The Silence of the Birds
(republishing, copying, no restrictions)
By: Father Shay
There is nothing so pleasant as a walk in the countryside in the summer. The smell of the lush summer, the red poppies bobbing in the barley fields delight the eyes and the rare song of the skylarks flushed from the meadows and cornfields is a joy to remember. But these simple joys of nature are fast fading and will soon to be lost perhaps forever.
The onslaught of intensive chemical farming has severely damaged the ecosystem upon which all wildlife depends. The chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen rich and pesticides, pollution from farm vehicles, mills and processing factories have soaked the land with poisons and leeched into the water table. Humans too are dying of cancers in every increasing numbers.
The pig slurry from farms is loaded with chemical from the feed and animal medications . Fish kills in rivers and lakes is all to common. Cattle and sheep dung is loaded with the chemical residues from feeds. We have all heard of the ‘cannibal cake’ cattle feed made from slaughtered cows and fed back to the next generation of cattle that became our killer beef burgers.
The pesticides have silenced the bird songs. Cherish every twitter you may hear from now on, it may be your last. Butterflies fluttering their dainty ways across the fields and hedgerows in most parts of Britain and Ireland will be just memories if you happen to see them, cherish every sighting.
The pesticides have killed off huge numbers of insects that the birds feed upon and many of them have died out too. The chemicals they ingested made their eggs infertile or the shells so fragile they could not protect the chick inside. Whole species of birds have almost disappeared.
The biodiversity of the whole planet is under so severe a threat that environmental experts have warned that a mass extinction is already under way and for many species of animal and bird it is irreversible.
Two renowned ecological researchers Jeremy Thomas and Carly Stevens have found huge declines in at least one third of all species in Britain. 71 % of Butterflies in 58 species are in serious decline. Some are already extinct. In the fields and meadows 20% of the animals are on the way to extinction.
Since the same destructive agricultural methods have been promoted worldwide the experts say in Science magazine that a mass extinction is well underway. All this is because of the greedy ways of one species human species, the ones with the big brains and the so called intelligence.
Thomas and Stevens say that the planet is losing an estimated 65 to 95 percent of all it’s species. It took millions of years for these beautiful and magnificent creature to evolve through God’s plan and we are responsible for killing them off in a few years. This is surely one of the greatest sins of human kind against the world
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