Little brown birds
For almost five years now, I’ve been watching the birds that come to our patio to feed. There’s a part of me that knows I shouldn’t feed them; should never have started feeding them. I recall that The Audubon Society says it’s not good to feed birds. I guess the point is that they get dependent on the food and do not learn to forage as they should. And that makes sense.
But, I reason — looking for a reason to justify what actually is just a desire I have — these birds are already half domesticated — that is, they’ve been feeding from bird feeders around this neighbhorhood forever. If not me, someone else will feed them, I reason. Plus, most won’t live more than a few seasons, I add to myself; and so what if what they eat is provided by humans — and is in that sense not natural? How is that any different, I ask, than how we ourselves are fed today, by vast corporations sending food to grocery stores (or amazon.com)? How is it different from feeding our pets food even more removed from nature than what we eat?
And so, my excuses.
But this is really just stalling; because what I want to write about is the little brown birds.
In the five years I’ve been watching these birds, they’ve been losing their colors. Birds that were reliably red — the cardinals — are now mostly brown, with but a tinge of red. I know that at certain seasons birds have brighter mating colors — but I don’t think this is that. The goldfinches seem reliable in their bright yellow of early summer, but not the cardinals.
The house finches as well — with their rosy undersides — seem to be dimming.
We’d lost the bluejays entirely. There used to be three — always — who’d sit on the back fence or the lower branches of the maple every morning, waiting for me to throw out a few peanuts. Invariably the squirrels and chipmunks got the first peanuts I thew down, and, I was convinced, simply wasted them. The squirrels would haul them off and I’d see them digging a hole and burying one just a few feet beyond the patio, in the sod, where, if it didn’t rot, would emerge later in the summer as a peanut plant to be quickly mowed down by the landscape workers. The chipmunks, I was convinced, had secreted over 40 pounds of peanuts under our concrete foundation, where they were rotting. Still the chipmunks gathered and stored, gathered and stored.
The chipmunks and squirrels did not need any more peanuts, so after I became wise to them, I’d only throw down a few ceremonial peanuts until I saw the three jays hanging around. They got used to me, too, and didn’t fly away when I came out onto the patio and threw down a new handful. One by one, quickly, each would dart in, grab up a peanut, and go cache it somewhere nearby; back then for another.
In this way I’d get rid of 9 peanuts, three for each. Every morning I did this.
Then the very deep cold came flashing in just before Christmas. Many birds died.
I didn’t see the blue jays again. I’d hoped they’d return with spring, that they hadn’t died. But none of them returned.
I was left now with only little brown birds, save the lone goldlfinch with his oh-so-shining yellow. But now it was fall, and he had decamped, too.
I sometimes wonder if my imagination is playing tricks on me.
I could swear I’d seen an article — about a year ago, it seemed — in The New York Times that discussed the loss of coloration among birds, which the article seemed to attribute to “climate change.” I wasn’t sure, though, because I could no longer find the article on the Times website as I began working on this story, and I searched and searched.
Of course I used google, too, as I worked to put together this article.
The only article I could find that matched what I was imagining was one from Newsweek, from summer a year ago: “Climate Change Making Birds Less Colorful, Scientists Say.” That matched what I thought I’d remembered. But this was about one study only — done in Europe.
“Climate change is making birds less colorful, according to a 15-year study on a common bird called the blue tit,” the article began. “It is dulling flashy feathers and threatening survival as our feathered friends rely on plumage to attract mates.”
“Our work suggests environmental changes, and specifically climate change, could be the main reason why birds such as the blue tit are undergoing a change in their physical features, more specifically in the brightness and intensity of their coloration,” said Lopez-Idiaquez.
This was Dr. David Lopez-Idiaquez, of the University of the Basque Country, Spain, who was the lead author of the study.
I found a few other references to this study; nothing from The New York Times. But what Dr. Lopez-Idiaquez’s study had shown seemed to match what I was seeing here, too.
From such meager data we can build edifices. It’s what I’d also done with my observations about the tallness of plants.
Who knew? What I felt I did know, now, was there was not much scientific study of any of this, evidently. Thinking back to my overly tall garden plants this summer, which had grown and grown, but had been meager in the flowering and fruiting department, I realized I’d noticed the same thing in the public “wetlands” park I sometimes hiked in. There the cattails were taller than I’d ever seen them — but the cattails themselves were sparse. And throughout the park there were hardly any flowers — unlike previous years when the angelica and ironweed and goldenrod and tickseed bloomed thickly. I couldn’t attribute this lack of flowers to dryness, either: this summer had actually been wetter than normal.
I finally found the article I’d remembered reading. It had been saved as a PDF on my computer.
And, I realized, I’d read it wrong — that is, I’d taken from it the wrong conclusion — or recalled it incorrectly, which is I guess the same thing.
The giant ibis, along with other physically distinctive birds of extreme shapes and sizes, is more likely to be lost in the current biodiversity crisis, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology. That is because human activities have threatened or destroyed the limited landscapes in which they have evolved to live.
The risk of extinction, the paper suggests, is not randomly or equally spread across the avian tree of life. Instead, birds like the Sulu hornbill (with its huge and hollow onyx beak), the Chatham shag (penguin-looking with a metallic sheen), the four-foot-tall white-bellied heron or the seven-inch-tall Seychelles scops-owl are more likely to face permanent erasure from Earth.
The study referred to this as “loss of morphological diversity.”
It was not until I got to the very end of the article that I found what I had remembered. It was a quote from Eliot Miller, a researcher and collections manager at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, whom the reporter had talked to about the research.
Already in the world of birds, Dr. Miller said, “almost everything is really simple and brown and boring.” The extinction crisis will not only cost us a certain number of species, but also impoverish the biodiversity we have left, he said, adding, “It shows that we are sort of making the world a less rich place with our actions.”
The phrase “simple and brown and boring” had somehow stuck with me, and when, a few weeks later that year, in Newsweek, I’d read about the study with the blue tits, I put two and two together.
