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BIRDS AND WETLANDS |
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Great Blue Heron, Black Rail, Marsh Wren, Blue-winged Teal. if you care about birds,
you care about wetlands conservation and restoration. Because America’s marshes, swamps,
bogs, hardwood bottomland forests, mangroves, tide flats, and prairie potholes are places
birds like -and need- to be.
Up to one-half of all North America’s bird species depend upon wetlands for resting,
feeding, or nesting. With the decline of wetlands, the continental duck breeding
population fell over the last 15 years from 45 million to 31 million birds, a decline
of 31 percent. Fifty years ago there were nearly 60,000 wading birds in
the Everglades. More than half
of the original Everglades have been drained and filled, and today there are only
15,000 wading birds.
Prairie potholes east and north of the Missouri River collect spring rain and snowmelt, and they support, on an acre-for-acre basis, the greatest variety and number of animals of any biological community in North America. The shallowest and fastest drying of these are the first to warm in the spring, providing an invertebrate soup for protein-starved migrating puddle ducks. Then, as these seasonal wetlands dry up, migrating shorebirds feast on the exposed mudflats. Prairie potholes are the breeding habitat for more than half the ducks in North America.
At 68-acre Bowerman Basin on the Pacific Coast, over one million shorebirds
at a time gather to feed and rest on their spring and fall migration. Tide
flats of estuarine wetlands like Bowerman are a rich source of bird life on
east and west coast alike, attracting thousands of viewers each year. Further
south on the Pacific flyway, the Central Valley of California supports 60
percent of annual migrants along the flyway; yet the four million acres of
wetlands that flourished in the Valley 200 years ago had been reduced to barely
300,000 by the 1980’s.
Bird watching and hunting is a $19 billion year industry and support 220,000 jobs in the U.S. Bird watching is the fastest growing outdoor activity nationwide, going from 21 million participants in 1982 to 54 million in 1994.
If you are working to save a wetland for the birds in your community, the wetlands campaign wants to help you raise money, get your message out, build coalitions, and advocate even more effectively. Let’s work together to save our remaining wetlands. for the birds! Call the wetlands campaign 800-659-2622 (message) or 360-709-9695, or join the campaign now.
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email us: wetlands@audubon.org |
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