North America Has Lost Nearly 3 Billion Birds Since 1970

Birds across the U.S. are disappearing, though many of us probably haven’t noticed. Over the past half century, North American bird populations have undergone a quiet crisis, with scientists estimating the continent to have lost 29% of its total avian population, as revealed a new paper published in the journal Science on Thursday. That’s a loss of nearly 3 billion birds in the last half century. “I would call it an imminent disaster,” says Ken Rosenberg, a conservation scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the American Bird Conservancy, and the lead author on Thursday’s paper in Science. “We need to do something about it now, and we need to pay attention.” Scientists have been tracking populations of threatened and endangered birds for years, and noted that some populations were in decline. But they assumed that those threatened species were being replaced by “generalist species,” or more adaptable birds that were better suited to deal with man-made changes to their environment. What’s stunning in these newest findings is the fact that broad population declines are being recorded across North American birds as a whole, in a trend not confined to any one species or ecological niche. “The bulk of that loss is occurring in the common species,” says Rosenberg. “It’s across every habitat.” Grassland bird species showed the largest impacts, with more than half their number, over 70...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Environment onetime Source Type: news