Episode 9: For The Birds

What can the evidence of birds tell us about climate change?

In the spring of 1958, when the winter snow melted and the warm sun returned, the birds did not. Birdwatchers, ordinary people, everyone wondered where the birds had gone. Rachel Carson, a journalist and early environmentalist, figured it out — they’d been poisoned by DDT, a pesticide that towns all over the country had been spraying. Rachel Carson wrote a book about it, Silent Spring. It succeeded in stopping DDT, and it launched the modern environmental movement. But now, more than 60 years later, birds are dying off en masse again. Our question is simple: What are the birds trying to tell us this time, and why can’t we hear their message any more?

Image: Rachel Carson, out in the nature she helped preserve. (Getty Images)

Key Sources: 

For this episode, we used many letters, essays, and books written by Rachel Carson. Our main sources were: unpublished letters by the Rachel Carson Papers at the Beinekce Library at Yale; Rachel Carson, Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson, edited by Linda Lear; Rachel Carson, Witness for Nature, by Linda Lear; Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson, by Rachel Carson, Dorothy Freedman, and Martha Freeman; Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson; and The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson.

Our re-enactment of a meeting of ornithologists came from an article in Forest and Stream from January 22, 1910, titled “To Save The Passenger Pigeon.”

We re-enacted part of an article from June 30, 1900, in the Toronto Globe and Mail titled, “Passenger Pigeons,” as well as a newspaper article from December 18, 1910 published in the Boston Globe titled, “Only One Wild Pigeon Left.”

Read Ken Rosenberg’s study on the decline of bird life in North America at SCIENCE.

Read Frances C. Moore’s study of tweets — human birdsong — and what they can tell us about how we normalize climate change.

Much of our archival audio of birdsong came from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Including:

American Birdsongs – copyright Cornell Lab of Ornithology

ML62621 American Redstart William W. H. Gunn

ML6562 Belted Kingfisher Martin Michener

ML7917 Eastern Phoebe Robert C. Stein