PAGE 1 / A SECTION	MONDAY • May 21, 2001

NOWHERE TO LAND
Homes for humans take fields, forests where birds once nested, leaving . . .
Charles Seabrook - Staff
Monday, May 21, 2001

The problem had to come from south of the border, scientists had decided.

It was the 1970s, and bird populations were declining. It had to be because of the destruction of tropical forests in Latin America. Forests there were being leveled by the millions of acres per year to make way for mines, cattle ranches, agriculture crops and other development.

But tropical forest loss alone could not account for all bird declines --- especially for species like the northern bobwhite and the clapper rail, which don't migrate. Researchers began looking for answers in the forests and fields of Georgia and elsewhere in North America.

They had to look no farther than down the street.

Massive urban sprawl was rapidly engulfing the landscape, displacing numerous birds in its wake.

Now, the unceasing human encroachment has nearly eliminated field and grassland birds --- the bobwhite, field sparrow, eastern meadowlark, loggerhead shrike, prairie warbler, Bachman's sparrow --- from many parts of metro Atlanta. Forest destruction also has decimated populations of "forest interior" birds like the wood thrush, which naturalist Henry David Thoreau said "declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest."

One songbird, the Bewick's wren, once common throughout Georgia and famous for nesting in old cars, junkyards and outbuildings, has all but disappeared from the state.

Ornithologist Georgeann Schmalz, who has kept tabs on birds in Atlanta's Fernbank Forest for more than 25 years, says nesting neotropical birds are becoming scarce in the 82-acre forest, and she suspects the intense development surrounding it is a reason.

Experts say there are several reasons for bird declines, but the biggest reason is the rapid loss of habitat --- forests, grasslands, marshes, swamps where the birds breed, feed and protect themselves from predators.

The dwindling bird numbers have prompted state and federal biologists and conservation groups to undertake an array of bird-saving missions.

Neotropical songbirds are a primary focus. The efforts make up the largest conservation effort undertaken for a segment of wildlife neither exploited by hunters --- such as ducks and wild turkeys --- nor on the Endangered Species List.

Why the fuss? The prompt answer from ecologists is that the birds are vital to the health and functioning of ecosystems. Their appetites are voracious, consuming mind-boggling numbers of insects every summer. A pair of nesting warblers and their brood may consume more than 2,000 leaf-chomping caterpillars a day.

Some studies have shown that without the songbirds, entire forests would be denuded.

"When forest birds eat insects, the result is greater tree growth and a longer period between insect outbreaks --- services that may be worth as much as $5,000 per year for each square mile of forest," says Scott Robinson, an ornithologist with the University of Illinois.

Birders have another perspective: The birds, with their sweet morning songs and dazzling reds, yellows and blues, are worth saving for no other reason than the great joy people find in watching, studying and listening to them.

Biologists predict many more areas of metro Atlanta and Georgia will lose birds as development steams ahead unabated. The 2000 census, for instance, shows that the 20-county metro Atlanta area boomed to 4.1 million residents from 1.8 million in 1970. The exploding growth translates into the loss of an estimated 50 acres of tree cover per day for new homes, malls and other development.

Bands of suburbs also have started merging with each other along Southern transportation corridors, in some cases forming almost unbroken chains of medium-density areas hundreds of miles long --- from Atlanta to Charlotte along I-85 or Atlanta to Chattanooga along I-75.

"The entire Piedmont region is heading toward one big area of sprawl, and when you lose habitat outright, you lose birds. Period," says Chuck Hunter, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Southeast coordinator for nongame bird species. "With farming or logging, you can always restore it. But once you've got houses and Wal-Marts, there's no return. It's the final nail in the coffin."

About 65 percent of Georgia is now forested --- nearly twice as much as at the turn of the last century, when cotton fields dominated the Piedmont and massive clear cuts had leveled mountain forests. With the decline of cotton and the timber industry's shift to the West Coat after the Eastern forests were felled, scores of old fields and clear cuts reverted back to forest.

Now, the landscape is rapidly changing again.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture last year ranked Georgia third in the nation --- behind Texas and Pennsylvania --- for the amount of farmland and woodland being converted to subdivisions, malls and other development. Between 1992 and 1997, about 211,000 acres of farmland and forests per year --- more than 1 million acres altogether --- were developed. It was nearly three times the 77,000 acres developed per year between 1982 and 1992.

The pace of the growth does not portend a good future for many songbirds.

On the coast, rapid development is a major reason for the steep decline --- about 50 percent in the past 20 years --- of the painted bunting, which without doubt is North America's most colorful songbird. The male sports a blood red belly, a royal blue hood, a red eye ring and a chartreuse cape on his back.

Ornithologist Joe Meyers with the U.S. Geological Survey in Athens says the wax myrtle thickets and other shrubby habitat preferred by the bunting are being gobbled up by new subdivisions and vacation resorts.

Elsewhere in the state, especially in the gently rolling Piedmont, where most of the state's human population is concentrated, development has created a highly fragmented landscape, with subdivisions and malls popping up all over the place, separated by isolated patches of woods or grasslands. Roads, power lines, farm fields and logging clear cuts also have partitioned the terrain into a patchy quiltlike pattern.

