Even if we don’t love starlings, we should learn to live with them
ideas.ted.com
ideas.ted.com
Here in NYC, you can have the police tow a car whose alarm goes off too frequently or doesn't shut down after a couple minutes. Not much you can do about a bird near your window mimicking the same sound with praeternatural accuracy every 30 seconds, all day long.
I have a bird house with a pair of sparrows. About 20" above that is a nest of breeding Robins that like a spot on the underside of my deck. The sparrows have never messed with the Robin nest in any way. There are eastern bluebirds nearby and the sparrows have caused no trouble for them either, despite the suitability of the house.
This "HOSP" hate is misplaced. Please don't hate on these birds. There are a couple pages on the Internet about the awful depredations of the terrible HOSP and so hating on them has become a fad.
I mean I'll grant that I like looking at blue jays despite them also being notoriously aggressive.
That said, having had a hawk nesting site near my house there are a lot of feather piles to deal with :-)
I don't have a dog (or cat) in this fight, but I've always heard that cats do indeed decimate bird populations. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
The most balanced source I found was an NPR article that questioned the accuracy these claims, but not necessarily the conclusions.
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/02/03/170851048/do-we-...
I'm interested to see what sources others might find.
Giving say for example 3M population and 4 years lifespan, 750K birds of that population are going to die that year. In nature that frequently means to be eaten. Somebody's gotta do it. Or do you prefer dead birds lying around (or rats feeding on the dead birds)? In many places finding dead birds is a reason to call Health Department actually.
I never said cats don't eat birds. What i'm saying is that they are doing service to the total bird population (and to humans - cats is the main reason human civilization was able to survive and develop in the dense highly unsanitary conditions like the cities of Middle Ages)
If all humans suddenly disappeared or stopped intervening, what would the landscape look like or turn into? Conditions would prevail that were affected by everything humans have done to date, but unaffected by any future human action. So for example, blackberry vines, kudzu, ivy, starlings, rats, and such, would take over, at least in some places, at least for a while. Is that bad? If humans disappeared, who would be around to find it bad or good?
Rather than fight it, I have redefined my ideas of "native" and "natural" to match these conditions. Because that's what "nature" is, right? That which happens without human intervention? Except of course tons of intervention has already happened and can't be changed, so the idea is to think about what would happen if the intervention stopped. Keeping endangered species alive or fighting invasives might be termed unsustainable and artificial under that view. I dunno, interesting thought experiment. To me anyway! LOL
Only stone-age humans are natural. You shall not use bronze, and iron is right out. Fossil fuel is Cthulhu.
I started thinking like, well too late, humans have been here. But just for fun let's pretend they instantaneously stopped being here; what would the "natural," "human-free" world look like then? It would look like what humans have made it into, plus whatever latent conditions we also caused but might be holding back by e.g. controlling rat populations or whatnot, plus whatever areas/systems/ecologies are and were always outside our influence.
'Because that's what "nature" is, right? That which happens without human intervention?'
Only if humans are supernatural is that what "nature" is.
It uses both pre-human conditions and conditions in places humans have avoided (e.g. Chernobyl) to paint a picture of "What if all the humans disappeared all at once" in both short and long term.
One hot nugget: The lower-NYC subways would flood almost immediately, and the streets above them would quickly convert into canals (from saltwater erosion), but the bridges would last longer without maintenance than they would under normal human use (because the biggest damage to the bridges is from road salt).
you'd need at least a 300M bed Mayflower destined for Mars.
>If all humans suddenly disappeared or stopped intervening, what would the landscape look like or turn into? Conditions would prevail that were affected by everything humans have done to date, but unaffected by any future human action. So for example, blackberry vines, kudzu, ivy, starlings, rats, and such, would take over, at least in some places, at least for a while. Is that bad? If humans disappeared, who would be around to find it bad or good?
Chernobyl area. Flourishing nature preserve. Youtube it.
In the UK, starlings are a protected species..
Little birds tend to be quite tasty and if it is nearly impossible to get rid of them I'd say would be a nice source of protein.
They taste like quail, apparently.
They are kind of pests on cattle ranches.
Not only they chased away much gentler pigeons, interrupted business negotiations with clients, they managed to pushed one of my designers over the edge who had a mental break down in the office.