Put a Songbird on your Shopping List:  adapted from Bridget Stutchbury’s National Wildlife article, Dec/Jan 2008

When you shop for groceries, you might want to keep songbirds at the top of your list!  No, not to buy them, but to keep the fact that songbirds are disappearing from our world and that the purchases you make can have an impact on the birds’ future status.  About one third of the 100 or so species of Neotropical migratory songbirds that breed and summer in North America have fallen in number more than 30% in the past 40 years.  Sadly, many of the imported fruits and vegetables many of us buy during the winter months are partly to blame.

In many Central American nations, crops are sprayed heavily with a potent mixture of dangerous chemical substances.  Widely used in Latin America, many of these chemicals are rated as Class I toxins by the World Health Organization and are considered “restricted-use” pesticides or are completely banned in the US. 

The growing demand by people in the US for fresh produce year round is a major driving force behind this pesticide use.  It comes at the expense of migratory songbirds, which are highly susceptible to the toxic effects of the chemicals used in their wintering grounds in Central and South American.  If they do not kill outright, these pesticides can cause nervous system damage which leads to reduced reproduction rates, among other things, for many birds. 

Crop chemicals are not only dangerous to birds, they are also dangerous to humans.  Produce imported from Latin America is three times more likely to violate EPA safety standards than US grown crops.  EPA regulations mandate that imported produce be free of pesticide residue, however, not all are.  Only those products labeled as “organic” are safe and free of pesticide use. 

Though many of us will never see fields of melons in Guatemala or the bright red berries on coffee plants in Mexico, the thrushes, warblers and swallows that we welcome in our backyards during part of the year experience both worlds.  Their lives are impacted by environmental changes on the same huge geographic scale that can affect our own lives, and they reveal environmental threats that most of us cannot see unfolding in faraway countries.

That is why songbirds might remain at the top of your shopping list.