Fragmentation can be devastating to songbirds. Study after study shows that the birds have trouble raising their babies in small blocks of islandlike woods surrounded by clear cuts, farmland and suburbs, as compared with large forest tracts.

Fragmentation creates avenues in which predators --- house cats, snakes, raccoons, opossums --- are virtually funneled into nesting sites, giving the marauders greater access to forest-nesting birds.

Neotropical songbirds' choice for nest locations doesn't help their cause. They often build their cup-shaped nests in the forest understory, relatively close to the ground or on the ground in easy reach of hungry, prowling creatures. White-tailed deer can make it easier for the birds' enemies. The deer, which have become pests throughout Georgia, often over-browse critical cover for the birds, leaving them sitting ducks for predators or even homeless.

The end result of fragmentation is that fewer nests succeed, fewer young birds return the next spring to replace adults lost to natural mortality, and the population declines and eventually crashes.

In Atlanta, Schmalz believes a variation on that scenario may be playing out in the Fernbank Forest, where the nesting neotropical birds' numbers have declined sharply over the years.

A predator that is becoming a major threat in Georgia's fragmented landscape is the brown-headed cowbird, a nondescript robin-size bird that prospers on forest edges, says biologist Terry Johnson of the Department of Natural Resources.

Cowbirds are brood parasites, laying their speckled eggs in the nests of other birds, leaving their chicks to be raised by the foster parents. In many cases, the cowbird will remove the eggs of the other bird and replace them with its own. With much of the foster parents' energy devoted to raising the voracious, fast-growing cowbird young, the songbirds' offspring, which are usually much smaller in size, often perish.

Schmalz and other experts, however, don't totally disparage the isolated, fragmented woodlots: Even though fragmentation is not good for the birds, they say, the woodlots are still more desirable than felling them for cluster homes and condominiums. Wooded tracts like Fernbank Forest are still important for neotropical migrants passing through and for the year-round urbanized birds.

But the urban woodlots themselves are endangered.

To illustrate that, biologist Malcolm Hodges of the Nature Conservancy of Georgia recently drove a visitor around some newly built subdivisions near Riverdale in Clayton County, pointing out stands of pines, some more than 40 acres in size, that are slated for the chain saw within the next year.

Some songbirds, like the summer tanager and probably the brown-headed nuthatch, still nest in the remaining stands, he said. But when the blocks of trees are destroyed, the birds living there must fly in search of other woods. Those woods, however, probably already have all the birds they can hold, and the new arrivals must run off the established residents or, if they can't, fly even farther for a place to live.

"The likely outcome is that some birds die," Hodges said.

GEORGIA'S DISAPPEARING SONGBIRDS: A 3-DAY SERIES

Sunday: Nearly a third of Georgia residents watch birds, and they are passionate about their hobby.

Today: Deforestation in Latin America is playing a big role in the disappearance of Georgia songbirds, but so is the population sprawl in metro Atlanta.

Tuesday: As cell towers spring up all across America, Georgia's songbirds are dying from crashing into them during night migrations. Experts say it's a big problem, and growing. In News

Online: An up-close look at individual birds, their songs and why they are endangered. ajc.com

PAGE 1 / A SECTION	TODAY • May 22, 2001

Forest of human obstacles deadly for migrating birds
Charles Seabrook - Staff
Tuesday, May 22, 2001

Birds are on a collision course with modern technology.

The age-old migration routes of songbirds now returning to Georgia and other points north have become dangerous obstacles courses --- virtual death traps for millions of birds along the way.

The trek to their summer breeding grounds in North America is arduous enough. After departing staging areas in Mexico and the Caribbean, the tiny birds wing it up to 20 hours over 600 miles of the Gulf of Mexico before making landfall on the Gulf Coast --- a truly remarkable feat.

Then they must fly hundreds of miles more to reach the spots where they build their nests and rear their young.

But modern technology has put thousands of obstacles --- broadcasting and telecommunication towers and soaring skyscrapers --- in the birds' paths, vying with them for airspace. At the same time, rampant development is paving over vital wild places known as "stopovers," which exhausted birds need for refueling and resting along migratory routes.

The result: Millions of birds survive the rigors of crossing the open Gulf only to perish in the homestretch.

Biologists and conservationists estimate that communication towers, some stretching as high as 2,000 feet into the air, are causing the deaths of as many as 40 million birds a year. They die when their bodies slam into the structures or they become disoriented by the towers' lights and crash into guy wires or into each other.

When telephone line towers, power lines, tall buildings and even modern-day wind mills --- or wind turbines --- are factored into the mix, the death toll may exceed 100 million, bird experts say.

At highest risk are the tiny neotropical songbirds, the warblers, tanagers, thrushes, vireos, flycatchers and orioles that breed and nest in North America in the spring and summer and migrate to Latin America and the Caribbean for the winter. Unlike migrating flocks of cranes, ducks, geese and other large birds, neotropical songbirds migrate at night to avoid daytime heat and predators.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists say the annual "tower kill" tally is a significant reason for alarming declines in migratory songbird populations since 1970.

More than 25 of Georgia's neotropical songbirds --- including wood thrushes, painted buntings, golden-winged warblers, cerulean warblers --- are among those facing diminishing numbers.

