The World Without Us

In 2000, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported that 77,000 towers were higher than 199 feet, which meant that they were required to have warning lights for aircraft. If calculations were correct, that meant that nearly 200 million birds collided fatally with towers each year in the United States alone. In fact, those figures had already been usurped, because cell phone towers were being erected so fast. By 2005, there were 175,000 of those. Their addition would raise the annual toll to half a billion dead birds—except that this number was still based on scant data and on guesses, because scavengers get to most feathered victims before they’re found.

From ornithology labs east and west of the Mississippi, graduate students were sent on grisly night missions to transmitter towers to recover the carcasses of red-eyed vireos, Tennessee warblers, Connecticut warblers, orange-crowned warblers, black-and-white warblers, ovenbirds, wood thrushes, yellow-billed cuckoos . . . the lists became an increasingly thorough compendium of North American birds, including rare species like the red-cockaded woodpecker. Especially prominent were birds that migrate, and especially those that travel at night.

One is the bobolink, a black-breasted, buff-backed plains songbird that winters in Argentina. By studying its eyes and brains, bird physiologist Robert Beason has detected evolutionary traits that unfortunately turned lethal in the age of electronic communications. Bobolinks and other migrants carry built-in compasses—particles of magnetite in their heads, with which they orient to the Earth’s magnetic field. The mechanism to switch them on involves their optics. The short end of the spectrum—purples, blues, and greens—apparently triggers their navigational cues. If only longer red waves are present, they grow disoriented.

Beason’s observations also suggest that migrating birds evolved to fly toward light in foul weather. Until electricity, this meant the moon, which would put them out of harmful weather’s way. Thus, a pulsating tower bathed in a red glow whenever fog or blizzard blots out everything else is as seductive and deadly to them as wailing Sirens to Greek sailors. With their homing magnets befuddled by a transmitter’s electromagnetic fields, they end up circling its towers, whose guy wires become the blades of a giant bird blender.

In a world without humans, the red lights will blink off as broadcasts cease; a billion daily cellular conversations will disconnect, and several billion more birds will be alive a year later. But as long as we’re still here, transmission towers are only the beginning of the unintended carnage human civilization perpetrates on feathered creatures we don’t even eat.

A different kind of tower—frameworks of steel lattice averaging 150 feet tall, spaced every 1,000 feet or so—marches the length and breadth and diagonally across every continent save Antarctica. Suspended between these structures are aluminum-clad high-tension cables bearing millions of sizzling volts from power plants to our energy grids. Some are three inches thick; to save weight and cost, all are uninsulated.

There’s enough wire in North America’s grid alone to reach the moon and back, and nearly back again. With the clearing of forests, birds learned to perch on telephone and power lines. As long as they don’t complete a circuit with another wire or with the ground, they don’t electrocute themselves. Unfortunately, the wings of hawks, eagles, herons, flamingos, and cranes can span two wires at once, or brush an uninsulated transformer. The result is no mere shock. A raptor’s beak or feet can melt right off, or its feathers can ignite. Several captive-bred California condors have died exactly this way on being released, as have thousands of bald and golden eagles. Studies in Chihuahua, Mexico, show that new steel power poles act like giant ground wires, so that even smaller birds end up on the piles of dead hawks and turkey vultures below.

Other research suggests that more birds die by simply colliding with power lines than from being zapped by them. But even without webs of live wires, the most serious traps for migratory birds await in tropical America and Africa. So much land there has been cleared for agriculture, much of it for export, that each year there are fewer roosting trees to ease the journey, and fewer safe wetlands where waterfowl can pause. As with climatic change, the impact is hard to quantify, but in North America and Europe, the numbers of some songbird species have fallen by two-thirds since 1975.