BIRDS Korea: April
Winter is now easing into spring, in a blizzard of scented cherry blossoms and an explosion of insect life. Millions of birds too are flowing northward across Asia, including shorebirds. Perfectly adapted to the natural world, these shorebirds will be arriving this month after incredible journeys, many flying non-stop for thousands of kilometres from winter homes in Australasia. Once here, they will search tidal-flats for crabs, worms and shellfish – vital food to fuel the remainder of their flights north towards Arctic breeding grounds. And there, in the summer, another generation will be born – soon to take its place in the extraordinary ebb and flow of migration.
This annual cycle of abundance is a powerful reminder that spring is a time of regeneration and hope. However, it is also the season in which T.S Eliot’s well-worn line from “The Waste Land” increasingly comes to mind: “April is the cruellest month.”
Our world is full of opportunity and possibility, but it is also undergoing massive change. Many of the landscapes that evolved naturally over millennia have been modified in only a few decades. And the resultant decline of biodiversity and natural ecosystem function is combining to help drive climate change, leading to further declines.
Consider the tidal-flats that shorebirds and other waterbirds depend on. These brown grey expanses of mud and sand that once lined the coast are carbon sinks. Natural processes within them convert dead matter into new plant and animal life, fueling abundance. However, already three-quarters of the nation’s tidal-flats have been impounded. Many have been converted to man-made wasteland. The dying tidal-flats release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. And shorebirds arriving here exhausted by migration can find no food.
The human-driven degradation of habitat is leading to rapid species loss and a decline in ecosystem function and resilience. The IUCN reports that, “rates of decline of waterbird species…are among the highest of any ecological system on the planet… Fisheries and vital ecological services are collapsing and ecological disasters increasing, with concomitant implications for human livelihoods.” (MacKinnon et al. 2012).
We need to conserve biodiversity and abundance – both for their intrinsic values and for the human generations that will come after us. For their sake, we need to slow down and take the time to understand the marvellous, vibrant web of life that surrounds and supports us.
Spring, with its remarkable abundance, is the perfect season for taking time to seek out and learn about other species, both great and small. Spring can be – and indeed needs to be – the season of growth and restoration, both of our own minds and of the natural world around us.
For more on biodiversity conservation in Korea and for full references, please see: birdskorea.org