Abstract
'' And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth;' Genesis I, verse 26. It's ironic that my Bible is kept on a library shelf next to the book "Where Have All the Birds Gone?" by John Terborgh.
We really haven't been the best of global caretakers. In our hemisphere, standards of living may change from north to south but some '' environmental stress" seems to be a common denominator. Americans use 1.5 billion aluminum cans a week, use 18 billion disposable diapers a year (enough to go to the moon and back 7 times), and throw away 870,000 pounds of food a day. We use enough disposable plates and cups in a year to give the world a picnic six times. Contributing significantly to the dumping of 15 billion pounds of garbage a year into the world's oceans, we have created a situation where 46,000 pieces of plastic can be found per mile of ocean and 100,000 marine mammals have died by being entangled or as a result of eating plastic. On a three mile stretch of the Niagara River, 150 toxic waste dumps have been located.
South of the border, populations are swelling. Take a breath and three more babies were born on earth. 16,000 per hour. Ninety percent in the Third World. The birds we love live in a changing world. Forty to fifty million acres of the earth's forests are destroyed each year. Eighty acres a minute. 55,000 being rain forest each year, the size of the state of New York. I could go on but you get the message.
It seems obvious that man will decide ultimately what species will share his planet. In many cases, species will be maintained in captivity permanently as there will be no wild to return them to. They may gradually change, adapting to a captive environment, but they will always remind those that view them that our planet is also inhabited by colorful, melodiously singing, bundles of feathers called birds. If they could not be viewed in captivity, they would surely perish as ''out of sight, out of mind" few seem inclined to protect things they have not seen. Back in 1978-79, we had 275 avian species on the edge of global extinction. Today we have over 1,000.
Today, with Third World agrarian societies competing for space and resources and high technological economies pumping out toxic waste and ozone pollution, it is even more important that we keep our birds. It isn't going to be easy though. Many so-called conservation organizations with high rise offices and well paid executive staffs see us a much easier victory than dealing with the real problems. They have even convinced some that we are part of the problem. Of course, they fail to realize that since recorded time man has had his avian companions. Noah was the first aviculturist and what a collection he had!