8. And No Birds Sing
OVER INCREASINGLY large areas of the United States , s pring now comes unheralded by
the return of the birds , and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled
with the beauty of bird s ong. This s udden s ilencing of the s ong of birds , this obliteration of the
color and beauty and inte res t they lend to our world have come about s wiftly, insidious ly, and
unnoticed by thos e whos e communities are as yet unaffected. From the town of Hins dale,
Illinois, a housewife wrote in despair to one of the world’s leading ornithologists, Robert
Cus hman Murphy, Curator Eme ritus of Birds at the American Mus eum of Natural His tory.
Here in our village the elm trees have been sprayed for several years [she wrote in 1958]. When
we moved here six years ago, there was a wealth of bird life; I put up a feeder and had a s teady
stream of cardinals, chickadees, downies and nuthatches all winter, and the cardinals and
chickadees brought their y oung ones in the s umme r. Afte r s everal years of DDT s pray, the to wn
is almos t devoid of robins and s tarlings ; chickadees have not been on my s helf for tw o years ,
and this year the cardinals are gone too; the nes ting population in the neighborhood s eems to
cons is t of one dove pair and perhaps one catbird family.
It is hard to explain to the children that the birds have been killed off, when they have learned
in school that a Federal law protects the birds from killing or capture. ‘Will they ever c ome
back?’ they as k, and I do not have the ans wer. The elms are still dying, and so are the birds. I s
anything being done? Can anythi ng be done? Can I do any thing? A year after the federal
government had launched a massive spraying program against the fire ant, an Alabama woman
wrote: ‘Our place has been a veritable bird sanctuary for ove r half a century. Las t July we all
rema rked, “There are more bi rds than ever.” Then, s udde nly, in the s econd week of Augus t,
they all disappeared. I was accustomed to rising early to care for my favorite mare that had a
young filly. There was not a s ound of the s ong of a bird. It was eerie, terrifying. What was man
doing to our perfect and beautiful world? Finally, five months later a blue jay appeared and a
wren.’ The autumn months to which s he referred brought other s ombe r reports from the deep
South, whe re in Miss is sippi, Louisiana, and Alabama the Field Notes publis hed quarterly by the
National Audubon Society and the Unite d States Fis h and Wildlife Service noted the s triking
phenome non of ‘blank s pots weirdly empty of virtually all bird life’. The Field Notes are a
compilation of the reports of s eas oned obs ervers who have s pent many yea rs afield in their
particular areas and have unpa ralleled knowledge of the normal bird life of the region. One
s uch obs erver reported that in driving about southern Mississippi that fall she saw ‘no land
birds at all for long dis tances ’. Another in Baton Rouge reporte d that the contents of her
feeders had lain untouche d ‘for weeks on end’, while fruiting s hrubs in her ya rd, that ordina rily
would be stripped clean by that time, still were laden with berries. Still another reported that
his picture window, ‘which ofte n us ed to frame a s cene s plas hed with the red of 40 or 50
cardinals and crowde d with other s pecies , s eldom pe rmitted a view of as many as a bird or two
at a time.’ Professor Maurice Brooks of the University of West Virginia, an authority on the
birds of the Appalachian region, reporte d that the Wes t Virginia bird population had unde rgone
‘an incredible reduction’. One s tory might s erve as the tragic s ymbol of the fate of the birds—a
fate that has already overtaken some species, and that threate ns all. It is the s tory of the robin,