A Third of North America’s Birds Have Vanished

At first Adam Smith couldn’t believe his calculations. Then it sank in. [View in browser]( | [Subscribe to Nautilus magazine]( July 4, 2023   Did a friend forward this? [Register here](. This Tuesday, your FREE member newsletter includes the week’s top science news plus one full story, below, from The Porthole. Enjoy! [SUPPORT NAUTILUS](   DISCOVERIES The Top Science News This Week   [Endothermic Physiology of Extinct Megatooth Sharks]( Ancient sharks were warmer than their smaller descendants. That may be what did the giant predators in. [PNAS→](   [Detection of the Cosmological Time Dilation of High-Redshift Quasars]( Why time ran slower in the early universe. [Nature Astronomy→](   [Rationally Irrational: When People Do Not Correct Their Reasoning Errors Even If They Could]( Why the plain truth isn’t enough to motivate us to say we’re wrong. 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[CBS News→](   [MDMA: Australia Begins World-First Psychedelic Therapy]( “When I got home, friends said they saw my eyes shining again.” [BBC→]( Experience the endless possibilities and deep human connections that science offers [SUBSCRIBE TODAY](   From The Porthole   [ZOOLOGY]( A Third of North America’s Birds Have Vanished At first Adam Smith couldn’t believe his calculations. Then it sank in. BY ANDERS GYLLENHAAL & BEVERLY GYLLENHAAL   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.” GLOBE TROTTER: Teams of researchers in both South and North America are trying to protect the Cerulean Warbler, one of scores of tiny world-travelers whose ranges span the hemisphere. Photo by Anders Gyllenhaal. 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. CITIZEN SCIENCE: The Great Blue Heron, shown here with its decorous mating plumage, is one of the species most often reported by birders as part of the massive citizen science project powered by the eBird smartphone app. Photo by Anders Gyllenhaal. 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. BYE, BIRDS: The graphic that Adam Smith sent out to his fellow scientists, showing the seismic drop in bird populations over the past fifty years. Credit: Adam Smith. The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows. That equates to 750 million birds, from bright yellow Eastern and Western Meadowlarks with their incessant morning songs to the stately Horned Lark with black masks across the male’s eyes and tiny hornlike feathers that sometimes stick up from their heads. Forest birds lost a third of their numbers, or 500 million, including the compact, colorful warblers and speckle-breasted Wood Thrushes that sing like flutes. Common backyard birds experienced a seismic decline. That’s where 90 percent of the total loss of abundance occurred, among just twelve families of the best-known birds—including sparrows, blackbirds, starlings, and finches. There’s been relatively little research on these species, and there’s no sense of urgency when resources are already stretched thin for so many other birds in more dire need. [Like the story? Subscribe to Nautilus magazine]( The possibility of such losses was too startling to share with his colleagues until Smith checked every step of his calculations, particularly since he’d never attempted this [analysis before](. “It always takes a couple of times to get these numbers right,” he said. After a day and a half of painstaking scrutiny, Smith realized there was no mistake. “I was speechless. We’ve lost almost 30 percent of an entire class of organisms in less than the span of a human lifetime, and we didn’t know it.” SUCCESS STORY: The Bald Eagle is North America’s great conservation success story, more than quadrupling its population in the past decade under an all-out effort to protect the iconic raptor. Photo by Anders Gyllenhaal. SOUND ON: The California Spottled Owl is at the center of the world’s largest research project that uses sound to determine how to protect this storied species. Photo by Anders Gyllenhaal. HUM HALLELUJAH: The Ruby-throated hummingbird delivers one of the core services that birds provide in the balance of nature. Hummingbirds alone help pollinate more than 8,000 species of plants and flowers in North and South America. Photo by Anders Gyllenhaal. FOLLOW THE BIRD: Scientists hope to save the Florida Scrub-Jay, the state’s lone native bird, with the help of a new tracking technique that follows the birds wherever they go around the clock. Photo by Jay Gyllenhaal. From A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds by Anders Gyllenhaal and Beverly Gyllenhaal. Copyright © 2023 by Anders Gyllenhaal and Beverly Gyllenhaal. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Lead image: Bonnie Taylor Barry / Shutterstock More from The Porthole: • [The dark side of fungi]( • [What the dragonfly knows](   P.S. The preeminent 18th-century physician-scientist Benjamin Rush was one of the youngest American revolutionaries—at 30—to sign the Declaration of Independence, [the wording of which]( Congress approved on this day in 1776. Rush’s biographer Stephen Fried told Nautilus he was [the Dr. Strange of the American Revolution](.   Today’s newsletter was written by Brian Gallagher Thanks for reading. [Tell us](mailto:brian.gallagher@nautil.us) your thoughts on today’s note. Plus, [browse our archive]( of past print issues, and inspire a friend to sign up for [the Nautilus newsletter](. [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( Copyright © 2023 NautilusNext, All rights reserved. You were subscribed to the newsletter from nautil.us. Our mailing address is: NautilusNext 360 W 36th Street, 7S, New York, NY 10018 Don't want to hear from us anymore? Click here to [unsubscribe](.