Canary In A Coal Mine

There are things we see every day and take for granted. Birds, for instance. 

When I was growing up not far from the southern Brooklyn shore, I did not pay much attention to the birds. There were "sparrows," "pigeons" and "seagulls." In my immediate area the "park" was a large, concrete area with swings, basketball hoops, benches and a wall for playing handball. There was no greenery beyond some trees. My house had a postage stamp-sized backyard just big enough for some rose bushes, hydrangeas and small bit of grass.

A part of the Brooklyn shore I didn't appreciate when
I was growing up in the area. (RE Berg-Andersson)

Luckily for me, I could walk the quarter-mile or so under a highway underpass to the bay. If I wanted to walk farther, I'd go to Plumb Beach and look at the Atlantic Ocean. At the time this beach was dirty and not really a place to go alone, especially at night. (Now it is part of the Gateway National Park system.) At the time I lived here I did not appreciate the variety of habitats and birds available to me, if only my second-generation American parents had had more of an interest in things beyond making a living to raise their family.

I now know the presence of birds can tell you a lot about an area. So can their absence.

At the time I grew up there my neighborhood was mainly white. Several miles down Nostrand Ave. an apartment complex was decidedly not mainly white. I don't know if it had a park, concrete or otherwise.

What prompts these thoughts is an article the New York Times reported in November about a study by Nature Human Behavior, published online in September. The Times put on a headline that seems rather silly considering the content of the report, but it would be the type of thing to appeal to its upscale (or wannabe upscale) audience: "Why Warblers Flock To Tonier Neighborhoods."

I don't know why there was a two-month lag between study and article, and I did not care to set up an account to read the full Times article. But I did read a similar article in Mongabay.com, where the headline took the report much more seriously:

Discriminatory U.S. housing policies still affect bird sightings 90 years later

In a way, this should be obvious. In the areas where nonwhite people had to live because of the institutionalized banking process known as redlining, parks were not a high priority. 

From the report:

Historic segregation and inequality are critical to understanding modern environmental conditions. Race-based zoning policies, such as redlining in the United States during the 1930s, are associated with racial inequity and adverse multigenerational socioeconomic levels in income and education, and disparate environmental characteristics including tree canopy cover across urban neighbourhoods. 

Here we quantify the association between redlining and bird biodiversity sampling density and completeness—two critical metrics of biodiversity knowledge—across 195 cities in the United States. We show that historically redlined neighbourhoods remain the most undersampled urban areas for bird biodiversity today, potentially impacting conservation priorities and propagating urban environmental inequities. 

The disparity in sampling across redlined neighbourhood grades increased by 35.6% over the past 20 years. We identify specific urban areas in need of increased bird biodiversity sampling and discuss possible strategies for reducing uncertainty and increasing equity of sampling of biodiversity in urban areas. Our findings highlight how human behaviour and past social, economic and political conditions not just segregate our built environment but may also leave a lasting mark on the digital information we have about urban biodiversity.

Here's another reason this should be obvious. When the Cornell Ornithology Lab and the Audubon Society urge "citizen scientists" to report what they are seeing in their hikes and at their feeders, either through the eBird database or for the annual Christmas Bird Count (which has a fee) or the Presidents Day weekend Great Backyard Bird Count (which doesn't), the majority of participants are people who live near parks or have backyards where they can hang feeders. In a gritty urban neighborhood, feeding birds may not be the highest priority when there are so many other things you must do to survive when money is tight. 

The people who DO report are generally people like me: white, older, with enough money to buy a house with some land in an area near a variety of habitats suitable for hiking, fishing and, if we have an interest in it, looking for birds. To draw these birds to us, we hang feeders filled with various types of seed or suet. It has only been in recent years that a serious effort has been made to encourage nonwhite people to get involved with birding specifically and nature in general.

From the Mongabay article:

“We’re starting to untangle the environmental effects, because segregation did not just shape where highways and wastewater facilities were built,” said [study] lead author Diego Ellis-Soto, an ecologist at Yale University, “but also where national parks and urban recreation areas were built.” Those green spaces, he noted, attract wildlife.

Is it any wonder historic birding references are written by mainly wealthy white men and lack data from redlined neighborhoods? In a way it is similar to why women have suffered because research into such things as cardiovascular disease has centered on men, thus ignoring how women react in similar circumstances.

Redlining was officially outlawed in 1968, although some would say the practice continues in a less obvious way.

As I said, in many urban neighborhoods I know a "park" is a concrete playground with basketball courts, maybe a few benches and a swing or slide for the smaller children. There are exceptions, of course. In the planned neighborhood of Sunnyside Gardens, the small houses were built in the English style, with a common, shared backyard that provides some needed space and a chance for neighbors to get together. (This area has become a preserved neighborhood to save it from being razed for more high-rise buildings.)

Most of New York is considered a concrete jungle, even though it contains Central [Manhattan], Prospect [Brooklyn] and Van Cortlandt [Bronx] parks, among others.  

But the majority of my home borough hasn't had farms or other large swaths of open space for centuries, not since Brooklyn was "developed" to handle the Manhattanites and others seeking to escape for more space. The people living near Prospect Park in Park Slope, along the near parts of Eastern Parkway and in Windsor Terrace spend a lot of money to live near this park, considered by landlords an offered "amenity." Maybe that will change in more of the nonwhite neighborhoods as they become "gentrified" by an influx of younger, richer, whiter people who demand more parks (and whose higher rents force out others, perpetuating the cycle).

You could say the absence of birds - whether through climate change or redlining - is like the canary in a coal mine, telling us things we might not want to know but ignore at our peril.