In Illumination’s animated movie “Migration,” which hits movies screens Friday, a mallard duck family flying from New England to Jamaica stops in New York. The freaked-out father of the ducks exclaims, “Whoa! We are not flying through this crazy death trap of a city!” A pigeon offers to guide the mallards, saying, “Just stay close to me and everything will be alright.” The pigeon proceeds to be hit by a bus and a scooter.
The pummeling of the pigeon can easily be a metaphor for real birds in the real world. We have turned much of Earth into a death trap for our fine feathered friends.
Such slapstick in the spirit of Looney Tunes is sure to fill theaters with guffaws. I hope, though, that when the laughter subsides, the scene lingers more soberly with families. The pummeling of the pigeon can easily be a metaphor for real birds in the real world. We have turned much of Earth into a death trap for our fine feathered friends, making their actual migrations more drama than comedy.
A 2019 study in the journal Science found that North America had lost nearly 30% of its birds, 2.9 billion, in the previous half century. The European Union has lost 600 million birds since 1980. A 2015 study found that global seabird populations had plummeted 70% since the 1950s, equivalent to a loss of 230 million birds. Humanity has hit them with far more than buses.
The asphalt of suburban sprawl, the slashing of forests and tilling of grasslands for agriculture, crop pesticides, house cats that roam outdoors, collisions with vehicles, building glass and powerlines, poisons and industrial operations all add up to billions of bird deaths a year. In the United States alone, such factors are such factors are estimated by the U.S. Fish and Wildfire Service to kill 3.3 billion birds a year.
According to the 2022 State of the World’s Birds, published by BirdLIfe International, 49% of the planet’s 11,000 bird species are in decline, while only 6% are increasing. Only 38% of…
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