"The next step for some of these birds could be listing under the Endangered Species Act . . . and this is a train wreck we're trying to avoid," says Albert Manville, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in Washington, who keeps track of migratory birds and other international issues.

The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that towers 200 feet or higher are killing between 4 million and 5 million birds a year nationwide, while an American Bird Conservancy study released last summer says the grim toll runs as high as 40 million birds annually.

If one considers just the lowest estimate of 4 million birds, "that means that towers are on average killing one bird every 7 1/2 seconds, every day and every night, all year long," Manville says. "These are mostly the little birds, the songbirds. So this is a fairly significant impact."

The study cites more than 230 bird species --- more than 50 of them rare, endangered or facing plummeting numbers --- as victims of the slaughter. Atop the list are neotropical songbirds.

According to the report, the ovenbird, a 5-inch-long, brown and white warbler that builds its ground level nest resembling a Dutch oven in Georgia's mountains, is the species most often killed by towers in the past 50 years. The red-eyed vireo, a 5-inch-long, greenish-backed bird with a warbling song that nests in forests throughout the state, is second on the list. Third is the Tennessee warbler, a tiny vocal bird that pays short visits to Georgia during migration.

Also fairly high up the list are migratory species of special concern in Georgia because of dwindling numbers --- Swainson's warbler, cerulean warbler, Bachman's sparrow and Henslow's sparrow. The warblers are neotropicals; the sparrows are short-distance migrants.

The study is a "smoking gun," implicating towers as major killers of migratory birds, says Gerald Winegrad, vice president for policy at the Washington-based conservancy. "In fact, it's a blazing gun," he says.

Birds have been dying for centuries from smashing into tall structures, such as lighthouses and smokestacks. Biologists also have been coming across birds killed by slamming into TV and radio towers for decades. For many researchers, the towers were favored places to collect dead birds for study purposes.

Only in the past few years have researchers come to regard tower kills as an urgent problem.

Generally, the taller the tower, the higher its risk to birds.

Only towers of 200 feet or taller, which are required by the Federal Aviation Commission to have safety lighting, are federally registered. There are more than 45,000 of those nationwide, says the Federal Communications Commission. Georgia has 2,059 --- one of the highest tower densities per square mile in the nation.

Clemson University ornithologist Sidney Gauthreaux recently showed visitors a map of Georgia with colored dots representing the locations of telecommunication and broadcasting towers. So many dots were around metro Atlanta that they merged into a solid block.

"It's a wonder how the birds get through it," said Gauthreaux, who in the 1980s used radar images of migrating birds to provide compelling evidence of songbird declines.

No one, though, is keeping official records of tower kills in Georgia.

Most songbird species fly aloft at 1,000 to 2,000 feet at night. During spring and fall migrations, birds may simply collide with the towers or with the supporting guy wires, especially on dark and stormy nights when visibility is poor.

Gauthreaux and other experts, however, say that the aviation safety lights on the towers are mainly responsible for the highest numbers of birth deaths.

The worst kills happen, they say, when a flock, perhaps numbering hundreds of thousands of birds, flaps toward a lighted tower during conditions of low cloud ceiling or fog. The birds lose their celestial aids for nocturnal migration --- the stars, moon and other natural light --- and have no way of orienting themselves, either from the sky or from the landscape below.

The tower's beacons then become the birds' strongest visual cues. Consequently, they end up flying endlessly in circles around the structure, uttering eerie distress calls. Thousands may cram into a relatively small space around the tower, getting caught up in a vicious whirlpool. Many others, already stressed out from the rigors of migration, fall to the ground from sheer exhaustion and quickly are snatched up by predators.

Studies document that hundreds or thousands of broken bird carcasses may be found beneath a single tower after one night. Some of them hit the ground with such force that they impale themselves on grass stubble.

Most kills, however, probably are never reported because predators are very efficient at grabbing the bird carcasses before anyone sees them, researchers say.

The general estimates of tower kills come from five or so long-term studies of bird deaths at individual towers 800 feet tall or higher around the nation. In one pioneering study, ecologist Herbert Stoddard and researchers at the University of Georgia dutifully counted --- at just before dawn every morning --- the birds killed at a 1,010-foot TV tower near Tallahassee.

The study took place from 1955 to 1980. During those 25 years, Stoddard found the broken bodies of 42,384 birds --- an average of about 1,700 a year --- from 189 species lying at the foot of the tower.

Using the results of the long-term studies and scores of limited tower kill reports from around the nation, biologists concluded that the total number of tower-related bird deaths runs into the millions each year.

Joe Meyers, a UGA graduate student in the 1970s, says the sight of several dead birds in a small area can be a gut-wrenching experience. He recalls opening a big freezer in a UGA laboratory once and finding it filled to the hilt with frozen songbird carcasses retrieved by Stoddard from around the broadcasting tower.

"It made quite an impression on me, seeing so many dead birds," says Meyers, now an ornithologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's field office in Athens.

The death toll likely will get worse, conservationists warn. The erection of communications towers --- including radio, television, cellular and microwave --- in the United States is growing at a breathtaking rate, increasing at an estimated 6 percent to 8 percent per year to serve the booming communications industry. Industry projections are that the nation's landscape will be bristling with as many as 100,000 new towers by the end of this decade.

