Opinion | The Crisis for Birds Is a Crisis for Us All, Hacker News

Nearly one-third of the wild birds in the United States and Canada have vanished since 1970, a staggering loss that suggests the very fabric of North America’s ecosystem is unraveling.

The disappearance of 2.9 billion birds over the past nearly 50 Yearswas reported todayin the journal Science, a result of a comprehensive study by a team of scientists from seven research institutions in the United States and Canada.

As ornithologists and the directors of two major research institutes that directed this study, even we were shocked by the results. We knew of well-documented losses among shorebirds and songbirds. But the magnitude of losses among 300 bird species was much larger than we had expected and alarmingly widespread across the continent.

What makes this study particularly compelling is the trustworthiness of the data. Birds are the best-studied group of wildlife; their populations have been carefully monitored over decades by scientists and citizen scientists alike. And in recent years, scientists have been able to track the volume of nighttime bird migrations through a network of 143 high-resolution weather radars. This study pulls all of that data together, and the results signal an unfolding crisis. More than half our grassland birds have disappeared, 717 million in all. Forests have lost more than one billion birds.

Birds are indicator species, serving as acutely sensitive barometers of environmental health, and their mass declines signal that the earth’s biological systems are in trouble. Unfortunately, this study is just the latest in a long line of such mounting evidence.

A study inGermany, for instance, reported a midsummer decline of 82 percent in the biomass of flying insects over the past quarter century. Forty percent of the world’s amphibians are in danger ofextinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Stocks of bluefin tuna are down to the last3 percent of their historic population, and the United States’ Atlantic cod fishery recently hita low. A United Nations report this year warned that about a million animal and plant speciesface extinction. That’s “more than ever before in human history,” according to the report.

All these statistics together underscore the pervasive character of the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch defined by the planet’s natural systems being altered profoundly by human behavior. How deeply will these losses have to cut before society declares, “Enough!”?

The fate of meadowlarks offers an example. These yellow-breasted songsters of America’s wide open landscapes depend on healthy grasslands that play an important role in filtering water runoff. But in the last half-century, 73 million eastern meadowlarks and 65 million western meadowlarks have vanished asgrasslands have been lostand water in many communities has become contaminated by agricultural runoff.

Fortunately, it’s not all bad news. Populations of North American ducks and geese have grown by 56 percent since 1970, according to the Science paper, and this is not an accident. During the first half of the 20 th century, hunters became deeply concerned about declines in duck populations every bit as severe as those we’re witnessing among common songbirds today. The United States and Canada responded with laws to protect wetlands and collaborated with Mexico to safeguard migrating waterfowl. Conservation management became increasingly driven by science. Private philanthropy, especially by Ducks Unlimited, generated significant financial support for wetlands acquisitions. Millions of additional acres of wetlands were restored and protected by the federal and state governments. The result: Waterfowl populations are booming today.

That success in waterfowl management can point the way forward. We need bold, landscape-scale conservation campaigns across North America that are comparable with those that brought back the ducks. These efforts do not require locking up land in gated wildlife preserves. Conservation programs under the federal Farm Bill on private lands in the Upper Midwest helped grow duck populations while providing protection from floodwaters and keeping drinking water supplies safe. Expanding the scope of those Farm Bill conservation programs would produce more of these benefits. Moreover, a bipartisan measure in the House called theRecovering America’s Wildlife Actwould direct some $ 1.4 billion a year in federal dollars to invigorate underfunded state and tribal wildlife habitat conservation programs.

Habitat loss has been the main cause of bird declines, and efforts to reduce development in wild lands and suburban sprawl should remain at the forefront of conservation priority. Additionally, we need to address other threats killing birds. Feral and pet cats roaming outdoors cause huge bird mortality every year, as doCollisionswith buildings, communications towers and power lines. Recent evidenceshowsthat pesticides, like neonicotinoids, may be directly or indirectly responsible for killing large numbers of birds. What’s also worrisome is that scientists are only now beginning to assess the ravages of the changing climate on bird populations.