"I’m on a Zoom call with a team of researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, their gridded video feeds a sort of Hollywood Squares of bird nerds, and we’re discussing the decline and fall of North America’s bird population — a staggering loss of 3 billion breeding adults, or nearly 30 percent of the population, in just a half century — when all of a sudden Gus Axelson picks up his binoculars and peers out the window.
“Gus,” I ask, “are you birding right now?”
Axelson, the Cornell Lab’s editorial director, hastily apologizes, but I tell him to go ahead and bird. I have a job, but birders like Axelson have a calling, and no one can predict when nature will call. “I had white-throated sparrows that have been gone for a couple of days,” Axelson, who leads production of Living Bird, the lab’s quarterly magazine, explains when he puts down the binoculars. “They just popped back up.”
By itself, this information is meaningless to me. What the heck is a white-throated sparrow? But it turns out these creatures are also part of the great bird decline, a fact Axelson’s colleagues at the Cornell Lab can show in vivid detail. During their summer breeding season in the Northeast, white-throated sparrows have grown scarcer over the past decade. Even abundant species like American crows and American goldfinches have grown rarer."
Harry Stevens reports for the Washington Post January 17, 2024.
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