General News
21 September, 2024
Barry's Corner
There is a lot of concern in the citizen science community about the pressures on species survival and the loss of habitat they face.
Around the globe, throughout Asia, across Australia and even over western Victoria the pressure is
on our birds.
The problem is not so much actual bird loss - it is the loss of habitat that is one of the key issues.
Some birds are migratory so we might think it is okay for them to escape to an easier area as many of wetland species have to do.
However, they can arrive to find buildings have popped up or the wetland itself has been drained so that their food supply has dried out or been turned into farmland.
Many of our shorebirds have been trying to cope with this for some decades and cannot switch
food type so readily, if at all.
Feeding opportunities along the way are limited.
Local birds such as the red-tail black cockatoo move seasonally according to availability of seeds on
stringybark and buloke trees.
If the stringys can sustain the birds during the winter they can move seamlessly to buloke once the
seeds are ready.
The yellow-tail black cockatoo is often seen on the ground searching out capeweed seeds or the introduced cypress Aleppo or hiding in radiata foliage as they have successfully switched to another species.
The birds with particular feeding and diet requirements have more trouble adapting.
One decision to drain a wetland might not appear to have much impact, but when all the neighbors
join in and a district is drained it affects so many species and in fact the entire biodiversity of the
region.
Starvation is a real problem for wetland birds,
The huge distances they need to travel can be fatal if there is less or no food for resupply.
Often the result is dead birds washing up on beaches in huge numbers.
Not much is being done to protect the birds, except by volunteer observers and scientists.
There are agreements internationally and between countries in an attempt to provide a focus on the problem but this is not always enforced.