Bird Populations Are in Meltdown

Humans rely on birds to eat insects, spread seeds, and pollinate plants—but these feathered friends can’t survive without their habitats.

Every night, Alice Cerutti falls asleep to the sound of birds singing on her rice farm in the middle of the Italian countryside. In the morning, the voice of the black-tailed godwit, a bird whose numbers are declining globally, wakes her from sleep—a little harshly. Cerutti imitates the bird’s piercing call over the phone and laughs. “Her sound is a bit annoying,” she says, though she quickly adds, “I really love her.”

Cerutti has turned her 115-hectare rice farm, exactly halfway between Milan and Turin, into a conservation project. During the past decade or so, she and her family have planted thousands of trees, reestablished wetlands, and brought in experts to help study and manage the precious birds that nest in areas Cerutti has set aside for wildlife.

It seems to be working. “We have this amazing and big responsibility,” Cerutti says as she explains that her farm is the last recorded regular nesting site of the black-tailed godwit in Italy. Local researchers found the bird clinging on there even as it disappeared from other locations.

Half of the world’s 10,000-odd bird species are in decline. One in eight faces the threat of extinction. This problem has been worsening for decades, which means scientists have been able to estimate roughly how many fewer birds are around today than, say, half a century ago. The numbers are startling.

There are 73 million fewer birds in Great Britain alone than there were in 1970. Europe has been losing around 20 million every year, says Vasilis Dakos, an ecologist at the University of Montpellier in France—a loss of 800 million birds since 1980. And in the US, just shy of 3 billion individual birds have disappeared in only 50 years.

“We are seeing a meltdown of bird populations,” says Ariel Brunner, director of BirdLife Europe and Central Asia, a conservation NGO. Loss of habitats, the rising use of pesticides on farms, and, yes, climate change—these are among the factors to blame. Even if you are not a birdwatcher, the loss of birds impacts you. Birds regulate ecosystems by preying on insects, pollinating plants, and spreading seeds—by excreting them after eating fruit, for example. We all rely on healthy ecosystems for breathable air, the food we eat, and a regulated climate.

The disappearance of birds is staggering. But Cerutti and others are trying to make a difference. In total, she has earmarked around a quarter of her farmland as a nature reserve. Six and a half hectares, for instance, are now woodland. If you view the farm, called Cascina Oschiena, using the satellite imagery on Google Maps, she says, you’ll see a wedge of dark green trees—alone amid the huge sea of rice fields that belong to her and her neighbors.

Cerutti has dispensed with pesticides and allowed vegetation in wetland areas to regrow. Besides the black-tailed godwits, there are bitterns and lapwings—both also in decline. And no, she doesn’t make as much money as she might if she were driven to maximize profits on the same tract of land. It doesn’t matter. “Not every farmer can do what we’re doing, but I think that it’s important to do something,” she says. A neighbor was recently inspired by Cerutti’s efforts to stop spraying places that border her farm with glyphosate, an incredibly potent herbicide. “I think it’s a great step,” says Cerutti.

Speak to birdwatchers and researchers elsewhere in Europe and you’ll hear many examples of birds that were common just a generation or two ago that are now on the edge. Take the corncrake, whose song was once heard frequently across Ireland. There are now just a few hundred individuals left in a handful of locations.

“To be utterly frank, the situation is pretty awful,” says Rob Robinson, a senior scientist at the British Trust for Ornithology who is based in East Anglia. He mentions the willow warbler. Robinson has been putting rings on the legs of these little birds and releasing them, a common monitoring technique, for years.

“We catch one or two a year instead of 15 or 20,” he says, explaining how things have changed since he started the work. He also remembers seeing flocks of finches on farmland as a child. “Those I see very rarely these days.” Nightingales and turtle doves also used to be plentiful around the British countryside in spring. Now they are all but gone.

Brunner adds: “We are not losing just the birds, we are losing the insects, reptiles, amphibians, a lot of plants. We get very, very simplified and impoverished ecosystems.” That means it can be easier for invasive species to spread, he says. Crops become more dependent on chemistry and human intervention—and also more susceptible to diseases.

There’s also what Brunner calls the “moral issue.” Sights and sounds that have been part of the landscape, and of human culture, for millennia are suddenly fading away. Turtle doves are mentioned multiple times in the bible, he notes.

The single biggest cause of the decline in bird populations, he says, is the intensification of farming. High pesticide use, the loss of hedgerows and margins where insects and birds can live, and hyper-efficient harvesting are all problematic. Robinson says that around 70 years ago it was common for wheat farmers to leave 1 or 2 percent of their crop on the ground in fields.

“That doesn’t sound like very much, but if you add up large areas of farmland, it can sustain large bird populations,” he says. Technology and harvesting practices have become so good at catching every grain that this food source just isn’t there anymore.

In May, Dakos and colleagues published a large study in which they analyzed 37 years of bird-population data from 20,000 sites across 28 European nations. The team considered the growing size of towns and cities, the loss of forested areas, temperature rises, and the intensification of farming as key factors. In the researchers’ analysis of population trends for 170 bird species, all of these anthropogenic pressures had some impact, but it was intensive farming that appeared to have the strongest correlation with plummeting bird numbers. All over the dataset were struggling farmland bird species.

“We weren’t expecting to find such a strong result,” says Dakos. Farmland birds declined by 56.8 percent between 1980 and 2016, he and his colleagues estimate. The next most quickly declining group, urban species, fell by 27.8 percent.

Although this huge research project underlines some of the problems birds face, we’ve known about these issues for many years, says Amanda Rodewald at the Center for Avian Population Studies at Cornell University in the US.

“We’ve known enough for a long time to actually take active steps,” she says. “Our failure to do that has reflected that there hasn’t been a collective and strong will to act, in my opinion.”

There are ways to help, however. Countries can make tax or other financial incentives available to farmers willing to protect and encourage wildlife on their land, for instance. Consumer demand for more ecologically sustainable products can also have a positive impact, she says.

In California, some rice farmers are being paid to delay the draining of their fields in late winter to protect breeding areas used by wading birds. The project, called BirdReturns, has been running successfully for years. It targets areas deemed of greatest conservation benefit to bird species. Those areas were originally identified by citizen science bird-monitoring data from Cornell’s eBird app, Rodewald says.

“People are recognizing that we need to take some steps with the way we use resources and manage our planet,” she says. Despite the current bleak outlook, Robinson also maintains hope for the future because efforts to save birds appear to be growing.

Cerutti’s experience, though localized, speaks volumes. In just a few years, she has transformed multiple hectares of land and embraced wildlife—despite having known little about birds just 12 years ago. “The amazing thing is,” she says, “when you give back to nature, she really grabs it right away.”

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