News On The March!

Bird by bird, the avian population is shrinking
Aug.24-The Christian Science Monitor*
“Earlier this summer, the National Audubon Society released a definitive study of population trends of North American birds, a monumental effort based on decades of Christmas bird counts and breeding bird surveys. The study confirms birds that were so familiar in New England – evening grosbeaks, eastern meadowlarks, northern bobwhites – are in free fall… The songs of tens of millions of birds have been silenced.
In one sense, extinction is hugely overrated. The vast majority of animals and plants that disappear hardly leave a ripple in the pool of life. Species become rare, they disappear.”
Yet is it a wonder if we should find the world about us has become grosser and in choice of our pleasures philistine? Our spiritual health is maintained not by some precepts mechanically learnt, by rote or by their observance. The beauties of Nature, her wild places and changing skies under the sun and moon that waxes and wanes, are as important. Just as a man’s development may well be measured in the influences of his childhood we as species owe to the richness of our environment that make some fossilized impression within us. These are counterweights to the accidents of life that are merely incidental or by chance.
One may read these impressions according to his temperament or by his beliefs. A Christian may say,”It is Gods blessing as I make of verse 28 from the opening chapter of Genesis.”
One thing is sure. Man who learnt to control nature and create in his image ought to have taken into account his soul as well. In the way he has overlooked the wonders of God's creation as symbolized in bob-white or sand-piper, he has shown himself to be a Caliban than the Son of God.
Once again to quote Nathaniel T Wheelwright, “The true loss is spiritual and aesthetic, not functional or economic. Life would go on if every Shakespeare play and Beethoven sonata were destroyed, but to use the words of the Audubon report, our skies would be "a little quieter and the landscape a little drabber." Of course, we'll always have CDs of bird song and DVDs of bird behavior to fall back on – a digital memory, as it were – but will that be enough?
I can see now our forefathers’ rite of passage was really about connecting us with the land. It was about learning how to become intimate with our world's signs, smells, sounds, textures and rhythms. It was about knowing where we are and who we are. How far we would be to be able to pass that gift on to our own grandchildren?”
• Nathaniel T. Wheelwright studies the behavioral ecology of birds and teaches biology at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

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