Last week - About 150 kilometres north of Vancouver on one of the Gulf islands, I was standing on the deck at our cabin and observing what appeared to be the tail end of this year's warbler migration. Within a few minutes on that drizzly Friday, first a few Wilson warblers, then a pair of yellow warblers and finally a lone yellow-rumped warbler came by. These tiny creatures, none more than 12-centimetres long, stopped briefly to fuel up on insects before continuing north on the Pacific coast flyway on an annual journey that may have begun as far south as Central America and could well end up as far north as Alaska.
Next week - The Vancouver Park Board and Vancouver city council will consider motions that will speak to a new "Bird Friendly Strategy." Monday evening, picking up from where former COPE park commissioner Loretta Woodcock left off, Constance Barnes's motion will point to the Fraser River Delta as B.C.'s most significant and important bird area that "supports millions of birds," both resident and migrants, annually.
With Tourism Vancouver cheering from the sidelines, she will point out the billions of dollars that birding tourism contributes now south of the border. And, of course, we will hear about the benefits birds bring to the quality of our lives as pollinators, spreaders of seeds and eaters of destructive insects and other pests. The park board will ask staff to "report back on the feasibility of developing landscape design guidelines to enhance bird habitat for landscapes across Vancouver."
On Wednesday morning, Andrea Reimer will take the lead at council. The motion will tie her proposal to the Greenest City Action Plan and the short history since 2010 when the city partnered with the Park Board, Nature Canada, Bird Studies Canada and The Stanley Park Ecological Society to celebrate World Migratory Bird Day. That event kicked off a week of public education programming about birds and bird habitat.
Reimer's motion will ask staff to report back on "best practices for monitoring and protecting bird populations in an urban environment including building and landscaping guidelines."
Vancouver is not leading the way in this initiative. More accurately, it is catching up to cities including Toronto, Calgary and Chicago that have their own bird-friendly strategies.
In fact, Chicago's strategy was crafted by Sadhu Johnston before he left there to become Vancouver's deputy city manager.
Here is what we know. Collisions with man-made structures rank second among the causes of death to migratory birds. This is second only to habitat loss, which is also most often the effect of human activity. In the United States alone, there are an estimated one billion deaths caused by "bird strikes" annually. During night migrations, these are most often caused by lights in a building luring birds on a collision course. During the day, it's the reflective glass of a building that cause birds to think they see greenery ahead when it's actually a reflection of what is behind them so they go slamming full speed into that reflection. This explains why most bird strikes occur between the first and fourth floors of buildings and not as the result of skyscrapers.
Incidentally, while Toronto has monitored bird strikes for years now, we really don't know what impact our buildings here have on migratory birds. There will be a proposal to monitor going forward, although, I'm told, because of the attendant crows, seagulls and rats that feed on the disabled and the dead, exact numbers will be hard to arrive at.
But let me leave you with this: Improving bird habitat and their chances of survival as they wing their way across continents can have unintended and at times delightful consequences.
Last spring, the Los Angeles Times reported on an inner city school in one of the most densely populated areas of L.A. where, thanks to help from Audubon and a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a grade school was able to replace 5,000-square-feet of concrete and Bermuda grass with native flora. "The plants attracted insects which attracted birds, which attracted students, who, fascinated by the nature unfolding before them, learned so much that their test scores in science rose six fold."
