Editor:
The sounds of the birds are muted as if their songs have been stolen from them. But it wasn’t the songs that did them in; it was their pedestals upon which they perched to tell the morning to come on and start the day. The trees went before and took the birds with them.
It was a traumatic experience for my wife and I when they were cut down. I witnessed one of these sentient denizens die … the chain saw cutting its lifeline, its last stand and then its crashing to the ground. There were five left and they all but one succumbed to the grim reaper. Two were at least 150 years old and two at least 50. We have one youngster left in a corner, whimpering.
They took with them the habitat for the Douglas squirrels who charmed us with their escapades. They took away the flora … the racoons that lived in the trees, the forest rats who came in the winter (to my wife’s dismay), the deer, the bears, the bobcat, the falcons etc. They took with them the bumble bees who nested below them in the ground. They took away the insects and other life too minute to see; they were part of the food chain for the birds. They took away the shade and the shelter from the rains. They took away any chance of a forest fire for there is nothing left to burn there is no longer any forest. Only the hummingbirds still come; we wonder for how long?
It was a time to mourn, nay to weep for their demise. Despite climate change and the place that the forests play in mitigating its onward march, they and all their neighbours and the flora which numbered in the thousands were removed. The memory of them ground up in machines dedicated for that purpose.
We reel from the trauma and what their absence means to us. We rail against those who wantonly destroy life like this without thought for what havoc and destruction to other lives they caused. We weep now, my wife and I; we cannot move from where we are, for there is no place we can go.
For us the birds, they don’t sing here anymore.
Fred and Bozena Whibbs, Sechelt
