A law was quickly passed in 1959 requiring Chinese citizens to participate in targeting sparrows.

People hit pots and pans together to prevent sparrows from resting in their nests all over the country. Nests were destroyed and any bird found was killed, forcing them out of their natural habitat, searching for safer areas. Sparrows were eradicated.

Sparrows worldwide are natural predators of many insects, including crop-damaging locusts.

Locusts didn’t make Mao’s pest list since the sparrows consumed them along with the grain, controlling the insect population. Removing sparrows as the predator in its ecosystem would soon prove devastating for China.

By 1960, locusts overtook rice crops, limiting the food supply and initiating a famine for the Chinese.

Numbers vary, with the official number of lives lost from the Chinese government placed at 15 million. Some scholars, however, estimate that the fatalities were as high as 45 or even 78 million

There was also a major drought in 1960. Many historians believe the effects of weather events were exaggerated to minimize public concern with policy failures.

The sparrow eradication stands out as a significant contributing factor to the severity of the famine.

China ultimately imported 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to recover the species within the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign

https://www.historydefined.net/how-killing-sparrows-led-to-one-of-the-greatest-famines-in-history/

This tragic lesson should teach us that maintaining healthy populations of birds that consume insects is important to support sufficient food production for survival of humans.

Since 1970, 93 million white-throated sparrows have been lost in North America!

So what happens as food production becomes stifled and insects increase as bird populations continue to decline in North America?  Can’t we just use increased chemical controls?

Here’s the problem.  Birds, and especially passerines like sparrows, have an extremely varied diet including various grains, insects, snails, frogs, worms and small vertebrates.  As these birds decline in numbers, the undesirable components of their diet will proliferate in our environment.  Attempting additional chemical control will require multiple chemical agents, multiple applications and all the associated side effects and costs.  And chemical controls typically lose effectiveness over time.  And effective chemicals may not be in existence.

The question remains.  Why do we allow valuable habitats to be degraded and even destroyed (such as unreplaced tree removals) to build housing that most people cannot afford?  Doesn’t it make more sense to preserve habitats for all their benefits including stable food production and biodiversity?

It is not likely that all the birds in the park will leave.  Some may leave.  And some bird species may even increase in numbers.  As the park vicinity becomes more urbanized, the risk is that there will be fewer bird species that remain resulting in a loss of biodiversity.

We know that development can have adverse impacts on bird habitats. That’s why the US Fish and Wildlife Service advises: “The best way to avoid habitat impacts is to avoid placing development in or near important bird habitat.”

Therefore, we recommend the city purchase the parking area and establish a buffer zone between the park and the proposed apartment complex.  Doing so may help preserve the existing natural environment and biodiversity of the park.  The Denver Post has also recommended establishing such a buffer zone.

We know that the proposed project at 777 S Yarrow St will result both in habitat loss of the collective tree canopy and habitat degradation due to the immediate proximity of the construction site to the park and the ponds.  An example of habitat degradation is the shedding of noise from construction activity and eventual human occupation, and ongoing apartment complex activity.

The Impact of Noise: Ben Goldfarb – High Country News

“Wild animals inhabit an aural milieu that is sensitive beyond our imagining. Human conversation occurs at around 60 decibels, and sounds that barely register to us — gentle breathing, the rustle of leaves — produce around 10 decibels. The most acute predators, meanwhile, can detect negative-20 decibels. Bats seize upon the crunch of insect feet; foxes triangulate snow-buried voles.

In 2000, Richard Forman demonstrated that meadowlarks, bobolinks and other birds gave highways a wide berth, at least two football fields, and hypothesized that traffic noise was the primary cause for avian community changes.

For animals that survive by the grace of their hearing, traffic’s “masking effect” can be fatal. Ambient road noise drowns out songbirds’ alarm calls and prevents owls from detecting rodents. A mere three-decibel increase in background noise halves the “listening area,” the space in which an animal can pick up a signal. By disturbing animals, noise also disrupts the ecological processes they catalyze, among them seed dispersal, pollination and pest control.

Songbirds survive by listening ceaselessly for the whir of falcons, the rustle of martens, and the alarm calls of their neighbors: “the chipmunk next door that sees the goshawk before you do,” as Carlisle put it.

When road noise drowns out sonic cues, birds must look for predators rather than listen for them. This “foraging-vigilance trade-off” gradually depletes them: Every moment you’re scanning for hawks is one you’re not gobbling beetles.” end quotes

If we don’t protect vulnerable bird habitats like Belmar Park in Lakewood, Colorado and the nearby collective tree canopy habitat at 777 S Yarrow Street, their bird populations are at high risk of declining and/or becoming less diverse.

