Bird populations have dropped at an alarming rate over the last few decades, but there is still a lot to be optimistic about, according to ornithologist and author Scott Weidensaul.
His new book, available April 21, The Return of the Oystercatcher: Saving Birds to Save the Planet, takes a look at recent conservation success stories and what they mean for the future. WSHU’s Sabrina Garone spoke with him to learn more.
WSHU: You write in the book that North America has lost nearly 3 billion birds in 50 years. That is such a scary number. Could you take us through the main drivers of this decline?
SW: Oh, it's death by 1,000 cuts, frankly — habitat loss, it's climate change. I think in the case of many birds in agricultural landscapes, it's pesticides and other chemicals. We humans occupy so much of the land. I look back over how North America has changed in the last 50 years — I guess I'm kind of surprised that we kept two-thirds of our birds! You know, we only lost about 3 billion of them. But we've also seen some remarkable recoveries for certain groups of birds — water birds like ducks, geese, swans, herons, and egrets, wading birds. Their numbers have been way up in the last 50 years, and many species of raptors have recovered. I mean, astoundingly so!
I graduated from high school in 1976 during the bicentennial year. There were fewer than 1,000 bald eagles in the lower 48 that year. If you had told me that 50 years later, when we're celebrating the country's 250th anniversary, that there would be 400,000 bald eagles in the lower 48, I would have asked you what you were smoking! That just seemed delusional, and yet here we are!
The story of birds over the last half-century or so is a mix of good news and bad news. I don't want to suggest that things are great for birds because, you know, we've seen indications that bird declines are actually accelerating with some groups, especially grassland birds. On the other hand, we've seen some improvement. In the population of eastern forest birds, like wood thrushes, there has been a decline. I've been involved in bird conservation for 40 years, and wood thrush numbers were going down and down and down decade after decade after decade — that's actually turned around in the last 10 years. Their numbers are up significantly across most of their range. So, I mean, it's one of the most beloved birds of our eastern hardwood forest. Progress is possible.
WSHU: It's not all doom and gloom, and I do want to talk about those success stories. But I'm curious — you said you're surprised that we do have two-thirds of our birds? Why is that?
SW: Humanity has such a footprint. With climate change in particular, every day of the annual cycle for almost every migratory bird. Weather patterns, spring is coming sooner, the timing of the seasons is off — that affects food supplies. And yet, the birds have been surprisingly resilient in the face of all that. I don't want to sugar-coat anything here, because as a conservationist, I'm deeply concerned. I think overall we're going the wrong way. But I grew up in the coal region of Pennsylvania with a landscape of strip mines and rivers that were biologically dead from mine-acid drainage. In my lifetime, I've seen that landscape recover to an extent that I never would have expected. Nature as a whole is more resilient than we give it credit for. One of the things that we need to give up as conservationists and as people is despair. It's easy to throw up your hands and say 'why even bother trying?' The only way change is impossible is if you don't try.
WSHU: Could you talk a little more about the importance of highlighting more uplifting stories in conservation? I mean, we certainly try to do that here at WSHU. I think it just gives people a sense of hope.
SW: I think that's absolutely critical because we're just bombarded with bad news, and I think that's part of that's just human nature. We tend to focus on the bad rather than the good. I have to say, conservation groups have a tendency to focus on the bad because it's more likely to motivate people, perhaps to action, or at least that's the perception that it tends to motivate people to action more so than hope. But if you don't have hope, why would you do anything? Why would you, why would you even bother?
What I've tried to do with this new book is lay out roadmaps for recovery. Not to suggest everything's great, but just to point out that in many places around the world at scales large and small, people are doing amazing things for bird conservation. A world that works for birds is going to work for everything, including us. There are 11,000 species of birds on Earth. They are found in almost literally every square mile of the planet, on land and over the oceans. They've got these globe-girdling migrations with incredible complexity. A world that works for them is gonna, is gonna work just fine for us. To go back to my roots in the coal regions of Pennsylvania, these are literal canaries in the mine for us. If we use birds as ecological barometers to take the pulse of the planet, we can see how well or how poorly we're doing. And at the moment, it's very much a mixed bag.
WSHU: Maybe we could get into some of those stories more specifically. I'm actually really interested in the raptors, if you could go into that a little bit more. Especially here in Connecticut and on Long Island, we're obsessed with our osprey! We've got the osprey cams all over the place, and everyone gets excited when they come back! I know raptors is how you got into birding, right?
SW: Exactly, I got started as a 12-year-old in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania at a place called Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. Hawk Mountain is the mother church of raptor conservation. That's the place where the idea of protecting raptors globally got its start back in 1934. The Kittatinny Ridge, the front range of the Appalachian river valley system — it's the rocky boulder field 1,000 feet above the valley. In the 1920s and 30, people were gathering in the fall to watch this migration of raptors and shoot the hell out of them! They were killing thousands of migrating raptors every year.