More than 1,000 of them will be megatowers more than 1,000 feet high to meet the demands of digital television. Federal laws requires that all television stations broadcast digitally by 2003.

"When you get into the 1,000-foot range, you're really into migrating songbirds' altitude," says Gauthreaux.

DTV towers already are poking into Georgia's sky, and four Atlanta television stations --- WXIA-TV, WGCL-TV, WAGA-TV and WSB-TV --- already are broadcasting digitally.

Alarmed over the annual bird killings and the possibility of the death rate worsening, several professional ornithological groups in 1998 urged the Fish and Wildlife Service to form a "working group" of representatives from the telecommunications industry, other federal agencies and academic institutions to study the problem.

Last fall, the agency issued a report saying, "The construction of new towers creates a potentially significant impact on migratory birds, especially . . . night migrating birds."

It also issued interim guidelines to reduce bird mortality from tower collisions --- lowering tower heights, employing different lighting and tower designs with fewer guy wires and limiting towers in areas where birds are more likely to fly in great numbers.

The temporary recommendations will remain in effect until a more comprehensive national policy on tower kills is worked out. Meanwhile, Fish and Wildlife Service personnel will follow them in evaluating the potential impact of new towers on migrating birds.

Fish and Wildlife Service also has approved a nationwide research program to scrutinize tower kills to craft a permanent policy for reducing the annual death toll. The study will cost $5 million to $10 million.

How much cooperation the agency gets from industry --- even from its sister federal agencies --- in following the guidelines and helping in the research remains to be seen.

Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledges that the guidelines are voluntary and in some cases will be expensive for industry to carry out --- reasons perhaps why response to the guidelines so far has been lukewarm.

Building a structure without supporting guy wires requires more concrete and steel, adding about $70,000 to the cost of building a 300-foot tower, say tower construction industry officials. And the higher the tower, the higher the costs.

Until now, the broadcasting and telecommunications industries have largely avoided the tower kill issue. Bill Evans, a consultant to the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, says simple ignorance has a lot to do with it and lays some of the blame on ornithologists themselves. "We have known for more than 50 years that TV towers kill birds, but we didn't make the industries aware of the problem until recently," he says.

Evans has made tower kill prevention a lifetime crusade. His Web site ---www.towerkill.com --- documents bird deaths around the country.

On the other hand, some ornithologists say the bigger reason for industry's failure to come to grips with bird kills may be the realization that tower owners possibly are in violation of federal law if their structures cause harm to migratory birds.

The 1918 Migratory Bird and Treaty Act prohibits the "taking, killing, possession, transportation and importation of migratory birds, their eggs, parts and nests" without a special permit.

The measure may be a reason many tower owners decline to take part in studies, says Gauthreaux.

The Fish and Wildlife Service says the law is the law. "It is not possible under the act to absolve (tower owners) from liability," even if they follow the agency's new guidelines, said Jamie Rappaport Clark, Fish and Wildlife Service director under the Clinton administration.

Gauthreaux says several tower kill solutions, albeit controversial, are at hand. For instance, birds seem to be most in danger from towers with red lights, but appear to give wide berth to structures with flashing white strobe lights. "We've found that bird strikes decline considerably when white strobes are installed on towers," Gauthreaux says.

But while white strobes might benefit birds, humans hate them. "If you have flashing strobes near a residential area, you're going to get a lot of complaints," says Gauthreaux.

Another bird collision peril is getting less attention --- birds crashing into office buildings that stay lit up at night. During peak migration periods, downtown Atlanta office workers coming into work in the morning often report finding dead songbirds on sidewalks around tall buildings.

The same mechanisms that disorient birds and cause them to collide with communication towers may be the culprits in skyscraper kills. The birds crash into windows of office buildings where lights are on or into buildings lit up by floodlights. One solution to the problem: Turn off the lights at night. Says Meyers: "By turning off the lights, you not only help the birds, you save energy."

OPINION	TUESDAY • May 22, 2001

Constitution: By saving birds' habitat, we'll keep music in the air
Staff
Tuesday, May 22, 2001

For a few glorious weeks each year, early risers in North Georgia are treated to a symphony just outside the window.

The musicians in this gift from nature are about 30 varieties of songbirds, many of them recently returned from wintering in Mexico, Central America and South America. But as Atlanta Constitution environment writer Charles Seabrook pointed out this week in his poetic and prophetic series, we humans are rapidly thinning the ranks of God's orchestra.

Over the last 20 years, most of our native songbirds have declined in number, some by about 18 percent, others by as much as 78 percent. It is a problem with international dimensions. Across Latin America, millions of acres of the tropical forests that are the birds' habitat are being destroyed every year for cattle ranches, agriculture, mining, fuel, home building and timber export.

Much of the devastation is happening right here at home, however. It's yet another spinoff effect of the rapid sprawl of North Georgia, where each year we take more trees for development per new resident than we did the year before. The U.S. Department of Agriculture ranks Georgia third in the nation, behind Texas and Pennsylvania, in the loss of woods and farmland to development.

Consider the plight of the sky-blue cerulean warbler, a prime candidate for federal protection. The bird winters in a sliver of rainforest in the eastern Andes Mountains. Unfortunately for the tiny birds, the timber there is among the most sought-after in South America.

