You pour yourself a cup of coffee and listen for the
chirp and twitter of birds outside. But as you sip, you notice the
quiet: What’s happened to the songbirds?
The
answer could be right in your cup.
Songbird
populations are dropping as foreign coffee plantations “modernize”
to keep up with America’s thirst for the brew, say scientists.
Millions of orioles, warblers, vireos and other birds migrate to
Mexican and Central American coffee farms each winter, to live in
the fruit trees that shade coffee bushes. But that’s
changed.
The United States now drinks a third of
the world’s brew, with beans our third largest import after oil and
steel; to meet the demand, foreign growers have been cutting down
shade trees to get higher yields from sun-drenched coffee plants, a
move they say produces four times as many coffee beans per
acre.
But these treeless coffee farms are nearly
devoid of bird life. “Sun coffee is one of the poorest habitats for
migratory birds, even in comparison to other human-disturbed
habitats,” says Russell Greenberg, director of the Smithsonian’s
migratory bird center, in Birding
magazine.
What’s a java junkie to do? Look for
“bird-friendly,” shade-grown coffees due on the market this spring,
says Greg Butcher, executive director of the American Birding
Association. They will probably sell at prices similar to gourmet
and organically grown brews.
* Danielle
Desruisseaux
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Coffee is bad for birds.
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