To the Editor:

I have been feeding the birds my whole adult life, more than 50 years. I have paid attention over the years and can identify pretty much every bird in Maine and New England by their song. But these days the woods are silent.
I am blessed to be able to spend hours every day, no matter what the weather, far from the tarred roads and the insanity of the human race. As we go zooming on our quest to acquire, we have lost sight of the sacrifices nature and the animal kingdom make daily on an ever increasing scale.
When I was young and my husband was alive, we lived in an A frame camp in West Paris.  I was using 25-50 pounds of sunflower seeds a week. Evening grosbeaks by the dozens, probably by the hundreds, were constantly at my feeders. I haven’t seen an evening grosbeak in years. No it’s not just the evening grosbeaks, it’s every bird.  There were so many chickadees and they landed on my hat when I went to fill the feeders.  I call them little warriors.  No bigger than a silver dollar, they can survive and thrive when it’s 20  degrees below zero.  How do they do it?  With all my knowledge and down coats, I couldn’t survive exposed to the elements in below zero weather.
I am to trying to say they are all gone.  The flocks of chickadees, nuthatches, titmice, and purple house finches are nowhere to be found in the Norway woods.
We are zooming to our own destruction and taking the animal kingdom with us. There is no creature on earth that fouls its own nest like we do. The silence in the woods is deafening.  The chickadee, once so prevalent in my local woods isn’t even a whisper, whisper.

Bobbi Wilner
Norway