"SILENCE OF THE SONGBIRDS" 

By Bridget Stutchbury

In the first installment we learned that neotropical migratory songbirds are disappearing at an alarming rate due to many threats, such as pesticides, predators, light pollution, destruction of breeding habitat and wintering habitat, coffee growing, and manmade obstructions.  The last issue addressed how destruction of wintering habitat affects migratory birds.  Each of these threats will be addressed in subsequent Newsletter issues.  You can read the first and second installments by following this link Archived Chapters or by following the link on our Facebook page.  

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This issue deals with coffee growing:

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.  You can also go to www.birdsandbeans.com.  This is a website dedicated to selling bird friendly coffee.

This ends my third installment.  Watch for our next Newsletter where I will continue sharing what I have learned from Dr. Stutchbury's eye-opening book "Silence of the Songbirds".  Her writings have touched me deeply and I just had to share it with all of you.  

Linda

DON'T PANIC!