You won’t find the cerulean warbler on the federal Endangered Species list; it is not so far gone as to rate that kind of last-gasp governmental life… - Scott Weidensaul

Birds are metabolic dynamos, requiring food at regular intervals and in significant amounts; few old sayings are as completely false as to claim that a finicky person “eats like like a bird.” If I ate, by proportion, the same amount as a chickadee, I would have to consume about fifty pounds of camarones every day, and even raptors, with their somewhat slower metabolism, must eat about 10 percent of their weight to stay alive.

Natural systems are like those hollow Russian dolls, layer nested within layer within layer, always hiding a new riddle beneath the last one. Figuring out how they work as a herculean task, one with which humans have been grappling for a relatively short time. If you want clear-cut problems and need solutions, try geometry. This is ecology and it doesn’t get any more complex and messier than this. But we’re learning.

Because we humans don’t notice changes that take place slowly, incrementally, we tend to underestimate their cumulative effects, even within the span of one or two lifetimes.