Lament for the Songbirds

‘But ask the animals, and they will teach you;
   the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
⁸ ask the plants of the earth,^* and they will teach you;
   and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
⁹ Who among all these does not know
   that the hand of the Lord has done this?
¹⁰ In his hand is the life of every living thing
   and the breath of every human being.  Job 12

March Break is generally a pleasant time for family excursions and discovery camps. Kids get to explore in museums and art galleries along with a lot of other opportunities. There was a more sombre event at the Royal Ontario Museum this past Friday. The organization called FLAP the acronym for Fatal Light Awareness Program, partners up with the ROM each year to display the corpses of birds which have been the losers in collisions with buildings. The 1,800 birds on display is a fraction of the estimated million or more birds which die in this manner, including several species at risk.

I saw film footage on the news of children leaning down close to the birds, even picking up and examining the tiny victims of our cities and the confusing light they produce.




Yesterday we watched a CBC Nature of Things episode called Songbird SOS which informed us that the songbird population of the Americas has plummeted by roughly 50% in the past fifty years, a disheartening statistic. Light pollution, habitat destruction, agricultural poisons, climate change, and outdoor cats kill billions of songbirds every year. We have "free range" cats and they are murderous. We felt considerable dismay as we watched.  
This doc reminds us that birds are literally and figuratively the "canaries in the coalmine." We lose species and their habitat at our peril for biodiversity and the health of the planet.

As someone who loves birds I want to figure out what I can do differently. Now, those cats...

Thoughts?