A Colombian (Latin America) study said that 1/3 of the bird species that lived in the forest in 1911 when most of the forest was still intact were now locally extinct in the scattered fragments of forest that remained after extensive clearing.  Latin America and the Caribbean, currently home to 560 million people, projected to be 710 million by 2030, all needing homes, food, and a livelihood means we can expect tropical deforestation to carry on like a runaway train. 

Patchy clearing leads to islands of forest called fragments resulting in birds isolated in these fragments.  The size of these fragments has a huge impact on how many species can persist there over the long run.  Leaving tiny fragments of tropical forest will not sustain enough habitat for the survival of a species.  Only a tiny number can live within the fragment and they are cut off from other surviving members trapped in a forest fragment half a mile or more away.  Small populations are prone to extinction because they cannot ride out the normal losses in the population that happen during food shortages, disease, or high predation.  Their genetic diversity drops too, as relatives are forced to breed with each other from lack of other options.  Birds are territorial, so cannot crowd into remaining forests and share what little habitat that is left.    Younger birds are forced to live in the forest edges where habitat is marginal and where they are four times more likely to be killed by predators than the dominant older birds inside the forest.  They grow to be weaker birds, less likely to be strong enough to migrate north early enough to get first pick for reproduction in the northern breeding grounds.

Dry-season fires in the adjacent pastures burn into the forest edges, killing trees and exposing others to the strong drying winds of the desert next door.  The individuals living in a small forest patch are under siege even if the forest is never completely cut to the ground.  A study of forest fragments in the central Amazon region of Brazil found that one hundred acre patches of tropical forest lost half of their understory bird species in under 15 years.  

Many species are highly specialized and so live in only a small confined region within the tropics.  When Mexico lost 95% of its original forest the species that once lived there did not simply move to the Amazon forest in Brazil.  As Mexico was cleared, individuals died and thousands of species withered as the forest disappeared.

The tropical winter range was already small and crowded because it is just a fraction of the size of the northern breeding range.  Young birds, born just a few months earlier in the northern breeding grounds  have always had to compete with older more experienced birds to find food and safe haven during winter in their tropical homes.  

The tropics also depend on the birds for insect predation, pollen moving and fruit/seed dispersal.  The birds are critical to maintaining healthy tropical forests because ¾ of the trees depend on them to eat fruit and disperse seeds away from the original tree (it's bad for a small tree to grow in the shadow of the original tree because they compete for soil, nutrients and sun).  If some forest fragments suffer from a shortage of birds, some trees might become extinct.

Deforestation of the tropical forest leads to drought because the trees have an effect on rain in the tropics.  Erosion also results leading to contamination of coastal fisheries and flooding.  Tropical forests are one of the most important natural resources on the planet covering only 6% of the land surface but receiving ½ of the rainfall and despite dire warnings and outcries deforestation HAS NOT SLOWED.

When a tropical forest is lost, we lose not only winter bird habitat, we lose history - the evolutionary forces that led to these unique species are an irreplaceable piece of the history of our planet and will never again be repeated.  There are mysteries that will never be solved, knowledge that will never be found.

THE EFFECTS OF MODERN COFFEE PRODUCTION ON MIGRATORY BIRDS:  To quote Dr. Stutchbury, "In the swirling steam that rises from your coffee cup could be the ghosts of warblers flitting among the orchids, orioles sipping nectar from spectacular bouquets in the tree tops and thrush flipping up leaves on the forest floor."  You are about to read something that will come as shocking news to most of you about , yes, coffee.  It would be news, indeed to the people who drink the 300 million cups of coffee a day and purchase the more than 3.3 billion pounds of coffee beans that are imported each year.

In the past few decades modern coffee farming has swept the coffee industry in Latin America and has also swept away some of the last forest refuges for birds.   Coffee drinkers have been slow to wake up to the environmental and social damage that their habit is causing, but they also hold the key to the survival of many neotropical migrants.

A traditional shade-grown coffee farm is a mini ecosystem with more than two dozen different species of trees that shade the coffee plants below and provide a home for animals and resident birds that are joined by migrants from the north from September through March.  The birds are attracted not to the coffee, but to the food the shade trees provide such as insects, worms, nectar and fruit.  In tropical countries where deforestation has taken place over hundreds of years for sugar cane production, it is shade coffee plantations alone that have provided habitat that has prevented certain birds from experiencing total extinction.  It isn't a complete substitute for preserving natural forest and there have been many extinctions anyway because of this lack of biodiversity. 

