3. Lighting on Oil Rigs: Cerulean warblers fly over the Gulf of Mexico, where over 2,500 oil and gas platforms light up at night. Birds often become attracted to these lights and can circle them for hours, draining their crucial energy supply.
4. Window Collisions: In the United States, millions of birds die each year due to window collisions. Individual family homes likely claim the lives of one or two bird annually. These deaths are due to a bird’s confusion when they see a reflective surface; they don’t understand that it’s a solid barrier.
5. Domestic Cats: Owning a cat is fine, but when taken outside these pets become a wildlife threat. Cats are an invasive part of the environment that, in the United States, account for the deaths of approximately 2.4 billion birds every year. On migration, birds like the cerulean warbler are often forced to stop in backyards to refuel, and their evolution factor in cats.
6. Pesticides: Neonicotinoids are now the most widely used insecticides on Earth, commonplace across agricultural fields and in backyards. These substances are toxic to many animals, including birds. Although this threat is less tangible, it is just as deadly, and simply adds to the long list of dangers.
It’s easy to see why life for a migratory songbird is hard. But while the cerulean warbler and others such as the wood thrush, black-capped vireo, and gray jay are facing these threats, more troubling things are occurring in other parts of the world. The ortolan bunting, a small sparrow of Europe’s grassy fields, is faced with the threat of being hunted — and served as French cuisine.
A male cerulean warbler
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