The Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Firstenberg

Author:Arthur Firstenberg [Firstenberg, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781645020097
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2020-03-09T04:00:00+00:00

Half of the park’s 14 resident bird species had either seriously declined or vanished despite the fact, as Balmori points out, that air pollution improved.

The decline of the house sparrow is a worldwide tragedy. “Twenty, even 10 years ago, it was unimaginable that the house sparrow would be the focus for discussion at an international ornithological or environmental conference,” wrote Jenny De Laet and James Denis Summers- Smith. Their 2007 study found spectacular declines of over 90 percent in house sparrow populations in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin, Hamburg, Ghent, Antwerp, and Brussels. Scattered throughout Princes Street Gardens, a 50-acre park in central Edinburgh, at least 250 sparrows had resided as recently as 1984. In 1997, only 15 to 30 birds were left, in only a single location. The population of sparrows in Kensington Gardens, a 275-acre park gracing central London, declined from 2,603 in 1925 to just four in 2002. This bird, which has associated with human beings for at least ten thousand years, is vanishing even where there are plenty of seeds and insects, where ornithologists can find no obvious cause for its decline. But there is a cause, and it is hidden in plain sight. Today, twenty-six antenna installations are lined up on the northern, western, and southern borders of Kensington Gardens, operated by Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange, O2, 3, and Airwave. They are saturating this beautiful park with microwaves so that human visitors can use their cell phones and the police can use their radios. The situation in Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens is even worse. Thirty-four cell sites surround this much smaller park, most of them less than five meters above the ground. The only location where sparrows still nested in 1997—the Gatekeeper’s cottage—is nestled against the bottom of an artificial hill called The Mound, and is the only spot in the entire park that is not in the direct beam of multiple microwave antennas. The irradiation of these parks that began in 1992 parallels the catastrophic collapse of their house sparrow communities.

The situation in Switzerland has become so alarming that the Swiss Association for the Protection of Birds declared the house sparrow “bird of the year” for 2015. A study conducted by zoologist Sainudeen Pattazhy in Kerala, India during 2008 and 2009 found that house sparrows were virtually extinct there. In Delhi, ornithologist Mohammed Dilawar reminisces that “till March 2001, they were in and out of our home. We left for a while to return to see, the commonest bird had flown the nest.”2 Pattazhy’s conclusion is the same as Balmori’s: cell towers are leaving sparrows no place to live. “Continuous penetration of electromagnetic radiation through the body of birds affects their nervous system and their navigational skills. They become incapable of navigation and foraging. The birds which nest near towers are found to leave the nest within one week,” he says. “One to eight eggs can be present in a clutch. The incubation lasts for 10 to 14 days. But the eggs which are laid in nests near towers failed to hatch even after 30 days.

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