Bird loss USA: criticise humans not cats. It is time for a reality check.

I for one have been fighting this battle for more than a decade. The sharp decline in bird species populations is mainly due to human behaviour. Yes, there are other factors, one of which is predation by outdoor cats but…it is all about us at the end of the day because even the cat problem is our problem.

It is all over the internet recently: 2.9 billion birds gone from the USA since 1970. To quote one website, USA Today:

“The cause is primarily habitat loss, as birds are losing the places they need to live, find food, rest and raise their young.”

To that you can add noxious stuff like pesticides. God, humans love pesticides. Well, businesses love pesticides because they allow them to make more money and they don’t give a f**k about the damage they do to the world. But then the explosion in human population needs to be fed and we can’t feed ourselves unless we make food production very efficient and for that we need poisonous chemicals to kill bugs.

Other threats to birds are e.g. buildings (collisions by birds in high rises) and the decline in insects (ah, yes, it’s pesticides again).

Another telling phrase from USA Today is this one:

“These data are consistent with what we’re seeing elsewhere with other (groups of animals) showing massive declines, including insects and amphibians…”

The huge losses include other animals. The problem concerns all creatures because there is one voraciously hungry creature out there which dominates the entire planet at the expense of everything: us.

So please can cat haters like Woodsman001 and others (there are many) who live in cloud cuckoo land stop blaming the cat for bird losses and go to the main cause first: human population growth leading to habitat loss and damage to the environment including poisoning the environment and climate change. The trouble is that cat haters and blamers have one thing in common: arrogance. The certainty that humans are the best, and that animals exist to serve the God Almighty human.

Some bird species have bucked the downward trend. These are waterfowl. This phenomenon is put down to increased and focused conservation. A little blip in the Armageddon of bird decline.

I won’t go on because any number of website discuss this catastrophe in detail. Please use Google to find them.