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So you’re sitting on your lanai or balcony or dock or some other outdoors venue some evening and you hear a rustling in the yard.

Sometimes it’s louder — a skirmish or a thrashing about. It could be the wind through loose foliage. It also could be a deadly battle among hungry critters that share our island, creatures that are not having a good year. Silence itself can signal a bad season for nature. Some examples:

-- Our burrowing owl reproduction is down from last year. Marco’s environmental specialist Nancy Richie, reports the average number of chicks per burrow was way down.

-- Purple Martin experts say 2007 has been a disastrous season. “The worst year in the 20 years I’ve been a purple Martin landlord in Florida,” said Bill Dietrich. In one case a martin nest was destroyed, the eggs and young eaten, apparently by hungry hawks.

-- Swallow-tailed kites pulled the front off some nest compartment at the purple martin home of Mary and Kevin Short. “We had feathers and wings all over the place,” Mary told the Purple Martin Society of Collier County. The kites ate all the babies and some adults.

-- A 52-inch Yellow Rat snake ate a female bird and six babies at a nest on Isles of Capri. Also on Capri, George and Joanne Moore report their worst year ever for purple martins.

-- “This year has been the scourge of the sparrows,” said purple martin lovers Tom and Leslie Burgess of Bonita Springs. “Early in season, half of our colony was wiped out by outlaw sparrows.”

-- Grackles ate all the martin hatchlings in nest-gourds at Eloise Ingram’s colony.

-- Experts say this also has been a very bad year for storks. Says Ted Below, avian ecologist for the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, “I think it’s true in all of South Florida and much of the Caribbean. There were very few nests and hardly any of them produced young. I don’t think we can blame it all on the drought. It would appear to be food-related but nobody really knows.”

Pelicans also have had a bad year. “They’ve raised as few young as they ever have raised,” said Below.

As the professional compare notes with counterparts elsewhere, they’re seeing similar problems with lack of food and drastic efforts by critters to find nourishment.

Said Below, “In the Dry Tortugas, the sooty terns “failed” (to nest), as did birds in the Bahamas. It’s something going on and I doubt seriously we’ll ever put our fingers on (the exact cause.) My first reaction is that it’s temporary. The only way we’ll know whether it’s is a trend is to experience it ahead.”

Right now, Below says, the avian migration seems “to be functioning regularly. We have the normal number of migrant birds coming to the area. The Peregrine Falcons started coming a couple of weeks ago, so they’re on time.”

For us humans, all this may not mean much. We know that animals and birds have a food chain and literally make their living by eating others.

Still, we enjoy life here, often oblivious to the wild nature of life in the bushes, in the burrows and sometimes just outside our screen enclosures.

Sometimes, however, evidence shows that survival out there requires extreme measures and maybe, just maybe, this has been one of those times.

“This is what wildlife does to you,” stated pelican expert Ted Below. “It’s like people. Who can figure out people?”

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Chris Curle is a former news anchor for CNN and for ABC TV stations in Atlanta, Houston and Washington, D.C. E-mail: chris@chriscurle.com.