Insect Eating Birds are Starving in UnPrecedented Numbers Across the US – You Can Help Save Them with Suet
We have lost tens of thousands of swallows in Oregon in the last WEEK.
The neonicotinoids are killing off the insect populations across the board in all inland waterways near agricultural areas.
They are also directly toxic to our birds. Here is the documented evidence:
http://www.abcbirds.org/abcprograms/policy/toxins/neonic_final.pdf
Here is the local news headline regarding Oregon swallows:
‘Windy and Stormy Weather Killing Swallows This type of mortality event is unprecedented’
I sent a copy of this local news article to Dr. Henk Tennekes in the Netherlands.
Tennekes has documented a mass die off of inland waterway birds, farmland birds, song birds, swallows and all other wild birds in the Netherlands over the last three years.
He has also documented the die off of all of the insects, amphibians, invertebrates and fish in Netherlands’ inland waterways over the last three years where Neonicotinoids are used. He is a toxicologist. This is his scientific specialty – to identify toxins in the environment.
Here is Tennekes response:
“The use of neonicotinoids in agriculture is causing an environmental disaster. The compounds are persistent in soil and water and prone to leaching from soils. They spread through the environment and exterminate the invertebrates, which are an essential food source for many species (e.g., fish, birds, bats, hedgehogs, reptiles, amphibians, to name a few). In short, neonics break the food chain.So, is should not come as a surprise that insectivorous swallows are starving.”
Neonicotinoid insecticides are killing off vast numbers of non-targeted insects and whole sectors of low level food chain insects, invertebrates amphibians and fish. This is documented fact. This news story is just more circumstantial evidence.
How You Can Help
Insect eating and omnivorous birds will eat suet when they need it. You can get it at the local butcher (clean and healthy pasture raised even!) for 99 cents a pound.
You can put it in nets, cages, dishes, anything that can hold it. You do not even have to melt it down – just hang it where they will see it – along wet lands, marshes, streams, rivers – anywhere the hunting birds live.
They will come and they will eat it.
You can melt it into blocks that fit commercially sold suet holders.
Just buy a few ready made blocks of suet (full of crap and expensive)
then use the plastic containers they come in to make your own from clean healthy melted suet and organic seed.
Put out suet cakes NOW.
The birds who depend on the bottom of the food chain to survive will eat suet.
If we do not feed them now THEY WILL STARVE.
Read this article to see for yourself the extend of the die off just in Oregon’s Willamette Valley (a prime agricultural area).
How many are dying across the country? WHO is COUNTING? No one.
The birds who need our help are the birds who eat bugs and small invertebrates and amphibians. They are our ‘natural’ pest control and our devestation of the ‘pest’ population is now killing them.
PLEASE! PUT OUT SUET FEEDERS WHEREVER YOU CAN.
http://www.kval.com/outdoors/Wet-and-windy-weather-cause-of-swallow-die-off-226211531.html
Wet and windy weather is common in Oregon this time of year. If it was killing the swallows we’d have none to start with. As usual, the media can only report what is happening. They do not know how to tell the truth about why it is happening.