The loss of three billion birds in North America is the canary in the coal mine
OpEd by Emeritus Professor David Bird:
David M. Bird is an emeritus professor of wildlife biology at Ï㽶ÊÓƵ who has studied birds for five decades.
When I read the recent headlines that North America has lost nearly three billion birds over just the past five decades, I was not surprised. But I must admit it did depress me to a degree. That’s a lot of birds!
Before we lost the three billion, how many birds were there in North America? In 1963, Roger Tory Peterson, the godfather of North American bird-watching, estimated there to be between 12 to 20 billion at the beginning of that decade. Going with the conservative figure, that’s a quarter of our birds gone in just 50 years.
The loss of billions of birds on North American soil has happened before. To our everlasting shame, in the late 1800s, passenger pigeons, sometimes gathering in flocks of two billion birds, were wiped out to the very last bird by humans.