 |
| The spring 1904 magazine in which the article appeared (image: Biodiversity Heritage Library) |
The following article by artist and ornithologist W. Otto Emerson was published in the March/April 1904 edition of The Condor, bi-monthly magazine of the Cooper Ornithological Club of California. In it, he recounts "the disastrous effect upon birdlife of the numerous telephone, telegraph and electric power wires which are strung along our highways, across lines of migration or favourite paths to feeding grounds". His conclusion is that the collisions result in innumerable shorebirds being killed annually.
Within the past few years, several instances have come under my observation which seem worthy of record.
The first case was noted September 8, 1898, in connection with the telephone line which, passing over the saltmarshes, joins Haywards with a landing on the bay shore, some four miles west.
Only two wires are used, which are attached to fourteen foot poles set some twenty feet out in the salicornia to the right of the roadway.
Beyond this, on both sides of the road, the marshes are cut up for miles into a series of checkerboard ponds for saltwater evaporation purposes.
In August, September and October these ponds are a mass of glittering white - more or less - as the water has been run off.
Small shore waders come by the thousands to feed upon the mass of larvae which collect about the edges of the ponds.
On the date mentioned, I drove over the road for the first time to find what fall migrants had returned.
On picking up eight or ten dead sandpipers from the road, I was at first unable to make out what had killed them.
I then noticed a fluttering bird out in the marsh in line of the phone wires, and found it to be a phalarope with a broken wing.
This revealed the secret.
I soon observed a flock go by from one pond to another and saw none of them strike the wire on that trip, but later saw several individuals that had fallen from a flock of sandpipers.
I picked up forty dead birds that lay along the road and about the marsh.
Some were under the wires while others would be flung off ten or twenty feet by the impact of hitting a wire in rapid flight.
A little farther, on I found a bird hanging by the wing and another by the neck to the wire.
Most of those picked up were found to be cut across the front of the head or breast.
Some were cut into the flesh deeply; a few were beheaded.
I made the next day another trip over the road and found the remains of thirty odd birds, mostly red-necked phalaropes and western sandpipers.
Quite a number of other sandpiper or tattler species were among those found on my first visit.
As I watched the flocks when they came in from the bay, or flew from one set of ponds to another, it was observed that their line of flight would just be in range to hit either of the two wires.
Coming with such a zig-zag and rapid flight they were not able to see the two wires in time to dip or rise in order to avoid being caught by the trap.
If one of the foremost birds of the flock struck the wire and fell, the rest would turn their course somewhat - more from seeing their falling companion, I think, than from being able to distinguish at the speed they were going, the real cause of the disaster.
 |
| William Otto Emerson - lifelong California resident (photo via Wikimedia Commons) |
On my last visit in this direction, on May 11, 1903, I found five red-necked phalaropes in full spring plumage, plus several least sandpipers and western sandpipers.
Larger birds than these would not be so liable to come in contact with the wires, flying as they do considerably slower and higher in the air.
This destruction of shorebirds goes on night and day the year round.
I asked some of the saltpond owners if they noticed birds flying against the wires.
They said some mornings after the spring or fall flights, they had seen dozens lying along the road.
Cats from warehouses and dwellings had learned the convenient larder and had grown fat, while Japanese and Italian workmen imitated the cats.
Mr. F. H. Hollins, of San Jose, mentioned to me some years ago that he had picked up two or three dozen phalaropes one morning (Nov. 1898) along the main thoroughfare, five miles east of the saltmarsh.
They lay under the wires and he thought they must have been killed during the night flight.
Mr. Clark P. Streater picked up on the main business street of Santa Cruz, California, in September, 1903, a black rail killed by overhead wires.
On June 29, 1903, Prof. F. E. L. Beal and I found one of the oddest tangles into which a bird ever managed to get itself.
It was a great horned owl, on one of the canyon ranches, and was wound up in a barbed wire fence.
He was hanging by the wing, wound several times around the wires, so that it was impossible to extricate him.
The fence had only two wires, and led down a slope into the upper end of a gully or canyon.
Some of the sandy hill had slid down leaving the wire with several posts swinging free, some six or eight feet in air, for a distance of several hundred yards.
No doubt the owl, intent upon some prospective midnight lunch, as he flew along down the gulch, came in contact with the top wire.
This, having caught his fluffy feathers, naturally wound Bubo tight in its barbs.
The legs were badly cut by the struggle for freedom which was further evidenced by the feathers about the neck.
He had evidently used his beak as well as feet.
In this age of barbed wire, there are more ways than one by which an animal may come to an untimely end.
No comments:
Post a Comment