A Third of North America's Birds Have Vanished

[usonian]

https://nautil.us/a-third-of-north-americas-birds-have-vanished-340007/

At first Adam Smith couldn’t believe his calculations. Then it sank in.

BY ANDERS GYLLENHAAL & BEVERLY GYLLENHAAL

June 30, 2023

For weeks, Adam Smith had been crunching the raw data from more bird statistics than anyone had ever tried before—thirteen different bird counts and millions of radar sweeps. Suddenly he heard the musical chime that tells him his results are ready. He leaned across his desk, surrounded by enough high-powered computers to heat up his entire office, and stared at what could only be an impossible conclusion: Over the past fifty years, his calculations found, a third of North America’s birds had vanished. “Well, that can’t be right,” he thought. “I must have made a mistake somewhere.”

Smith, one of the hemisphere’s top specialists in bird populations, just sat for a while in his cluttered cubicle at the Canadian Wildlife Service, which was decorated with caribou antlers, a musk-ox skull, and early drawings from his twin boys. Then it dawned on him. “This would be a massive change, an absolutely profound change in the natural system,” he said. “And we weren’t even aware of it.”

Up until that point, counting the abundance of individual birds throughout the entire continent was impossible. At any given time, many species number in the tens of millions in North America—adding up to billions of birds—and they’re constantly on the move. But the science of bird study was advancing, and a close-knit group of scientists was experimenting with using radar imagery, satellite photos, and citizen science to add precision to the dozens of conventional bird counts done for groups of species.

The computation Smith had just finished that day in May 2019 combined individual population estimates for 529 bird species, from the most common sparrows and robins to rarities hardly ever seen. When Smith pulled these estimates together and adjusted each for its degree of certainty, the findings came down to a single ski slope of a chart. It showed a precipitous drop in nearly all these species in every part of the continent. At the bottom sat four lone digits—2.913. That’s the number of breeding birds in billions that had disappeared since the early 1970s. He had documented an accelerating churn of seasonal losses that slowly took their toll on the abundance of birds. And it translated to an astounding third of the adult birds that not long ago filled North America but now are gone.

It's from the book "A Wing and a Prayer" (2023)
Not a book plug. They said nothing about the book until the end of the article.

Anyway, here's the blurb.
Description:
A captivating drama from the frontlines of the race to save birds set against the devastating loss of one third of the avian population.
Three years ago, headlines delivered shocking news: nearly three billion birds in North America have vanished over the past fifty years. No species has been spared, from the most delicate jeweled hummingbirds to scrappy black crows, from a rainbow of warblers to common birds such as owls and sparrows.

In a desperate race against time, scientists, conservationists, birders, wildlife officers, and philanthropists are scrambling to halt the collapse of species with bold, experimental, and sometimes risky rescue missions. High in the mountains of Hawaii, biologists are about to release clouds of laboratory-bred mosquitos in a last-ditch attempt to save Hawaii's remaining native forest birds. In Central Florida, researchers have found a way to hatch Florida Grasshopper Sparrows in captivity to rebuild a species down to its last two..

[mike_c]

1. more than half of flying insects have disappeared as well

In some studies north of three-quarters, gone. Just gone. No one was paying attention when it began, and suddenly most flying insects are missing, at least in the places where people are counting them. Many were important food resources for birds, and their co-disappearance probably includes many instances of plain correlation. But yeah, not a coincidence.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

2. Maybe more Roundup on suburban yards will help.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. I can believe it. A few years ago, we had several different species of woodpecker in our back yard.

Every species known to occur in our region*, except the Pileated, showed up regularly. I saw little Downys doing a mating dance on our deck. Saw male/female couples of downy, hairy, red-bellied and red-headed woodpeckers, and yellowhammers (AL state bird) in groups. Red-winged blackbirds and Brewer's blackbird in flocks of 2-3 dozen. Brown thrashers (GA state bird) were fairly common, and we saw towhees, spotted thrushes and nuthatches reasonably often. Even spotted some birds rarer in our area, like redstarts, Savannah wren, and one species of warbler (memory fails me).

Woodpeckers search for food mostly in the bark of dead and dying trees which are infested with grubs. A heavily wooded area near us, which was the property of a church, was cleared to put up a "multi-purpose facility" which is used probably twice a week -- serving God by destroying His creations, I guess. Yellowhammers have been gone ever since, and I've only noticed woodpeckers when I've heard them attacking our wooden trim (three times in the years since the woods were torn down). Mostly just the most common birds -- cardinals, robins, blue jays, sparrows, wrens -- remain. And that's despite us keeping a birdbath and a suet cage for the wookpeckers. The suet sits dry and uneaten, and we have half a dozen packages of it we'll probably never use now.

All for the sake of more and more acreage covered by monoclonal green lawns.




*To be honest, my memory isn't clear re. the yellow-bellied sapsucker.