Re:Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Earth Was Covered by...
by fiftyfifty on Wednesday April 26, 2023 @01:18PM
(#35717090)
I've been a falconer for a couple of decades and in general try to keep up with the research around birds of prey. The general consensus is only about 10% of birds of prey survive the first year. It doesn't surprise me that the survival rate for most other birds is equally as bad. I've been out in the field a number of times in the winter and found wild birds of prey that were so weak they couldn't fly and you could just walk up to them and pick them up. In every one of these cases the birds were skin and bones, starving to death. Nature can be brutal.
Also, Darwin wrote a lot about the extreme variations that we see in the 'balanced' ecosystem. He tallied up the birds near him and found that ~4/5ths of all the birds would die every winter. He remarked that a 10% death rate illness in humans would be considered a huge event, but that every year, nearly all the birds near him just up and die. This was in a passage on how the 'balance' that we see is really just a lot of species furiously competing with each other and trying to eek out minuscule improvements in the deadly chaos.