It was the ultimate migrant. A bird of such abundance it created entire forest ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More. This is why Passenger Pigeons were important. This month marks the anniversary of the death of the last Passenger Pigeon over a hundred years ago and it’s a timely reminder of what we still have to lose. But more importantly, what we have to gain, from conservationWhy is animal conservation important? Animal conservation is important, because animals are the only mechanism to create biodiversity, which is the mechanism that creates a habitable planet for humans. Without animals, the energy from today’s plants (algae, trees, flowers etc) will eventually reach the atmosphere and ocean, much of it as carbon. The quantity of this plant-based waste is so More of the migratory birds we have left.
Celebrating bird migration
Perhaps fittingly, this week the UN BiodiversityWhat is the definition of biodiversity? When we ask, what is the definition of biodiversity? It depends on what we want to do with it. The term is widely and commonly misused, leading to significant misinterpretation of the importance of how animals function on Earth and why they matter a great deal, to human survival. Here I will try to More also celebrated the start of European bird migration in a post on LinkedIn.
Migration is one of the most important and powerful drivers of ecosystem stability. The miracle of migration is in its co-evolution with Earth’s ecosystems and hence, our everyday lives.
Spring creates huge waves of decay, which as animals, we see as times of plenty. There is a point to that irony. We are part of a system that destroys itself if we don’t harvest and recycle that phenomenal waste energy. But we can’t do that alone.
Migratory birds have always been fundamental to humanity. They are why we have farming and freshwater.
When we lose any migratory birds, the environment converts into something we don’t understand. This is often in the presence of a new suit of animals that we dub ‘pests’. They are merely fresh ecosystem builders but like any rebuilding, they cause major disruption and inconvenience.
The certainty that came before birds like Passenger Pigeons went extinct, vanishes. This is replaced with something that is more likely than not, to fail to support current styles of survival. Such is the connection that humanity still has to the animal kingdom. It is why we cannot afford to let migratory birds go extinct.
Which begs the question, why are conservationists not telling this story?! That’s a subject I cover in my book Wildlife in the Balance.
Conservation of migratory birds is critical
Unless we protect remaining migratory animals, we continue to undermine the processes of nutrientEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More (energy) transfer(of nutrients) the thing that sets animals apart from plants, is that they can move. Some of the biggest migrations on Earth every day, are the movement of insects like caterpillars, from the stem of a plant to a leaf and back, before turning into butterflies and transferring the energy elsewhere. Large-scale migration of grazing animals and migratory songbirds moves More, concentration and amplificationAmplification (of nutrients and energy). Animals consume plants and other animals and in doing so, reintroduce important energy-containing nutrients back into the environment, at even higher concentrations and in patches. Amplification of energy is driven by migration and happens at every scale, from insects moving daily in and out of your vegetable patch, to African wildebeest herds and the seasonal More. These three fundamental principles, which I describe in the book ‘Wildlife in the Balance’ are elegantly explained when discussing visible, mobile animals like birds.
‘Animals do not migrate into the wealthiest food areas, rather they have evolved to migrate between, to preserve the riches in the long term. They stabilise disorder(Of energy and ecosystems). Ecosystems are thermodynamically driven. Disorder occurs when energy dissipates and becomes more chaotic. For example, the release of hot air into the atmosphere results in that energy is freer to disperse (maximum entropy). The opposite is true when energy is locked into biological processes, when it is stored inside molecules (minimum entropy). Stability in ecosystems occurs More by transferring and concentrating energy at these places, reducing the risk of wild fluctuations in the environment while creating a nest egg for their own future.’
Wildlife in the Balance
The consequence of Passenger Pigeon extinction
The Passenger Pigeon, it is confined to the history books. But we’ve still yet to learn the significance of this crucial piece of evidence from our own history.
‘The pigeons damaged forest canopies and deposited nutrientA substance that contains the raw materials for life. At a chemical level, these are contained inside compounds that are absorbed into the body and essential energy-containing molecules are extracted, so that energy can be transformed into other chemical processes that use the energy for living. More rich excrement, which may have been important for the maintenance of now-rare canebrakes in the southeastern United States (1). Because of their dietary preferences, their extinction changed the balance between white oaks and red oaks (2). The extinction of the passenger pigeon may have led to an increase in the incidence of Lyme disease (3, 4). The pigeons were effective seed predators. In years with a bumper crop of acorns and beechnuts, the pigeons ate so much that competitors for the food, such as white-footed mice could not eat enough to increase in number. Now, in the pigeons absence, the mice increase during these years (5). Because mice are the reservoir for the tick-transmitted Lyme disease bacterium, when they increase in number increased cases of Lyme disease result. These impacts are still being felt a century after the last passenger pigeon died.’