Back in Georgia, the birds' preferred breeding ground --- mature hardwoods in stands of 500 acres or more --- is getting next to impossible to find. As Atlanta and Chattanooga chew their way toward each other, the warbler's odds are growing slimmer.

Think of them as the warblers in the coal mine. They are indicators of perils not only for birds, but for us as well. The same wetlands and marsh areas that are disappearing as bird habitat are also unavailable to perform their natural water cleansing and flood absorption functions.

The loss of trees in metro Atlanta has created a "heat island effect" that increases temperatures, power bills and smog alerts. Songbirds also rid us of tons of pestering insects. Without warblers, studies indicate, most of our remaining trees would be denuded by caterpillars.

Forty years ago, Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" warned of a decimation of bird populations, sparking the environmental movement and leading to the banning of the pesticide DDT. Today's problem is not as simple as eliminating a single chemical. But there are variety of measures at both the federal and state levels that could help:

> Quick action on guidelines for rapidly proliferating communications towers. Millions of migrating birds die each year by slamming into ultra-tall structures for cell phones, digital TV and other technologies. Mitigation measures can include choosing sites out of the migration path, lower tower heights, more bird-sensitive lighting and fewer guy wires.

> Shade-grown coffee planations in Puerto Rico and elsewhere provide some of the last remaining refuge for wintering songbirds. But Department of Agriculture policy promotes conversion to more-productive sun-grown coffee, which is devastating to animal habitat. The department is re-examining those policies; it should move rapidly to undo them.

> At the state level, we must find more money for green space and habitat protection. Gov. Roy Barnes has made a great start there but needs the Legislature to get on board with an expanded program. The state, too, needs more money for nongame management, so that perhaps we can match the miraculous recovery achieved with deer and wild turkey. A ban on supersized parking lots would help not only birds but water quality, the heat effect and the look of things.

Small steps, in the grand scheme of things, for tiny birds that have a huge impact on our quality of life.

Cerulean warbler / ELIZABETH LANDT / Staff

PAGE 1 / A SECTION	TUESDAY • May 22, 2001

Rest stops vanishing at 'alarming rate'
Charles Seabrook - Staff
Tuesday, May 22, 2001

Fort Morgan, Ala. --- Bob Sargent warns about the snakes.

"You'll want to keep an eye out. There are some big cottonmouths in here," he says as he leads visitors through thickets of wax myrtle and scrubby oak on an April morning.

In a clearing is what they had come to see --- long, thin, nearly invisible webbing, stretched like a giant hair net over skinny, upright aluminum poles. Tangled in the soft weave is Sargent's first prize of the day --- a yellowish female scarlet tanager.

With an adroitness honed by years of experience, he gently disentangles the bird and places it in a cloth mesh bag. At a tent a short distance away, Sargent's colleagues, who, like him, are all volunteers, weigh and measure the bird and record the data on a laptop computer.

Then, they attach a thin, aluminum band around its left leg. The band has an identification number --- never again will that ID be assigned to another bird.

Holding the banded bird in his oversize hands, Sargent walks a few feet away and opens his hands. Poof, the bird is gone --- on its way northward to nesting grounds.

"Godspeed, little creature," says the 65-year-old Sargent, whose stocky 6-foot-3 physique and shaved head belie his grandfatherly ways. "That bird may have come all the way from South America and flew 600 miles over the Gulf of Mexico to get here. Tomorrow it could be in Georgia.

"I never fail to be awed by it."

For two weeks every spring and fall, Sargent and his wife, Martha, depart from their red brick home in Clay, Ala., and, with an entourage of amateur birders, come to this sandy peninsula stretching into Mobile Bay. They spend their time banding the neotropical birds flying in from or taking off to winter homes in Latin America.

Fort Morgan, the Confederate stronghold guarding Mobile in the Civil War, was made famous in 1864 when Union Adm. David Farragut steamed past the fort's defenses ordering, "Damn the torpedoes. Full steam ahead."

On this day, at Fort Morgan State Park, Sargent and his fellow birders must cope with biting mosquitoes, the whims of the weather and poisonous snakes to do their work.

"We do it because we love the birds," says Sargent, a retired electrician. Busloads of schoolkids often show up unannounced to watch the bird-banding, and Sargent often lets some of them hold a bird and release it.

The banded creatures, he explains, may provide valuable information about bird migration patterns, feeding and nesting habits and other secrets that may help scientists devise strategies to protect them.

Sargent says the need for such strategies is urgent.

"I believe many of our songbird species won't be around for my grandchildren to see," he says. "We're losing so many of them because of the harm people put in their way."

The fact that hundreds of millions of the tiny birds, many weighing no more than a few pennies each, make a grueling journey between two continents twice a year is one of nature's greatest marvels.

"It's an astounding spectacle," says John Fitzpatrick of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in upstate New York.

The urge to head north in spring and south in fall is probably triggered by changing day lengths. For weeks before they depart, the birds gorge on food, building up fat reserves for the demanding flight. Some warblers may get 200 miles of flying at peak efficiency from 1 gram of fat.

