Biodiversity – WILDSCAPING OUR NEIGHBOURHOOD SOCIETY

So, I was listening to CBC Radio yesterday and they interviewed the renowned wildlife artist, Robert Bateman on his 94th birthday. He was talking about paying attention to what was happening in your environment. Look at the birds, observe the seasons and it will enrich your life. I have found this to be the case in my life. So, I set up an observational experiment using the Merlin app on my iPhone. It can identify birds by their songs, so it’s really useful at this time of year when we have many migratory birds coming through. There’s one observational nugget. At this time of year, you will encounter many birds that don’t live here year round. They come to your region on the way to somewhere else or they come here to nest, raise their young and then leave again in the fall. The natural world is not bound by borders and politics, but by seasons and habitat.

Anyway, the experiment was this. Go into the woods, on the off leash dog trail, east of Willingdon, near the Parkland tank farm. There’s a bench a couple of hundred yards in, where I sat to listen and observe. I turned on my Merlin app which started recording the bird songs in the near vicinity. It’s pretty dense forest, so seeing the birds is difficult, but hearing them is not. Over the course of a few minutes, Merlin picked up and identified 16 species within 50 yards of where I sat. Some of the migratory birds included the Black-headed Grosbeak, the American Goldfinch, Warbling Vireo, and Black-throated Gray Warbler.

The second part of the experiment was to go to McGill Park, a block away and sit at a bench there, surrounded by acres of grass and start recording. There, Merlin picked up 5 species, one of which was the violet green Swallow, a few of which I could see in the open sky above the tank farm. When I moved to Vancouver, Swallows were common sights in the summer, primarily the violet green and barn Swallows. Fifty years later, they are very scarce. The data backs up this observation with swallow populations plummeting by 50-90% according to the species.

So the two habitats I sampled are in the accompanying photos. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why the difference in biodiversity. In a more abundant environment, we get greater biodiversity. In a monoculture, very little. We have over-lawned our parks and need to rewild some of the acres of grass monoculture that we have inherited from a Victorian notion of what a park should be. We need to change that way of thinking. That’s why Wildscaping Our Neighbourhood Society was formed.

Prentice Lee

We are privileged to live in an exceptionally beautiful and environmentally abundant part of the world. Yet the very existence of our wonderful community came at the expense of the environment that existed here for thousands of years until a mere 150 years ago. The giant cedars and Douglas firs that once graced our area now exist only as magnificant stumps like those in the forest of Confederation Park.

We are now in an area called the Anthropocene, a geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on earth’s geology and ecosystems. The Anthropocene is being cited as the 6th mass extinction, only this time it’s not an asteroid colliding with the earth that’s killing life on the planet, it’s us! We have destroyed habitat to build our cities, over-fished the oceans to feed people, razed entire ecosystems to create farmland and poisoned the insect world at an industrial pace.

A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that since the dawn of human civilization, 83% of wild mammals have disappeared. Today, livestock makes up 60% of biomass of all mammals on earth, followed by humans (36%) and wild mammals (4%).

In the face of this rampant and accelerating assault on the natural world, protecting and promoting biodiversity is one of humankind’s greatest challenges. The impact of relentless human activity has extracted a tremendous toll on the natural world.

The anthropocentric mindset needs to be replaced with the idea that we share the earth with the non-human species, both plant and animal, and we need to consider them in our actions.

While we are blessed with many beautiful parks and some remaining natural habitat in Burnaby, much of the design of existing parks has been at the expense of biodiversity. Natural habitat has been destroyed and parks with large open grass areas have replaced rich and complex ecosystems. We believe a percentage of those grassed areas should be re-wilded to recreate habitat for the plants, insects, small mammals and birds.

As a lifelong avid birder, I have noticed the reduction of bird populations over the last 50 years. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, throughout North America alone, there has been a cumulative loss of nearly three billion birds since 1970. That’s 29% fewer birds than 48 years ago. Our ability to destroy has been staggering. Take the Passenger Pigeon. It was once the most numerous bird on the planet, numbering in the billions. It was slaughtered into extinction. The prevailing ethos that caused that was the view that the earth was mankind’s dominion, to be exploited with impunity. So we have harvested, ploughed, logged, polluted, and over-populated our way to the current sad state of affairs.

One of our immediate goals is to create a biodiversity park in our neighbourhood area of Burnaby Heights. Our idea is that this small area be planted to support birds, bees and butterflies. We believe that if people see this area become a home for those essential creatures, it will represent an inspiration to replace some of our lost habitat – a space that the community could enjoy while supporting crucial biodiversity.

We have canvassed many people in our community and received universal support for this idea.