This remarkable woman, Rosalie Edge, a pioneering conservationist, when nobody else seemed interested, swept in and bought the mountaintop and turned it into the world's first sanctuary for birds of prey. This was at a time when it was considered civically responsible to shoot any hawk, falcon or eagle you saw because everyone knew they were bad birds — they ate your chickens, ate the game animals you wanted to hunt. Hawk Mountain started the movement toward recognizing the ecological importance of raptors, and that has spread all over the world.
We come out of World War II and the discovery of what seems to be miracle insecticides like DDT — they were really the coup de grâce to raptor populations across not just North America, but around the world. The 1960s and 70s, when I was growing up at the peak of the DDT era, peregrine falcons were completely gone from the east, bald eagles were on the ropes, and osprey had all but disappeared from most of the area. And it wasn't just raptors, it was double-breasted cormorants, brown pelicans, and the list just went on, and on, and on — all these birds at the end of long, complicated food chains that bioaccumulated pesticides. But we got smart as a country. We banned DDT, and over the years ,banned many other of these persistent, long-lived organochloride pesticides. The resiliency of birds — these birds came back much faster than anyone could have predicted.
WSHU: Why is the book named for the American oystercatcher?
SW: The American oystercatcher is a really good example of a shorebird, which is a group of birds that are in really serious decline, that we've been able to turn around. They're an example of what people can do if they put the time into the science to figure out what the problem is and come up with common-sense approaches to solve it. American oystercatcher numbers, like most birds, really suffered during the market hunting period. We shot millions and millions of shorebirds for the table, which is hard to believe these days. And then after World War II, when the middle class really came into its own, and Americans discovered how much they love beaches — oystercatchers nest on beaches. They lay their eggs right in the sand. With more and more people crowding the beaches, their numbers fell further. By 2008, their population had dropped about ten to 12% per-decade. They were down to about 11,000 on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.
In 2008, a group of scientists who had been working with oystercatchers came together to form a scientific working group and try to figure out what the problems were. They knew beach disturbance was a big part of it, but they also realized a big part of the problem was nest predation. All those people on the beaches, overflowing trash bins, created the perfect opportunity for large populations of raccoons, foxes, skunks, coyotes, free-running cats, and dogs off-leash — all of those things were contributing to the destruction and loss of oystercatcher nests. They basically ran the numbers and said, if we could increase the productivity of oystercatcher nests by an average of half a chick, per-pair, per-year, we could turn another decline over the next decade into a 30% increase.
They pulled together an amazing consortium of more than 40 federal and state agencies, NGOs, conservation organizations, land owners, national wildlife refuge managers, and said we're just going to work together in a concerted, focused way. They came up with a business plan, actually, that laid out $500,000 a year for ten years, so they could start to mitigate these problems, particularly the nest predation. It works phenomenally well! They didn't quite hit that 30% goal in the first ten years, but since 2008 oystercatcher populations have gone up about 45%. To put that in perspective, almost every other species of shorebird that uses the Atlantic flyway is in serious and accelerating decline. This is a roadmap for recovery. It shows what we can do if we think hard about it, do the science, run the numbers, and then start working in a collaborative way. And put money behind it — conservation, unfortunately, is not free.
WSHU: You write in the book, which I really loved, take a moment of calm and recharge, and there's no better way to do it than in the company of birds. I think that's so awesome. And we actually have a new series here at WSHU called Birdsong Break that we kind of try to do that, pull people out of the news for a minute and just take a breath, and let nature do its thing. Could you speak to the healing power of being in nature and encouraging more folks to get out there and understand the world around them?
SW: Well, I think that's one of the few things that came out of that pandemic that was positive. There were so many people, because they were stuck during the COVID pandemic, that the one thing they could do safely was go outside. Those of us who've been involved with birding and bird conservation for a long time have just seen this explosion in interest that started during the pandemic and continues to gain steam. I think because people have recognized, especially, you know, the world that's just moving so fast and so much of the news is not pleasant, there's a lot of good, solid science that says just simply stepping outside and listening to birdsong will lower your pulse and lower your blood pressure. It's better for you, it's good for your mental health, and it's never been easier to introduce yourself to that natural world. You can step outside into a world of birdsong, fire up your your Merlin app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology on your phone, and Merlin will identify all those birds that are singing around there, and clue you in on what those birds are, where they're coming from, and where they're going, and tie you into a world that maybe you didn't have an easy access to before. You will feel yourself easing. You will feel that, you know, clenched hand around your heart and your gut, just kind of relax a little bit. It does it for me. I need it! I need it more than ever these days, we all do. It's a great antidote to what's driving so many of us crazy.
WSHU: I love that. Very well said.