Shade grown coffee plantations are a sustainable agriculture, meaning crop rotation is not necessary because the attendant trees continuously provide nitrogen to the soil.  A shade coffee plantation is a lifeboat for thousands of species of plants and animals in Latin America, including our migratory birds who spend their winters in tropical forests.  But the lifeboats are sinking.  The shade trees are being cut down to make way for SUN COFFEE.

In the belief that they could avoid leaf rust disease which can wipe out a coffee crop, beginning in the early 1970's shade trees were ripped out and a completely different variety of coffee was planted, one that grew well in full sun, a robusta variety.  It grows quicker, can be planted more densely, produces more fruit and has twice as much caffeine.  However, robusta has a more bitter taste so it is used mainly for instant coffee and mass-produced supermarket coffee.

But, the real problem with robusta SUN GROWN COFFEE is that it needs huge amounts of fertilizer, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides, none of which was needed with shade grown coffee.  Without trees, heavy rains wash away the soil and the nutrients are carried away in streams, which means additional applications of chemicals are then needed. 

SUN COFFEE has triggered an ecological disaster because the shade trees, and the communities they harbor, have been lost on such a large scale.  By the early 1990's about 40 percent of the lands used for growing coffee in northern Latin America had been converted from shade coffee to sun coffee.  Birds, frogs, bats, insects, and countless other forest creatures suddenly lost their homes.  Overall, more than a million acres of shade coffee in northern Latin America have been lost to sun coffee plantations. 

The Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center thinks that this massive loss of shade coffee habitat might have triggered declines of migratory songbirds that are frequent visitors to shade coffee plantations.  The population declines of Baltimore orioles and Tennessee warblers on their breeding grounds coincide with the dramatic conversion of shade to sun coffee.  There is precious little natural forest left on the wintering grounds in the many regions where coffee is grown, so shade coffee may be the only hope for forest birds like wood thrush and Kentucky warblers.  Now, even the shade coffee is hard to find in some regions.  Losing a million acres of shade coffee has forced generations of migrants into poor habitats where it is hard for them to stay alive and build up enough energy reserves to migrate north in spring.

The proliferation of SUN COFFEE has not just hurt birds, it has been a disaster for many rural coffee farmers in Latin America.  The financial gains from increased productivity of sun coffee are offset by the cost of fertilizers and pesticides and increased labor costs for the intensive maintenance.  At first the farmers were subsidized by government programs, but are now left to fend for themselves and are at the mercy of international coffee prices which are notorious for their wild fluctuations bringing profits one year and ruin the next. 

Some good news is that with the support of the Smithsonian and other groups, and with the popularity of specialty coffee and support for fair market pricing, small farmers are being assisted in once again producing shade grown coffee (Arabica, which tastes better).  These groups help the farms apply for and gain approval for their coffee to be designated "Bird Friendly"

You may find many designations on the coffee you find on the shelf that would lead you to believe you are purchasing a coffee that was grown with the birds as a top consideration.  Some of these labels are:  Organic, Rainforest Alliance, Fair Trade, and Shade-Grown.  NONE of these meet the correct criteria.  The label you MUST look for is BIRD FRIENDLY which means it is certified by scientists from the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and that the coffee is organic and meets strict requirements for both the amount of shade and the type of forest in which the coffee is grown. 

Ask for shade grown or sustainable coffee the next time you visit your favorite café and look for it in the store.  Everyone loves the message and taste of shade coffee.  Bird Friendly certified coffee can be hard to find on store shelves and in coffee shops.  One reason is that the standards for certification are so rigorous that only a small fraction of coffee farms can qualify.  And there's another problem:  coffee sellers don't always advertise that their coffee is Bird Friendly.  Probably only about 10 percent of coffee from Bird Friendly certified farms carries the Bird Friendly stamp on the package says Robert Rice, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.  For example, Starbucks and Whole Foods sell some coffee from Bird Friendly certified farms, but they don't see the need to make room on their packaging for a separate label that appeals to a relatively small and silent minority:  birders.  Perhaps we need to be a little less silent!

If you cannot find bird friendly coffee, please inquire here at Backyard Birds.  We can order it for you and sometimes we have some in stock.