Every day feels like SILENT SPRING

We live in the country parttime. Our little piece of land is heaven with a river nearby, a pond, and an acequia (drainage ditch). A few acres of the field are covered by sunflowers which bloom in late summer and now are hundreds of dead flower stalks with dry seed heads, each proffering innumerable tiny seeds. In the remainder of the field other wild grasses grow and flowers such as milkweed and chicory.

You would think our land would be a paradise for birds. But it’s not. Not any more.

Every morning I walk the perimeter of the field and some mornings I only see or hear one or two birds. Other mornings like today — I watched 5 or 6 sparrows playing hide and seek in the sunflower patch. Yesterday I glimpsed several nuthatches flitting between the trees on the other side of the property. But that’s all I saw in 20 minutes.

Once, not so long ago, our property was filled with bird life. My husband and I could sit on the couch for hours looking out the glass doors and observe a variety of species — pine siskins, towhees, juncos, goldfinches, cassin finches and many more. In the trees were robins and woodpeckers and flickers and doves and occasionally owls. Gliding over the pond in summer, we watched the graceful arial performances of barn and cliff swallows.

Now, the feeders sit for weeks without a single bird descending on them. I had to throw out the thistle seed in its net sock because I knew it had grown stale. Of course, the birds may not need to use the feeder at present because there’s plenty of wild plants they can feed on. Also, we have a large bird predator population: crows, hawks, ravens, turkey vultures, magpies. No wonder, you may say, birds are scarce. But I often wonder how all the birds could have learned this area is dangerous — is there a “no fly” zone sign posted somewhere on the avian network?

It’s more likely that Rachel Carson’s book with the title SILENT SPRING is no longer a precautionary tale, it’s a fact. Her dire warnings that were first published in the New Yorker in 1962 have come true. The book resulted in DDT being banned from widespread spraying and for several generations, birders felt they could relax. Yet, they were wrong — there were plenty of other lethal chemicals, like Round-up being widely used; there was significant loss of habitats and several severe diseases. Birds died flying into windows and into giant wind turbines. Birds were murdered by the million by household cats. Then there’s climate change. Birds inexplicably fell out of the sky in great numbers in my state 4 years ago. People attributed the kill-off to the vast wildfires in California preventing birds from landing — the birds were so exhausted by the time they reached here that they simply dropped dead.

It’s one thing to hear or read about these dire conditions, it’s another to witness its impact day after day — to experience it every morning as I walk around the field. I try to enjoy, to treasure the birds that I do see because who knows how long they’ll be here. A few years ago, I coined a phrase: Birds lift your gaze. How true that is. And, as we grow older and the world seems more and more beset by unsolveable problems, we need to lift our gaze, it’s vital. I hope birds are still here for that purpose.