“The overall abundance and biomass of birds often increase from rural to urban settings, with just a few species contributing to the majority of individuals.”

Unfortunately, having fewer bird species means declining biodiversity. And biodiversity is our best natural defense against climate change.

The following condensed from The Race to Save America’s Birds

Recovery missions for individual species can cost between $1 million a year to 10 or 20 times that.

The state and federal wildlife agencies that watch over troubled species also remain hampered by antiquated policies. Too much of the focus is on the final stages of a bird’s existence – as in the case with the grasshopper sparrow – when costs are highest, challenges are greatest and there’s little room for error.

The country’s once-impressive federal bird research firepower has gradually been abandoned, leaving much of the scientific work up to nonprofits struggling for funding. The country’s Endangered Species system, the world’s gold standard for saving species from extinction reaching its 50th anniversary, is being swamped by the rising number of species in need and funding that hasn’t kept up with that demand. It can take years, sometimes decades, for candidate species simply to get an assessment, records show.

“We’ve got to rethink conservation from soup to nuts,’’ said Pete Marra, dean of Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Institute and leader of a new initiative pushing for research aimed at species before they approach extinction. “What we’re doing is not working.’’

We’ve taken birds for granted for generations even though they play essential roles as nature’s workhorses. They spread seeds, pollinate plants, eat insects by the tons, fertilize the land and seas and, of course, provide the soundtrack of the outdoors. Today, they also play a role as living barometers of the health of the environment that we share.

“I would say we have a decade to get this right,’’ said Elizabeth Gray, chief executive officer of the National Audubon Society, one of many leaders in the field we talked to who stressed that the next 10 years will be decisive for North America’s bird populations.

Birds provide essential benefits to all of us (including your children and grandkids) that will be diminished as birds decline in numbers or biodiversity.

As we lose birds or bird variety, we lose their contribution to biodiversity.  As biodiversity declines, the web of life weakens and may fall apart.

The web of life is the house we live in.  If your house is on fire, would you call the fire department or wait to see how big the fire gets?

‘IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.’

Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich

According to the City of Lakewood, CO: “Colorado’s urbanization is leading to habitat destruction. Birds offer several societal benefits like natural pest control, waste breakdown, pollination, seed dispersal, fostering a connection to nature, promoting ecotourism, and environmental monitoring.”

Benefits birds provide include:

• Birds save us millions of dollars a year by eating pests in gardens and farms, thereby reducing the amount of pesticides needed to control these populations, and mitigating the damage pests inflict on our crops and ornamental plants.
• Birds feed on a variety of insects, rodents, and other small animals, naturally keeping those populations in check and ensuring a proper balance in their ecosystem.
• They are essential as pollinators and for seed dispersal of many plants including forest trees and native plants.
• Protection from climate change.  As bird populations decline, so does biodiversity.  And biodiversity is the strongest natural defense against climate change.
• Carcass scavenging
• Economic impact: according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, bird watching is the fastest growing outdoor recreation in the country with over 47.8 million participants in the US.
• Birding improves people’s lives. Not only is birding a great family activity that appeals to all ages–it also provides individuals with physical and mental fitness, a sense of community, and a personal connection with nature.  These things are increasingly important in our urbanized and technology-driven world where adults and children alike suffer from ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ (a term coined by Richard Louv in Last Child in the Woods) whose symptoms include obesity, depression, attention deficit, and deficiencies in problem-solving and critical-thinking skills.

It may not be possible to fully anticipate the exact effects of declining bird populations but there will likely be more insects, reduced crop yields, higher food prices, fewer trees, more rodents and even more animal remains decaying outdoors.

As birds decline in numbers, entire species eventually go extinct over time.  Some are already gone.

Recent research indicates that as bird species go extinct, the remaining species may become increasingly more similar to each other and “will lose their unique characteristics and trend toward a physical “average”: a small to medium body size and a strong, short beak, like sparrows and crows have.”

“A reduced variety of bird types will most likely lead to a reduction in the variety of insects consumed, flowers pollinated, seeds dispersed and so on.”

Therefore, it is critical to protect remaining habitats like Belmar Park and the tree canopy an S Yarrow St. because it may not be possible to fix or replace lost habitats at a later date.

Investments in understanding and preventing declines in populations of birds and other organisms will pay off only while there is still time to act.