I encourage anyone who is concerned to read Rachel Carson's great work, Silent Spring, published in 1962. I graduated from high school in 1962, and have been an outdoorsman for all my life, until I arrived in S. Florida at least.
I remember when I was a pup listening to the songbirds of spring in North Carolina, and it was wonderful. I would open my window as soon as it was warm enough, and it would stay open until late fall made it too cold to continue the practice.
As a kid I would hear hundreds of birds, and could identify a lot of them by their calls. Carson's book depressed me then and I thought at the time, "ah, that's a bunch of crap."
Fast forward to today and here I sit in south Florida, next door, well within five miles anyway, to the Everglades. Now the reverse is true of the windows of my home, I wait for the cooler days of winter so I can open windows and not be a prisoner to the central AC that makes life possible down here in the sub tropics.
As winter becomes what passes for spring in S Florida, one may well expect that lots of birds would be coming up the flyway from South America across the keys and saturating the areas around the 'Glades. Not so, it is an almost silent spring even down here.
There is spraying for mosquitoes now and then, but that also takes out a lot of other insects. What is the major food source of songbirds? Insects of course. No food, no birds. That added to the destruction of habitat, and the proliferation of feral cats that decimate bird populations, and something that I would shoot on sight if possible, I am living Rachel Carson's book. We have flocks of green parrots, but they are not native and make a terrible noise. Doves coo, but are hard to find. Crows caw, but that is an intrusion. There are very few songbirds down here, and it is sad.
By default of monitoring the southern airways for drug smuggler's aircraft, the same radar units monitor the eastern flyway. In most species of migratory songbird there has been a 90% to 95% decrease in the songbird population.
A thousand people a day move to Florida, and a good percentage of them come to S Florida. In the ten years I have been here I have watched even small wild places get dozed down and condos built. The last natural spot in Plantation where I rode my trail bicycle was converted to housing about three years ago.
I am fed up with it, and Diane and I are going away, moving to be near grandchildren. We will be very near the L. B. J. National Grasslands Park near Decatur, Texas. 30,000 acres of parkland and nature away from the cities. Maybe I can recapture some of what I experienced as a North Carolina nature lover in the spring, but I am not too optimistic.
