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Billions of Birds Have Vanished in a Generation

To save them, we need to look and listen

A GREAT THINNING of the skies is underway. There are 3 billion fewer birds in North America than half a century ago. Five hundred million fewer in Europe. Seventy-three million fewer in Britain. Worldwide, almost 50 percent of bird species are in decline. What was once called “common” is becoming rare: the “common eider” is now in the same global conservation category as the jaguar.

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Dawns and springs are quieter, the air emptier. An ancient avian orchestra is falling silent. An almost unimaginable abundance has been lost.

In August 1861, the American naturalist A. S. Packard described vast numbers of migrating curlews appearing on the south Labrador coastline. “We saw a flock,” he wrote in his journal, “which must have been a mile long and nearly as broad; there must have been in that flock four or five thousand! The sum total of their notes sounded at times like the wind whistling through the ropes of a thousand-ton vessel.”

Two decades later, the English naturalist Richard Jefferies described the profusion of bird life at the edge of London: “The bevies of chiffchaffs and willow wrens . . . the chorus of thrushes and blackbirds, the chaffinches in the elms, the greenfinches in the hedges, wood-pigeons and turtle-doves in the copses, tree-pipits about the oaks in the cornfields; every bush, every tree, almost every clod . . . seemed to have its songster.” Yes—birds could once be seen and heard in a plenitude now beyond our wildest dreams.

Absence is harder to track and feel than presence. The ghosts of gone birds fade quickly from memory. Shifting baseline syndrome habituates us to sparser skies. It does not have to be this way—but we will not save what we do not love, and we rarely love what we cannot name. Noticing is the first step to naming—naming the first step to knowing both things and the relations between things. Knowledge may lead to wonder, wonder to care, care to action, action to change. But this is a fragile chain, easily broken; its links must be reforged and rejoined, over and over again.

Nest is secrecy, Nest is rest. Nest is sanctuary, fastness, absence of fear. Nest is bowl, sphere, burrow, hole, or cradle. Nest is white stork’s bristling cauldron of sticks and soil on a church’s steeple. Nest is skylark’s hollow in a wildflower meadow, or lapwing’s scrape in a pylon’s shadow. Nest happens far from human eyes, and Nest lives hard by people. Nest is blessed.

Nest is ingenuity, intricacy, improvisation. Nest is wren’s ball—pure cocoon. Nest is starling’s mess—all twigs and yarn, untidy as a teenager’s room. Nest is four glowing blue robin eggs tucked in a boot in the daytime dusk of a cobwebbed barn. Nest is bowerbird’s bling and dazzle, Nest is flamingo’s urn of sun-burned clay. Nest is a gyrfalcon eyrie used yearly since long before........

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