see it at all since it was going for a kill and the wings don’t make a sound.

This is just in one city! I think if we stopped behaving in an actively hostile way towards birds, save some falconry for population control, we might see the diversity of urban bird populations increase. If we actually introduced niches into our infrastructure for them to roost, managed our urban forests a bit better and planted some more trees while we’re at it, we could maybe even see them thrive here.

[ImaCake]

>There’s also the parrots of Telegraph Hill, an escaped domestic population that turned wild and has managed to sustain itself.

Speaking of current attitudes towards wildlife, I find it interesting how we are so keen to promote biodiversity but usually unwilling to consider invasive or introduced species as a way of achieving more stable biodiversity. I think with the ongoing threats to our environment and how this impacts us, we will turn more and more to using invasive species to save our natural and urban environments. I hope we stop thinking of nature as a static thing unable to adapt in ways beyond the limited scope of human imagination.

[SllX]

We might come to that, but I think the attitude we have right now is reflective of a very basic fact that we rarely admit to ourselves: introducing new species into an ecosystem adds an additional level of complexity that changes it in ways that are often detrimental, and we are not equipped to even begin to understand how to mitigate the negative effects by managing that much complexity.

In short, we simply don’t understand the ecosystems that exist well enough to begin to try to make any positive changes to it. However, I think the Parrots are okay if they stay in the city because San Francisco is an almost entirely built environment.

[prawn]

I've been in places in the USA and Europe that just feel devoid of birds or often insects. Lift a log in Australia and there are dozens of living things crawling around. In parts of the US, more often than not, there's nothing.

I have a pretty routine suburban backyard in South Australia and there are loads of birds, as with your experience - lorikeets, wattlebirds, etc.

[dmix]

Using Australia as the baseline measure for wildlife/insect levels and you're going to find the vast majority of places wouldn't keep up..

[prawn]

That reply got me thinking - thanks.

[cf141q5325]

In Europe you can see some "forests" which are devoid of any life. I lived near one as a kid. They are simply not functioning ecosystems but dead silent wood plantations.

[Ensorceled]

Anecdotally, I grew up in Rural Ontario and there are far fewer birds around my home town then there were when I was a kid. Yes, there are still lots of birds, but the winter migrations used to bend the hydro lines down to the ground.

[Mikeb85]

I live downtown in a large Canadian city and there's magpies, pigeons, sparrows, ducks, geese, and the occasional hawk or falcon. That's just downtown. Go to one of our parks and there's more variety. An hour outside of town, even more. No, birds don't seem particularly scarce here.

[devb]

Those are all birds that have been able to adapt very well to urban life. For each one of those, there are scores that haven't been able to do so.

[emmelaich]

I think we're blessed in Australia with variety and number of birds.

But even here, especially in larger cities they seem to be fewer and fewer and less diverse.