Clemson University ornithologist Sidney Gauthreaux once calculated that during peak spring migration in late April, more than 30,000 migrants may cross a given mile of coast between Corpus Christi, Texas, and Lake Charles, La., every hour for five hours --- a total of 45 million birds in one wave.

The travelers' goal is to make a rest stop in the first line of extensive forest on the mainland, perhaps 20 to 30 miles inland. Untold numbers never make it that far.

Many simply run out of fuel --- their stored fat used up fighting head winds or storms en route. From sheer exhaustion, they fall into the sea.

"I've stood on the beach at Fort Morgan and seen scores of dead songbirds washing up," says Sargent. "It breaks your heart, but you realize this is nature's way."

Others may struggle until they spy the first sliver of land where there is any remnant of shrub woodland along the coast, and there they plop down.

"When that happens at Fort Morgan, we'll have hundreds of totally exhausted birds everywhere, very emaciated with no fat reserves left," Sargent says. "You can see all kinds of warbler species in a single shrub, like a Christmas tree all lit up."

Some of the birds are so spent they never resume their journeys, and perish.

The millions that do continue the journey rest for a day or so, gobbling up hordes of caterpillars and insects to rebuild fat stores. Then, flying only at night, they make the overland trek in a series of flights, each lasting four to six hours and spanning 50 miles or so. The flights are punctuated by "stopovers" ranging from a few hours to a few days --- the avian equivalent of a highway rest area or a fast food outlet or a flophouse.

One of Georgia's best-known stopovers is Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, where as many as 27 different warbler species might be seen on a single day in late April through mid-May.

Another is the Altamaha River delta on the coast, where massive flocks of migrating birds stop to feed and rest.

As the birds move northward, they fan across the eastern United States, feeding on the all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of insects and caterpillars. Many of the fliers follow river corridors, where the dense foliage offers bountiful food and protection against daytime predators.

"That's why I have high praise for Georgia's efforts to establish a greenway along the Chattahoochee River," says Gauthreaux. "Protecting our rivers is so important."

Many neotropical migrants choose Georgia for their nesting place. Others will go on as far north as the Canadian tundra to nest.

The farther the birds go, the more important the stopovers become.

"Unfortunately, for neotropical migrants, these places are disappearing at alarming rates," says Derb Carter, a lawyer and ornithologist with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Chapel Hill, N.C.

The coastal wild places vital to the birds after they make their exacting flights across the Gulf are now prime real estate --- giving way to vacation resorts, malls, houses and other development. Many other resting stops --- forests, grasslands, old fields --- have become partitioned by development into small plots, places where predators are a major menace.

In metro Atlanta, birders fret that mushrooming growth threatens Kennesaw Mountain's attractiveness to migrating birds.

Bob Sargent already has fought one bitter battle to save Fort Morgan for the birds, and he fears he will have to wage another. In 1994, he learned from a friend in Alabama government that investors had secretly drawn up an elaborate plan to develop Fort Morgan State Park --- a large restaurant, a six-story hotel, a marina, parking lots, 12 period-style homes to be leased to private individuals.

Sargent rallied conservationists, bird lovers and ordinary citizens all over Alabama, who bombarded the governor with thousands of letters and calls of protest. The proposal was killed.

"Now, another group wants to build a lodge here," Sargent says. "It never ends. The birds need friends."

Georgia's Disappearing Songbirds: Day three of a three-day series

OPINION	TUESDAY • May 22, 2001

Constitution: By saving birds' habitat, we'll keep music in the air
Staff
Tuesday, May 22, 2001

For a few glorious weeks each year, early risers in North Georgia are treated to a symphony just outside the window.

The musicians in this gift from nature are about 30 varieties of songbirds, many of them recently returned from wintering in Mexico, Central America and South America. But as Atlanta Constitution environment writer Charles Seabrook pointed out this week in his poetic and prophetic series, we humans are rapidly thinning the ranks of God's orchestra.

Over the last 20 years, most of our native songbirds have declined in number, some by about 18 percent, others by as much as 78 percent. It is a problem with international dimensions. Across Latin America, millions of acres of the tropical forests that are the birds' habitat are being destroyed every year for cattle ranches, agriculture, mining, fuel, home building and timber export.

Much of the devastation is happening right here at home, however. It's yet another spinoff effect of the rapid sprawl of North Georgia, where each year we take more trees for development per new resident than we did the year before. The U.S. Department of Agriculture ranks Georgia third in the nation, behind Texas and Pennsylvania, in the loss of woods and farmland to development.

Consider the plight of the sky-blue cerulean warbler, a prime candidate for federal protection. The bird winters in a sliver of rainforest in the eastern Andes Mountains. Unfortunately for the tiny birds, the timber there is among the most sought-after in South America.

Back in Georgia, the birds' preferred breeding ground --- mature hardwoods in stands of 500 acres or more --- is getting next to impossible to find. As Atlanta and Chattanooga chew their way toward each other, the warbler's odds are growing slimmer.

Think of them as the warblers in the coal mine. They are indicators of perils not only for birds, but for us as well. The same wetlands and marsh areas that are disappearing as bird habitat are also unavailable to perform their natural water cleansing and flood absorption functions.

