New York Times, March 30, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Did Your Shopping List Kill a Songbird?

by Bridget Stutchbury
Woodbridge, Ontario

THOUGH a consumer may not be able to tell the difference, a striking red and
blue Thomas the Tank Engine made in Wisconsin is not the same as one
manufactured in China - the paint on the Chinese twin may contain dangerous
levels of lead. In the same way, a plump red tomato from Florida is often
not the same as one grown in Mexico. The imported fruits and vegetables
found in our shopping carts in winter and early spring are grown with types
and amounts of pesticides that would often be illegal in the United States.

In this case, the victims are North American songbirds. Bobolinks, called
skunk blackbirds in some places, were once a common sight in the Eastern
United States. In mating season, the male in his handsome tuxedo-like suit
sings deliriously as he whirrs madly over the hayfields. Bobolink numbers
have plummeted almost 50 percent in the last four decades, according to the
North American Breeding Bird Survey.

The birds are being poisoned on their wintering grounds by highly toxic
pesticides. Rosalind Renfrew, a biologist at the Vermont Center for
Ecostudies, captured bobolinks feeding in rice fields in Bolivia and took
samples of their blood to test for pesticide exposure. She found that about
half of the birds had drastically reduced levels of cholinesterase, an
enzyme that affects brain and nerve cells - a sign of exposure to toxic
chemicals.

Since the 1980s, pesticide use has increased fivefold in Latin America as
countries have expanded their production of nontraditional crops to fuel the
demand for fresh produce during winter in North America and Europe. Rice
farmers in the region use monocrotophos, methamidophos and carbofuran, all
agricultural chemicals that are rated Class I toxins by the World Health
Organization, are highly toxic to birds, and are either restricted or banned
in the United States. In countries like Guatemala, Honduras and Ecuador,
researchers have found that farmers spray their crops heavily and repeatedly
with a chemical cocktail of dangerous pesticides.

In the mid-1990s, American biologists used satellite tracking to follow
Swainson's hawks to their wintering grounds in Argentina, where thousands of
them were found dead from monocrotophos poisoning. Migratory songbirds like
bobolinks, barn swallows and Eastern kingbirds are suffering mysterious
population declines, and pesticides may well be to blame. A single
application of a highly toxic pesticide to a field can kill seven to 25
songbirds per acre. About half the birds that researchers capture after such
spraying are found to suffer from severely depressed neurological function.

Migratory birds, modern-day canaries in the coal mine, reveal an
environmental problem hidden to consumers. Testing by the United States Food
and Drug Administration shows that fruits and vegetables imported from Latin
America are three times as likely to violate Environmental Protection Agency
standards for pesticide residues as the same foods grown in the United
States. Some but not all pesticide residues can be removed by washing or
peeling produce, but tests by the Centers for Disease Control show that most
Americans carry traces of pesticides in their blood. American consumers can
discourage this poisoning by avoiding foods that are bad for the
environment, bad for farmers in Latin America and, in the worst cases, bad
for their own families.

What should you put on your bird-friendly grocery list? Organic coffee, for
one thing. Most mass-produced coffee is grown in open fields heavily treated
with fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides. In contrast,
traditional small coffee farmers grow their beans under a canopy of tropical
trees, which provide shade and essential nitrogen, and fertilize their soil
naturally with leaf litter. Their organic, fair-trade coffee is now
available in many coffee shops and supermarkets, and it is recommended by
the Audubon Society, the American Bird Conservancy and the Smithsonian
Migratory Bird Center.

Organic bananas should also be on your list. Bananas are typically grown
with one of the highest pesticide loads of any tropical crop. Although
bananas present little risk of pesticide ingestion to the consumer, the
environment where they are grown is heavily contaminated.

When it comes to nontraditional Latin American crops like melons, green
beans, tomatoes, bell peppers and strawberries, it can be difficult to find
any that are organically grown. We should buy these foods only if they are
not imported from Latin America.

Now that spring is here, we take it for granted that the birds' cheerful
songs will fill the air when our apple trees blossom. But each year, as we
continue to demand out-of-season fruits and vegetables, we ensure that fewer
and fewer songbirds will return.

Bridget Stutchbury, a professor of biology at York University in Toronto, is the author of Silence
of the Songbirds.