July 31, 2008 -- Gone are the days when millions of passenger pigeons crossed North America in flocks a mile wide that took days to pass. No longer do multitudes of bison wend their way across the nation's prairies. Even migrating songbirds returning to summers in Europe and North America are less abundant today, birdwatchers say. Such great migrations must be protected, researchers argue this week in the journal PLoS Biology, not just to save the species in question, but because the migrations themselves are ecologically important and spectacular to behold. "We have to save these animals while they're still abundant," lead author David Wilcove of Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. told Discovery News. "It's when they're abundant that they are able to play their ecological role so well. It's also what makes migration so inspiring. It's not seeing a dozen cranes on the Platte River in Nebraska. It's seeing half a million." Wilcove points out that migrating salmon grow in the oceans, and swim upriver to spawn and die. Their bodies carry nutrients from the ocean to the rivers. Salmon today deliver only 6 to 7 percent as much nitrogen and phosphorus from the ocean to Northwest rivers as they used to. "Songbirds migrating north in the spring consume vast numbers of insects that might otherwise defoliate trees and crops," Wilcove added. Focusing on conserving migrations as phenomena, rather than just protecting species, is a new approach to conservation, he said. "It's saying something that's qualitatively different than what we've done before. The key ingredients to protecting migration are to be proactive -- to protect species while they're still common -- and to act cooperatively, because the administrative boundaries that mean a lot to us people mean nothing to these animals." "We need to find ways to be proactive rather than reactive," agreed Julie Young of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Missoula, Mont. |
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