ChrisMak
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 p.179 #6 · "Official" Nikon 500 f/5.6E PF Discussion and Image Thread | |
Lance B wrote:
I know we're all getting a little off topic here but. Yes, man has a lot to answer for with regards to introduced species, but nature has done it all the time. When you think about it, native animals and birds to an area/island/continent/ecosystem have all worked this out centuries ago, the current crop of animals and birds in a particular area/island/continent/ecosystem have all blossomed due to their suitability and dominance for that area and have killed off and made extinct other animals that may have lived in that area at one stage and could not cope as well. As bad as man is and it is always easy and fashionable to blame man, yet nature is responsible for 99.9% of loss of species since time began. However, this definitely does not absolve man's culpability in this area as man is responsible for many stupid decisions in this regard.
Australia has a harsh climate in many areas and has meant the current animals have survived due to their resilience and suitability to their particular area and thus naturally saw off the extinction of many other animals and birds etc. So, we could have had a number of different animals and birds were it not for the type of environment we have here. Many of these animals may have survived but were out done by the current native birds and animals. Does this make it better? Not necessarily, just different and thus we have what we have The very fact that Australia has a many varied climate, from tropical, subtropic, to desert, to snow fields etc means we see a very varied set of animals that have adapted to these different areas. So, in the case above of the introduced Mynah bird which I loathe, left to fend for itself in the real Australian environment, as opposed to the friendlier urban areas where it inhabits, it would most likely not survive or at least have it's numbers severely limited due to the harsh conditions and lack of easy food and thus not be an intrusion on the local birds of those areas. It really only inhabits the city and town areas where is chases out the local birds which really upsets we bird lovers. You never see them out in the "bush", or out in the wilderness areas where our native birds thrive and survive and would thus have limited impact in those areas. ...Show more →
Off topic yes, but relevant even to birders and wildlife shooters.
Something very much similar is the case with the Ring necked parakeet that I mentioned, in fact, it survives and thrives only in the larger cities, and partly by the grace of people in the cities with gardens that like to install bird feeders, nets filled with nuts etc... Because it is a generically tropical bird, it also benefits from avoiding the worst of winter in the cities where average temperature may be up to 5 degrees celcius higher due to e.g. underground heating networks. It is also a vegetarian bird and the lack of insects in the cities does not harm the bird, but the countless nets with peanuts do help in supporting a few still growing colonies in our major cities.
My real point though, is that "natural" evolution is a process that is very slow and has taken thousands of years, and the apparantly perfect balance in many ecosystems is perhaps best seen as the result of a long self learning process in many very different environments. Man intervening in theses ecosystems and environments is not neccessarily harmful, our society for the protection of birds has many projects going where the result may be that habitats are restored and birds saved from becoming extinct. But that unfortunately does not weigh up to the destructive and disruptive effects of man striving to increasingly become the one and only major dominator, and that is increasingly taking on the form of a hazardous experiment, worldwide, but certainly where I live.
Randomly dragging around species over the globe and around the world is one of the shadowy areas of this experiment, and the recent corona virus outbreak undoubtedly has a link here, with a few million armadillo having been poached in Africa for the Chinese market. The same goes for randomly and at will usage of abundant chemicals for food production and production of consumer goods. Insect populations are dwindling fast and the outcome is not at all a guaranteed good one.
I am not of the believe that man should best vanish from the earth to save it, but there is obviously a very tough lesson to learn when it comes to dominating one's environment and habitat, a lesson that has to be learned apparently without the support of the age-old self learning mechanisms in nature. In other words, man has to figure it out himself by trial and error, and by shedding his delusions of grandeur. Many bird species will become extinct before that lesson is learned no doubt, and some will become "pest birds" that thrive in the man-altered environments.
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