Is our once booming bird population beginning to dwindle in the northeastern United States?
Mary Anne and I have always loved birds in the wild. We’ve made a couple of visits to Hawk Mountain in Berks County to see the seasonal migration. Thirty years ago, we experienced on a farm in Amish Country what the bird population must have sounded like in the 1800s. At the time, we were on an extended magazine assignment to profile farm life. We stayed at the 50-acre Glen Run farm of Hanna and Harold Stoltzfus in Atglen, a small hamlet in Chester County.
The couple and their Amish neighbors raised sheep, pigs, beef cattle, milk cows, chickens, and vegetables in a throwback rural area where dogs ran free. What I remember most besides daughter Genevieve running off frequently to view hens in the chicken coup was the sound of birds merrily singing in the Stoltzfus trees. Thousands of them. Every morning was to wake up with them welcoming a new day.
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Back home, our yard features mature red and white oak trees, a black walnut, holly, maple and dogwood trees, several arborvitae, hedges, a boxwood, honeysuckle and trumpet vines. Our bird houses are routinely occupied. Yet the sound of songbirds is rare. Mostly it’s the chirping of sparrows.
This all came to mind while reading historian Florence Wharton’s collection of reminisces of Samuel C. Eastburn who grew up on a farm near Langhorne in the mid-19th century. In the chapter “Birds, Nature and the Environment”, Sam notes how bird colonies once proliferated in the borough thanks to English settlers. In the early 1700s, it wasn’t fashionable to have trees in Langhorne, the former Attleboro. Farmers groaned over the work chopping them down to provide more clear-cut open space. But village folk longed for tree-lined streets like those in England. So, they imported sycamore and buttonwood saplings. The trees grew into towering monarchs and attracted many songbirds by the time Sam was born in 1848.
“These great trees were the favorite nesting places of the many Baltimore Orioles which are now so scarce,” he noted in the 1920s. “It used to be the delight of us boys to see their black and gold flashing among the freckled branches, or to speculate where they found the strings for their hanging nests.”
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Residents catered to the avian choir. “Bluebirds built (nests) in the clothesline boxes that were on posts in almost every yard, while calabashes and gourds were hung for wrens’ nests at many kitchen doors,” Sam continued effusively. “Pewees built nests on top of posts or in outbuildings. Catbirds ‘mewed’ on the garden hedge in gooseberry and other brambles. Chirping sparrows nested in vines, hummingbirds of various sizes suspended their flight before the honeysuckle vines. Mudd swallows built under many eaves, with incessant banter as they raised their families. Kingbirds sat on grapevine posts in front of the hives, looking for a tired, over-ladened bee as it returned to its home. Barn swallows flew about to and from our barns in the hundreds with the mowing hay or glided in irregular platoons across our fields before a group of chimney swallows poured by in the hundreds into the old, wide chimneys when night approached.”
Late in life, Sam noticed a decline in bird numbers and species. Even today the trend isn’t good. According to data from Cornell University’s Ornithology Laboratory, the bird population in the U.S. and Canada since the 1970s has dipped 30 percent, particularly in the Northeast. That’s a loss of nearly 3 billion adult breeding birds. Cornell ornithologist Ken Rosenberg is worried. “These bird losses are a strong signal that our human-altered landscapes are losing their ability to support birdlife. And this is an indicator of a coming collapse of the overall environment.”
Yikes! I’m thinking I should have planted a sycamore and buttonwood in our yard.
Sources include “Langhorne: Crossroads of History: Samuel C. Eastburn’s ‘Olde Attleborough’” by Florence Wharton published in 2016, and “Vanishing: More Than 1 In 4 Birds Has Disappeared in The Last 50 Years” by Gustave Axelson published on Sept. 19, 2019 in “Living Bird” magazine.
Carl LaVO can be reached at carllavo0@gmail.com
This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Is Bucks County's once bustling bird population beginning to dwindle?
