Eat Local, Save a Songbird

Sailor USS Bobolink, 1927

Oh, wait.

Bobolink, Indiana, 2006 J. Gilbert

Farmers in Latin American are growing exotic and off-season foods for the American and European markets and lacing them heavily with pesticides not allowed to farmers in the importing countries.
Result? Migratory bird die-off.
Yeah, and fork over the extra bucks for organic coffee and bananas, too.
From the New York Times today:

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.