David E. Blockstein & Stanley A. Temple, Fauna in decline: Extinct pigeon’s tale. Science 5 Sep 2014. Vol 345, Issue 6201, p. 1129
Along with it went the oak forests of the US and now humans have to adapt. For perhaps hundreds of years, more lives will be affected by these changes, and science can do little to predict what a future holds without such birds.
‘Fire has long been considered a key driving force in US oak forest regeneration, but evidence shows that it’s not enough without the passenger pigeons’ massive canopy-opening processes. These days little light reaches the forest floor, and with regeneration suppressed all fire does is clear the few emerging saplings. The leaf litter that would once have been processed by animals, carbon mulched into the soils, is now released into the atmosphere and the aging forests are falling over with no hope of rebirth. The passenger pigeon, like all animals, was the stabilising entity of an entire ecosystem. Its absence increases the transfer of energy into the atmosphere, upsetting the oak forest ecosystem and Earth’s climate.’
Wildlife in the Balance
Refinding lost ecological wisdom
Some authors suggest that the birds may have been overwhelmingly dependent on forests and that any argument that the forest depends on the birds doesn’t stand up.
While it’s true that the bird exclusively ate oak seeds they also co-evolved with that ecosystem. The birds created their own habitat for survival.
In this context, the birds’ importance takes on a whole new meaning.
In nature-deprived western countries though, it’s hardest of all to see those patterns. Science tends to be biased by a view of ecosystems that are largely in tatters. It’s hard to see the birds for the trees, so to speak. We tend to assume (wrongly), that all animal life depends on our management of vegetation. Or that we can recreate something similar to what existed before. We can’t. Only abundant and diverse birds and animals can recreate a habitable world.
But the connections between people and pigeons were long recognised as important by indigenous people. Only Westerners have lost that ability to see or think clearly about nature.
‘I have seen them move in one unbroken column for hours across the sky, like some great river, ever varying in hue; and as the mighty stream, sweeping on at sixty miles an hour, reached some deep valley, it would pour its living mass headlong down hundreds of feet, sounding as though a whirlwind was aboard in the land. I have stood by the grandest waterfall of America and regarded the descending torrents in wonder and astonishment, yet never have my astonishment, wonder, and admiration been so stirred as when I have witnessed these birds drop from their course like meteors from heaven’.
Simon Pokagon, last chief of the Pottawatomie [1].
Passenger Pigeons created an ecosystem that humans evolved into. The truth is that the birds were essential to the forests that humans became co-dependent upon. This is why it makes no sense to imagine that we can recreate a world without abundant migratory birds. Or that, from our own survival perspective, birds are more dependent on forests than habitable forests are dependent on birds.
The true importance of Passenger Pigeons
To regard animals as anything other than material to their own existence is to deny the basis of how nature works. Yet this denial is rife throughout conservation. Significance of animals remains massively understated.
This misunderstanding further suppresses our ability to communicate and act properly on ecological issues.
The only thing we know for certain is that animals rebuild functioning ecosystems faster than anything we can ever do (or imagine) ourselves.
What we lose then, when we let animals go extinct, is the mechanism that makes our planet habitable. Animals were never the icing on the cake. They are no less separate from nature as we are.
Remember, the Passenger Pigeon did not go extinct because of habitat loss. It was hunted to extinction. Yet the consequence of that loss has been profound. And it’s there for all to see. It caused the collapse of a huge and important oak forest ecosystem. This actually makes it one of the best examples of animal impactWhat is Animal Impact? Without wildlife, Earth would not be habitable for humans, because it's animals that stabilise ecosystems. It’s a fundamental law of nature that animals (and humans) exist because we are the most likely lifeforms to minimise environmental chaos. Animal impact, therefore, is a measure of how much all wildlife is collectively responsible for creating a habitable Earth. The More today.
Yet despite this, conservationists continue to assume that such animals simply depend on forest. When in truth, as far as habitable ecosystems go, it’s the other way around.
This is the glass half full that conservation needs. It’s a real truth and a source of inspiration for rewilding our world and beginning to imagine a better future.
References
- Barrow, M.V., Jr., ‘A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction. By Joel Greenberg’. Environmental History, 2014. 19(4): p. 747 – 749.
