This time of year, when the day starts dark with fog and ends in warm sunshine, the birds are starting to think about migration. In days when we still had swallows, they were already leaving in late August. After a summer of darting jet arrowheads swooping and looping over the garden, we’d wake to quiet skies and feel a little heartbreak at the loss. But we were fortified by the knowledge that they’d return with the spring to suck all the biting bugs from the skies. Until they didn’t.
I don’t know if some places still have swallows. I’d like to think they are not gone, but pulling short, traveling less between the summers of strongly temperate zones and staying within smaller bands around the equator. But I don’t really believe that. I suspect they are victims, instead, of our profligate use of pesticides. They’ve swallowed too many bugs adapted to the poisons. This is the silence that Rachel Carson predicted. Because after her warnings, we did not change our habit, only the poison.
We also no longer see kingbirds, defying death over every lighted sports pitch to eat the moths and mosquitos attracted by the lights and smells of human excitement. Nor flycatchers and phoebes in the fields and back yards. House martins and bluebirds are becoming rare both in suburban gardens and agricultural areas. It should be clear that if all these insect-eaters are missing from our skies, it is probably related to their one common denominator, the insects. But we keep spraying anyway and scratching our heads in mock confusion at the growing silence.
The fruit- and seed-eating birds are also dwindling. I have not seen a cedar waxwing in years nor heard the delightful liquid fluting of the wood thrush, though the thrushes are also affected by the insects they eat. There are far fewer goldfinches in my town than there were just a few years ago when I moved here, and the house finch and purple finch, birds that used to be so common you could trip over them, are absent now.
We seem to think that because the poisons we spray are not concentrated enough to kill us (at least not in one dose) that smaller animals are also immune. But as every parent knows, the poison is in the dose, and those smaller bodies of our infants can die from the poisons we administer to our adult bodies. How much worse is it for birds who are hardly material bodies at all?
But the poison of herbicide, pesticide, and fertilizer is only part of the story. The other part is that these poisons all work for a time. A crash in insect populations propagates throughout the food web. A newly tilled field or a former diversified family farm turned into “developed” land will not only have poisons applied to the new monoculture, but it will be a monoculture, lacking in the diverse foods that used to grow there. Finches and other seed eaters require a full growing season of available foods, from the seed-heads of early annuals to the last ragged autumn asters. A monoculture, even if it is full of sunflowers, is not going to feed a finch for an entire summer. Kill off the bugs and everybody starves. Including you…
This is why I feed the birds. I know I am not doing much, but as with all the decisions that I make against the tide – like not flying, like not shopping in box stores or at Amazon, like minimizing waste of all kinds – I keep doing it, because it is right and because even a little bit is better than nothing. (And maybe others will finally join me and make a real difference… yeah, right…) I also do not limit my bird feeding to the feeders. In fact, I think that is the worst way to feed the birds. You can’t feed the insectivores a healthy diet at all, and even the seed foods tend to include quite a lot of the junk food of the bird world, heavy in the grains that are easy to grow in fields and ship around the world, decidedly lacking in the more nutritious seeds of wild plants grown in local soils.
I keep the feeders full, but much more importantly I grow the habitat that they need. I plant the foods they rely upon, and I don’t ever use poison. (For my own sake as well as the birds.) I make sure there are wild fruits available in all seasons. I have many plants that are heavy seeders and I resist the urge to dead-head, at least until the birds have had their fill. This has the unfortunate effect of making my garden look less like a garden than an abandoned lot sometimes, but I would rather my landscape be disheveled than dead. And a garden without birds and bugs is dead.
I have planted for all seasons, but I have concentrated on the migration periods. Migrants need foods ready to receive them in the springtime. This involves more of insects than fruits and seeds, for obvious reasons, but I also plant winter fruiting shrubs like winterberry and bayberry and overwintering herbs like dill and coriander that rush to produce seed as soon as winter relents. But birds returning from the winter feeding grounds are not recovering from the breeding season. Migrants need even more food in the autumn. Young birds are still growing bone, muscle, and feather. Parents are undergoing the annual molt and recovering from the summer of producing and feeding young. Migrants are hungry going into the autumn trip; they need more food before they leave.
Luckily, this is where gardening for the birds is much more effective than hanging out a feeder. Most plants are at peak fruit and seed production in the late summer and early autumn. (Of course…) I don’t have to stock up on sunflower seed if the actual sunflowers are bursting with ripe seed. But it’s not just the annual garden plants. I have put in dogwoods and viburnums, coneflowers and tickseed and all sorts of late summer perennials. I also over-plant the berrying bushes and vines so that much is left to fill other bellies. And when I get tired of eating raspberries, I don’t feel remorse, because those berries aren’t wasted.
This has another benefit for me as a gardener. I get to eat more of what I plant for myself. There are more raspberries than I will ever eat. But in addition to the excessive planting to include feeding wildlife, the wildlife are being fed…They aren’t eating my peaches. I will never want for apples. And I can have luxurious stands of sea oats and hops vines covered in seed-heads that stay on the plant until ripe. I don’t much eat these seeders, but they are essential to some of the herbal remedies I make and they are gorgeous and long-lasting autumn décor.