The loss of trees in metro Atlanta has created a "heat island effect" that increases temperatures, power bills and smog alerts. Songbirds also rid us of tons of pestering insects. Without warblers, studies indicate, most of our remaining trees would be denuded by caterpillars.

Forty years ago, Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" warned of a decimation of bird populations, sparking the environmental movement and leading to the banning of the pesticide DDT. Today's problem is not as simple as eliminating a single chemical. But there are variety of measures at both the federal and state levels that could help:

> Quick action on guidelines for rapidly proliferating communications towers. Millions of migrating birds die each year by slamming into ultra-tall structures for cell phones, digital TV and other technologies. Mitigation measures can include choosing sites out of the migration path, lower tower heights, more bird-sensitive lighting and fewer guy wires.

> Shade-grown coffee planations in Puerto Rico and elsewhere provide some of the last remaining refuge for wintering songbirds. But Department of Agriculture policy promotes conversion to more-productive sun-grown coffee, which is devastating to animal habitat. The department is re-examining those policies; it should move rapidly to undo them.

> At the state level, we must find more money for green space and habitat protection. Gov. Roy Barnes has made a great start there but needs the Legislature to get on board with an expanded program. The state, too, needs more money for nongame management, so that perhaps we can match the miraculous recovery achieved with deer and wild turkey. A ban on supersized parking lots would help not only birds but water quality, the heat effect and the look of things.

Small steps, in the grand scheme of things, for tiny birds that have a huge impact on our quality of life.

Cerulean warbler / ELIZABETH LANDT / Staff

READER	SUNDAY • May 20, 2001

Birds had it made in shade on coffee farms
Charles Seabrook - Staff
Sunday, May 20, 2001

Ciales, Puerto Rico --- Leopoldo Miranda-Castro watches a greenish-yellow Kentucky warbler gorge on some red berries at the edge of a rain forest in central Puerto Rico.

No longer than an adult's thumb, the bird is getting ready for its daunting flight across long stretches of the Gulf of Mexico to summer nesting grounds in North America.

"That little bird might be in your back yard in Atlanta in May," Miranda-Castro tells a visitor.

An ornithologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Miranda-Castro keeps watch over Puerto Rico's neotropical songbird species, which breed in North America in the summer and migrate to the Caribbean and Latin America in the fall to escape northern winters.

The populations of many of those birds are in steep decline, and Miranda-Castro says a major reason is apparent as he drives through Puerto Rico's coffee-growing region.

Steep slopes on numerous small coffee plantations stand bare of vegetation --- being readied for the planting of scores of "sun-grown" coffee plants.

A short time ago, the now-denuded slopes were "shade-grown" coffee groves, where coffee plants thrived in the deep shadows of banana, grapefruit, orange, mango and other trees.

Neotropical birds like warblers, vireos, tanagers, buntings and orioles also flourished there --- protected from predators by the dense rain-forestlike foliage and feasting on the ample fruits and insects there.

"There's no telling how many birds were displaced when these shade-grown coffee plantations were bulldozed to make way for the sun-grown coffee," says Miranda-Castro.

It's a scenario being repeated throughout the coffee-growing regions of the West Indies and Latin America. Traditionally, most of the coffee from the Caribbean area and Latin America was grown under a canopy of shade trees. However, about 40 percent of the 6.9 million acres planted in coffee from Mexico to Colombia have been replaced by open groves of higher-yielding, faster-growing, sun-loving varieties.

Forests vs. 'green deserts'

As consumer demand for coffee increases, more acreage is being converted every day to sun-grown coffee.

The sun-grown groves, however, are "green deserts" shunned by birds, says Miranda-Castro.

It's of major concern to him and other ornithologists: Shade-grown coffee farms, which closely resemble tropical rain forests, have become about the only refuges left for neotropical songbirds wintering in the tropics, they say. Massive deforestation already has robbed the birds of their natural habitats in the rain forests.

"Now they're losing their last remaining sanctuaries," Miranda-Castro says. "The biggest threat to the birds in the United States is the loss of their (winter) habitat in this area of the world."

About a third of all migratory birds that breed in the United States spend the winter in coffee-growing areas of the Caribbean and Latin America, say researchers with the Smithsonian Institution's Migratory Bird Center in Washington. They have found that more than 180 bird species live or forage on shade-grown coffee plantations, but few if any live on the open-sun coffee farms.

"For numbers of birds, the shade-grown plantations are exceeded only by undisturbed tropical forests as places of habitat," says Russell Greenberg, director of the Smithsonian Institution's Migratory Bird Center. "Even in (areas of development), shade-grown coffee plantations support significant populations of migrant birds, such as American redstarts, black-throated green warblers, yellow-throated vireos and tropical residents like parrots and toucans."

In return, coffee farmers benefit from the birds, which eat tons of pesky insects and grubs, thereby reducing the need for pesticides.

Near Ciales, Miranda-Castro waves his right arm toward a heavily forested hillside and asks a visitor to point out the shade-grown coffee groves amidst the rain forest. The visitor cannot tell the difference.

"I do this little test to show that shade-grown coffee plantations look like rain forests to us, and they look the same to birds, too," Miranda-Castro explains.

Once shade-grown coffee plantations are converted to sun-grown, he says, birds must find new homes or perish.

