TV REVIEW : ‘Wing’ Scratches Surface of Birds’ Plight

For the latest installment of his “The New Explorers” series, correspondent Bill Kurtis raises parallels between the threats to wildlife described in Rachel Carson’s 1963 book, “Silent Spring” (and earlier, by the underappreciated Murray Bookchin in his “Our Synthetic Environment”), and the new signs of declining songbird populations.

Is a new synthetic, silent spring upon us?

“On a Wing and a Prayer” never reaches the ominous conclusions of Bookchin and Carson, and the new threats to the migrating birds are not so easily identifiable as DDT and other toxic chemicals. Still, ornithologists are reporting such stark drop-offs in numbers (a 30% decline in wood thrushes over 30 years, a 60% decline in some varieties of warblers) that they sense an ecological crisis. Without songbirds, insects would run amok.

That sense is visible in the scientists’ eyes as they traipse about the woods of South America and Illinois, talking with Kurtis on camera. If the birds are harbingers of some doom, the ornithologists are intensely committed eco-detectives, standing knee-deep in mud, hiking through poison ivy patches, carefully tracking birds with items ranging from red tags to weather radar and hot-air balloons.

Kurtis’ report concerns only one small part of the problem and the map: songbirds nesting in semi-wild Illinois swamplands. Here, the culprit is, ironically, another bird. Cowbirds, whose habitat is grazing land, will explore nearby forests to invade songbird nests and replace songbird eggs with their own. Somehow, songbird mothers don’t notice that the more aggressive cowbird chicks are getting most of the food, leaving songbird chicks fatally undernourished.

But lest environmentalist-bashers assume that birds’ problems are other birds, the cowbird dilemma has been caused by man-made deforestation. With deeper, larger forests, songbirds are well-protected from the marauding cowbirds. The solution is something more difficult than banning chemicals: It’s to restore large sections of deforested land to forest, and soon.

But this isn’t the only problem facing songbirds. Diseases have been reported killing off house finches across the eastern half of the United States. Migratory patterns have been disturbed by urbanization. The birds are sending a warning song, but it’s more complex than Kurtis’ report suggests.

* “On a Wing and a Prayer” airs at 8 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.