It is becoming more difficult to source some of these habitat-building plants, especially the seed-producers. Nearly all the annual flowers on the market these days are hybrids that don’t even produce pollen, never mind seed. And increasingly perennials are being bred to be ornamental — meaning hybridization, more focus on large and abundant flowers than on reproduction, and inhibiting traits that don’t look good or that are inconvenient for a gardener. These trends affect insect interactions more than birds, though if a plant is putting all its energy into masses of frilly doubled petals it has fewer reserves to dedicate to seed production. However, everybody is indirectly affected by alterations that make it difficult for insects to pollinate flowers. If there is no pollination, then there is no fruit or seed.
And then there is the ramping up of rodent predation in this warming world. I can’t remember the last time I grew more than one or two sunflowers out of dozens of planted seeds, and since moving to Vermont, I’ve had no sunflowers. None. Zero. I plant them every year. And each year, every last seed or seedling is destroyed. Matters not if I start them indoors in paper pots or outdoors under row cover. If a plant makes it past the cotyledon stage, when the seed becomes unpalatable to squirrels and chipmunks, then the groundhog will eat it. And the groundhog will go to great lengths to get at sunflower plants, climbing into deep pots, forcing his fat body into tight spaces, and ripping apart row cover. I think the little bugger has taken to using sticks as rakes to get at his favorite plants beyond the metal fencing.
I can’t remember where I read it, probably The Rambunctious Garden by Emma Marris (but if I still have that book, it’s in a box… though I probably don’t… ), but wherever I read it, someone said that while we are killing species left, right and center, creating the conditions for the fastest and possibly soon to be largest extinction event this planet has ever experienced, we are also creating the perfect conditions for those species that prey on us and our ways of being. No more swallows. Millions of starlings. No more butterflies. Billions of ticks and mosquitos. Kudzu, autumn olive, crabgrass and purple loosestrife, but no chestnuts, bloodroot, wild lupine and tulip trees.
Last week a person in New Hampshire died from eastern equine encephalitis, a mosquito borne virus that has no drug treatment or vaccination and kills about a third of the humans who are infected through inflammation of the central nervous system. (It is apparently worse in the equine family.) If you survive, you will likely suffer severe debilitation for the rest of your life. This virus is rare but endemic in the Northeast. It also has a fairly low infection rate. If you are bitten by a carrier mosquito, you have about a 4% chance of developing symptoms. So it is not a severe threat. However, as mosquito populations explode, the virus could as well. This year there have been 47 mosquito populations in Vermont that tested positive for the virus, and every year that I’ve lived in New England there has been at least one human fatality. (I don’t know how many horses…)
The thing about this virus is that it requires concentration in the blood of another species in order to be strong enough to infect large-bodied animals like horses and humans. And you’ve probably already figured out what it likes, given my topic for today… yes, birds. Particularly the birds that live near human settlement. Mosquitos feed on the birds, transmitting the virus. The virus multiplies in the birds. More mosquitos feed on the infected birds and receive blood that is rich in the virus. These mosquitos then infect whatever other animal they feed on. Mosquitos that feed on both birds and mammals, such as the West Nile carrier, coquillettidia perturbans, can spread the virus from infected birds to humans.
This is quite a complex chain of interactions that must take place to infect a human. But we have created exactly the perfect conditions to nurture and propagate this virus. We’ve moved mosquito and bird species around the planet. We’ve warmed the planet so that mosquitos can breed year round even in temperate climates. We’ve created poorly drained cities with mosquito breeding puddles and dead ponds and rivers that hold no mosquito larvae predators. We’ve sprayed poison on mosquito populations so frequently that they can not only survive exposure but take these poisons into their bodies to poison other species, so that we’re killing the animals that feed on adult mosquitos as well. We’ve reduced the natural habitat for all species to the spaces in and around our own dwellings so they are forced into contact with us and only those that become habituated to that exposure survive. And then there are all these floods…
We can’t do anything about the floods or the heat. We might not be able to bring back the swallows though we can certainly stop spraying poisons so that other mosquito predators won’t die from ridding us of this plague we’ve created. We can also change the ways we deal with water so that floods don’t happen as much and don’t stick around for weeks as stagnant pools. We can stop transporting things all around the globe so that we are not constantly exposing defenseless ecosystems to novel parasites and predators. We can leave more space to the non-human world or regulate how space is used so that there are no dead-zone monocultures (which is, incidentally, better for humans as well). And we can create habitat… we can feed the birds. Among other species that can restore balance in this mess.
It may seem counterintuitive. If birds are the necessary link between mosquitos and mammals, then get rid of the birds, right? That is the way our culture usually operates. And it has not once worked in over five centuries. But creating habitat for many species always works. Because the birds you attract to a habitat — rather than just a feeder — will be eating a varied diet — including those mosquitos. And you will also be creating space for other mosquito predators, like frogs, bats, mantises, turtles and more. You are rebuilding the balanced world a little bit at a time.
And who knows, like all those decisions made against the tide, maybe more and more people will follow. Because the tides are changing…