"If the birds don't survive here, they won't be singing for you in Georgia in May," Miranda-Castro says. "We have to protect neotropical songbirds on both ends of their ranges. If you protect only one area and not the other, it is not enough to ensure their survival."

Research backs him up. Studies by Smithsonian ornithologist Peter Marra show that poor winter habitat for the neotropical songbirds can jeopardize their summer nesting in Georgia and elsewhere in North America.

He found that songbirds forced into poor habitat in Jamaica were the stragglers in getting back to their summer homes and could not compete well as a result.

"In addition, their winter habitat affects the condition they're in upon arrival in their breeding grounds," Marra said. "These are crucial factors in how well the birds do on their summer breeding grounds."

The early arrivers, he explained, may be at an advantage because they have first choice for best breeding sites and mates, as well as additional time to replace clutches that may be lost to predators or the weather.

Other researchers point out that the loss of an acre of tropical habitat for neotropical songbirds might be the equivalent of hundreds of acres in their summer territories. "Here in Puerto Rico, the birds are concentrated in a far smaller area than the places in which they breed in the United States," said Miranda-Castro. "So, when we lose an acre of habitat here, we lose a lot of birds."

That is particularly true in the shade-grown coffee regions, where most of the neotropical migrants appear to concentrate now.

Changes in how coffee is grown in the West Indies and Latin America should look familiar: They are similar in some respects to the shift in the South and Midwest from small self-sustaining farms to larger high-production farms, says Robert Rice, a policy researcher with the Smithsonian center.

Traditionally, the vast majority of coffee in Puerto Rico and Latin America was shade-grown. But traditional coffee harvesting is not as efficient as big-time growers would like. Workers often must use machetes to cut through dense vegetation to get to coffee plants. Coffee beans are picked by hand and hauled out of the groves in baskets.

Enter technology. Engineers developed devices that mechanized the coffee-growing process, from planting the coffee bushes to harvesting the beans. Equipped with the new technology in the early 1970s, "industrial" coffee farms --- where the land is deforested and cleared of its lush growth to grow coffee bushes in full sun --- began replacing the traditional shade-grown coffee plantations.

"What in essence served as a habitat (for birds) became a factory," Rice says. "These pruned, managed farms look like the English hedgerows, but they are dependent on chemicals to stay alive."

One other force drove the change to sun-grown in the 1970s --- fear of a plant disease known as coffee leaf rust. To prevent spread of the disease, coffee growers replaced older, shade-loving varieties with new varieties, packed in tight hedgerows that can survive in open sun, but only with large amounts of fertilizers and pesticides.

Coffee leaf rust never emerged as a major problem for Latin America. But sun coffee's high yields appealed to growers, who began seeing the varieties as a major advantage. To boost farmers' income, the U.S. Agency for International Development spent more than $80 million from the 1970s to the early 1990s to help growers in Central America and the Caribbean convert to sun-grown coffee farms, according to a report by the Smithsonian's Migratory Bird Center and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In Puerto Rico, says Miranda-Castro, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the territory's agriculture agency has promoted conversion to sun-grown coffee. "If you don't grow sun-grown, the USDA can make it difficult for you to get crop insurance, farm loans, subsidies for pesticides and fertilizer and other benefits," Miranda-Castro says.

Higher costs being rethought

Officials in those agencies and in the coffee industry itself, however, are beginning to rethink their policies on sun-grown coffee. Although sun-grown producers, because of higher yields, make more money than shade farmers when coffee prices are high, their reliance on chemicals and the techniques of intensive agriculture means that their costs are higher, leaving them more vulnerable than traditional growers to low prices.

Shade-grown coffee plants also reduce the costs of replanting as they often remain productive for more than 40 years, while sun-loving varieties remain viable only for about a decade.

The advantages of shade-grown coffee are the reasons several small Puerto Rican farmers have withstood pressures to convert to sun-grown.

One is 76-year-old Juan Rivera, whose steeply sloped 14-acre shade-grown coffee farm is on the outskirts of Ciales. "I was told many times by the agriculture authorities that I would make more money and be better off if I changed to sun-grown coffee," said Rivera, leaning on his battered pickup truck parked in his farmyard, where chickens pecked on the ground.

"I told them I was doing just as well or better than my neighbors who put in sun-grown coffee," Rivera said. "I get good prices for my coffee. I get more money with less effort. The coffee beans from my shade-grown plants weigh more than the sun-grown beans. It takes 20 baskets to make 100 pounds of shade-grown coffee, but it takes 23 baskets of sun-grown to make that much.

"I can harvest later into the year, so I have coffee to sell when others do not. And I also can sell all the bananas, oranges, grapefruit, plantain, coconuts, papaya and other things I grow with the coffee. I have all I can eat, too."

The rapidly dwindling tropical forest habitats for wintering birds, made worse by the loss of shade-grown coffee plantations, has prompted biologists, conservation groups and others to kick off a program urging coffee drinkers all over the nation to choose shade-grown coffee brands to help the birds.

"Your morning cup of coffee," says Greenberg of the Smithsonian, "could help save the birds."

> ON THE WEB: Information on purchasing shade-grown coffee: www.atlantaaudubon.org/pages/sgclinks.htm