Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Migration

For my birthday, I received a bunch of books that have been on my “To Read” list for quite some time. One of the books was No Way Home: The Decline of the World’s Great Animal Migrations by David Wilcove.  This book takes you through some of the world’s most amazing migrations of the sky, water and land. It starts with birds and monarchs. Next, the author follows the migrations of the large mammals in Africa and North American plains. Lastly (but perhaps the most interesting to me) was the migrations of whales, turtles and salmon.


The message of this book is about the disappearance of the worlds major migration events. While many of the animals are in no immediate threat of extinction, the scale of these events is changing. Rather than having heards that have millions of buffalo, we now have much smaller herds of a couple hundred or thousand. The reason for the change is simple; the success of a predator known as Homo sapiens. Humans have single handedly changed the landscape in more than one way. Each of these could have an impact on a population but as a whole the impacts are far reaching. We have hunted animals to the point of extintion (or close to it). We have broken up the forests so migrating animals no longer have resting spots. We have polluted our waters so much that fish and whales get tangled in fishline or mistake plastic bags for jellyfish. The list goes on. 

Some people may say that we shouldn't be concerned. These animals have numbers that show they will be around for decades still. But these are the events that inspire us and take our breath away. That is worth a lot (in my opinion anyways). I hope to see at least one of these great migrations soon - perhaps one spring I will see the Sandhill Cranes at the Platte River in Nebraska. This is a nice quick and informative read. Whats really fun is that I already got to use some of the information in a class taught at Audubon!

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