The Big Ideas Blog

On October 23^rd, 2011 hundreds of dead birds were found upon the beaches of Georgian Bay, Ontario, around the Wasaga Beach area.  At the moment, the deaths are thought to be the result of botulism poisoning.  Now, I’m not an expert on botulism or birds by any means, but to me if the accumulation of the birds was over a few days then that does sound like it would be reasonable.  However, this all happened over night! How is it possible that hundreds of birds ate poisoned fish or muscles at pretty much the exact same time, and therefore all died at around the same time?

            I’m angry about this situation because this is not even close to the first time that mass animals deaths has happened.  There is a map on Google that shows you where they have been found, and to be honest, it’s primarily the USA.  In most cases reasons were found, ranging from ones that are relatively believable, such as the temperature shock in the lake (fish on the St. Clair River beaches) to ones that are just ridiculous, such as New Year’s fireworks (Blackbirds in Arkansas).

            To me, if there were only a few incidences of mass deaths, then maybe some of these can be explained away.   But there are so many cases with excuse after excuse, and it just makes me angry.  There is clearly something going on with the environment: even if it turns out that these birds died from botulism poisoning, botulism was never found native in the Georgian Bay before.  It is due to the fact that ships brought the zebra muscles over from warmer waters.  While these zebra mussels have had unforeseen benefits, they have also managed to pose a growing ecological issue.  As the summer water wanes and the mussels die, botulism, a naturally occurring disease, infects the mussels.  As it moves up the food chain, the disease spreads into fish stocks and then the lake bird population.

The amount of times that people have been the cause of environmental disasters keeps increasing and it needs to stop.  The human race needs to stop affecting the environment.  If we keep interfering then eventually the things that we are affecting are going to be the things that we need to survive.  Right now, when humans over-hunt or over-fish, we just make laws against killing those items.  The problem is that when we can’t fish one type of fish then another type of fish is just going to become stressed.  It’s just a vicious cycle; everything needs to be made sustainable.  There should be laws about fishing and hunting preemptively, before there is a problem.  If things are controlled before there is a problem then there never will be a problem.