So, what will happen to this lovely parcel of land, if, as Carly Simmon wrote in her famous song Big Yellow Taxi – Don't it always seem to go - That you don't know what you've got til its gone - They paved paradise And put up a parking lot - it is paved over.
A parking lot for apartments, condos, townhomes, cement paths. I bring this up, while thinking about the Doral Forest development plans for the land right next to Beaver Lake Park and a stone's throw from here, and what may happen on this land if it is removed from the ALR. The developers for the Doral Forest development are crowing about the fact that the 4 buildings 'only' occupy .26 of land, but look at the plans, much of the remaining property will be covered with roads and cement walkways (parking will be on 1 1/2 levels dug out of the ground). Yes, there is a small conservation corner and lots of plants. Good nesting for the birds....but what about the wild grasses and other open area ‘weeds’ needed to feed them? THIS is what is coming back on the open lands of the old golf course. Much needed food source for our local and migrating birds that live here and pass through every year. There are serious warnings about our increasing toll on local habitats and the environment itself.
Jonathan Franzen writes – For most of my life, I didn’t pay attention to birds. Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling, and who hurries out to see a golden plover that’s been reported in the neighbourhood, just because it’s a beautiful bird, with truly golden plumage, and has flown all the way from Alaska. When someone asks me why birds are so important to me, all I can do is sigh and shake my head, as if I’ve been asked to explain why I love my brothers. And yet the question is a fair one: why do birds matter?
My answer might begin with the vast scale of the avian domain. If you could see every bird in the world, you’d see the whole world. Things with feathers can be found in every corner of every ocean and in land habitats so bleak that they’re habitats for nothing else.
Birds aren’t furry and cuddly, but in many respects they’re more similar to us than other mammals are. They build intricate homes and raise families in them. They take long winter vacations in warm places. Cockatoos are shrewd thinkers, solving puzzles that would challenge a chimpanzee, and crows like to play. (On days so windy that more practical birds stay grounded, I’ve seen crows launching themselves off hillsides and doing aerial somersaults, just for the fun of it, and I keep returning to the YouTube video of a crow in Russia sledding down a snowy roof on a plastic lid, flying back up with the lid in its beak, and sledding down again.) And then there are the songs with which birds, like us, fill the world.

The Audubon Society released a new report describing the sharp and startling population decline of some of the most familiar and common birds in America. The average decline of the 20 species in the Audubon Society’s report is 68 percent.
Forty years ago, there were an estimated 31 million bobwhites. Now there are 5.5 million. Compared to the hundred-some condors presently in the wild, 5.5 million bobwhites sounds like a lot of birds. But what matters is the 25.5 million missing and the troubles that brought them down — and are all too likely to bring down the rest of them, too. So this is not extinction, but it is how things look before extinction happens.
The word “extinct” somehow brings to mind the birds that seem like special cases to us, the dodo or the great auk or the passenger pigeon. Most people would never have had a chance to see dodos and great auks on their remote islands before they were decimated in the 17th and 19th centuries. What is hard to remember about passenger pigeons isn’t merely their once enormous numbers. It’s the enormous numbers of humans to whom their comings and goings were a common sight and who supposed, erroneously, that such unending clouds of birds were indestructible. We recognize the extraordinary distinctness of the passenger pigeon now because we know its fate, killed off largely by humans. But we have moralized it thoroughly without ever really taking it to heart.
Agriculture has intensified. So has development. Open space has been sharply reduced. We have simply pursued our livelihoods. We knew it was inimical to wolves and mountain lions. But we somehow trusted that all the innocent little birds were here to stay. What they actually need to survive, it turns out, is a landscape that is less intensely human.
In our everyday economic behavior, we seem determined to discover whether we can live alone on earth. E.O. Wilson has argued eloquently and persuasively that we cannot, that who we are depends as much on the richness and diversity of the biological life around us as it does on any inherent quality in our genes. Environmentalists of every stripe argue that we must somehow begin to correlate our economic behavior — by which I mean every aspect of it: production, consumption, habitation — with the welfare of other species.
This is the premise of sustainability. But the very foundation of our economic interests is self-interest, and in the survival of other species we see way too little self to care.
The trouble with humans is that even the smallest changes in our behavior require an epiphany. And yet compared to the fixity of other species, the narrowness of their habitats, the strictness of their diets, the precision of the niches they occupy, we are flexibility itself. - Verlyn Klinkenborg

We look around us, expecting the rest of the world’s occupants to adapt to the changes that we have caused, when, in fact, we have the right to expect adaptation only from ourselves. The question is whether we will see the distinctness of the field sparrow — its number is down from 18 million 40 years ago to 5.8 million — only when the last pair is being kept alive in a zoo somewhere. We love to finally care when the death watch is on. It makes us feel so very human. Migratory birds cross ecological obstacles like oceans or deserts, these birds have to prepare by tremendous fattening up on fuel for their flights. Natural habitat on either side of long flights function for birds like our gas stations, where they have to fill up prior to and after the flights.
Bird numbers have been steadily declining in North America as well. According to Partners in Flight, 22 of their 86 Watch List species have lost at least half of their population in the past 40 years and are projected to lose an additional 50 percent of their current population within the next 40 years.
Degradation of grasslands and forests plays a role, but pesticides may also be a factor in avian decline in North America. A 2017 University of Saskatchewan study published in Scientific Reports found that insecticides had a substantial impact on migrating, seed-eating passerines, or perching birds. Reductions in pollinator populations — such as bees and butterflies — have been widely reported. Last year, a German study showing a staggering 76 percent decrease in flying insects had many experts buzzing about an “ecological Armageddon.”
The 2018 State of the World’s Birds report, which provides a comprehensive look at the health of bird populations globally, has found that the extinction crisis has spread so far that even some well-known species are now in danger. Dozens of species lost more than 50 per cent of their populations between 1970 and 2014. Loss of habitat to urban sprawl, farming and forestry is arguably an even bigger driver of long-term decline in bird populations. As "North America's bird nursery," Canada has an added responsibility to conserve habitat. A majority of the continent's birds are hatched here, before migrating south.

Do we need more reasons, more facts, more slaps up the side of the head to understand why areas like the old golf course should be left as natural as possible? Allowing all species (besides humans) to flourish and give them all the fighting chance of survival, areas that we, as humans have been decimating for so many years? Are we so much more important than the wildlife we are carelessly wiping out in order to provide housing for our own species.