Brown Bag Seminar on Bird Friendly Landscapes paints bleak picture but offers hope

Mizzou Botanic Garden’s second 2023 Brown Bag Series program, “Bird Friendly Landscapes,” was held May 10 at co-sponsor Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture’s schoolhouse. Presenter Dana Ripper, co-founder and director of the Missouri River Bird Observatory, shared information about declining bird species and tips for safely attracting birds to home landscapes.

 

Ripper noted that approximately 430 bird species have been documented in Missouri, 100 of which are year-round residents. 

 

She discussed the scope of songbird decline, highlighting results of a study published in Science magazine by researchers from seven institutions that documented a loss of one in four North American breeding adult birds since 1970 — a shocking total of nearly 3 billion birds.

 

Loss of habitat is the greatest cause of diminished bird species. Ripper noted that in Missouri, grassland ecospheres are among the hardest hit. Meadowlark species, for example, have suffered a 70% decline. She highlighted Missouri’s division of ecological regions, each with its own land type profile and the reduction of natural habitat in each due to human activities such as agriculture and urbanization. 

 

Ripper said a near-total loss of prairie has been devastating to birds like grasshopper and Henslow sparrows, both of which depend on that ecosphere for survival. Bobwhites and greater prairie chickens have sadly been extirpated from Missouri’s prairies.

 

A loss of wetlands and the biodiversity they support has resulted in species loss all the way up the food chain, as has the use of herbicides such as glysophate.

 

In cities, Ripper said that nothing has negatively impacted songbird species more than the increase in lawns. In the United States, there are 63 million acres of lawn. The use of insecticides and herbicides on neighborhoods’ green expanses has resulted in the elimination of insects, the primary food source for many birds.

 

Also implicated is the tendency to feature non-native plants in home landscapes. Ripper cited the research of University of Delaware Entomologist Doug Tallamy, which demonstrated that native plants and trees invite native insect species, the larvae of which 96% of birds use to feed their nestlings. Non-native species do not support the insects with which native birds evolved. Native plants also produce berries and seeds that attract many native songbirds.

 

Ripper recommended two additional activities to make home environments more inviting for birds. She urged homeowners to keep house cats indoors and to apply bird-safe window treatments to avoid bird-killing window collisions.