Look up, listen, and be very concerned. Birds are vanishing – and their crisis is our crisis

More than 40m birds have disappeared from UK’s skies since 1970: a trend that imperils the network that gives us life

Most mornings in spring I listen for a sequence of birdsongs to know that my local area is in good heart, but also to reassure myself that the world is working largely as it should. The default soloist of my dawn in Buxton, Derbyshire, is a mistle thrush that delivers from the ash tree above our house.

As I listen to my soloist there is an added delight in knowing that, from Cape Wrath in northernmost Scotland to Kingsdown in Kent, his voice unites with tens of millions of other dawn birds. The blue and great tits of the inner cities, blackbirds and robins among the English villages, chaffinches and wrens through the remotest Scottish glens: it is a collective performance, free of charge, unfolding across all Britain to all people.

Have we time enough and opportunity, we can attune ourselves to one of the greatest events of every April morning on our planet, since birdsong unfolds across all Eurasia and North America as daylight processes over those lands too. Think of it as the Earth rejoicing at the sun’s cyclical return.

The global chorus may unite us in planetary ritual but increasingly, as underlined by a recent report, there are more and more gaps in the avian responses to this daily passage. Both in the long and short term, Britain’s birds are now shown to be on a dangerous downward trajectory.

The UK has lost 40m birds since 1970 and Europe as a whole has lost 600m birds since 1980. The British figures, especially for farmland species such as skylark and lapwing, have long been the worst of any country in the region. The North American continent, meanwhile, but especially the US, has seen avian populations fall by almost a third since 1970, losing a cumulative 3bn birds.

What is at stake is not simply some aesthetic thrill or existential reassurance which we have long vested in our avian neighbours, although the prospect of these losses alone is crushing. Aldous Huxley once suggested that if you took birds out of the English poetic canon you would have to lose half the nation’s verse.

We have yet truly to understand how much environmental loss is also cultural impoverishment, but the lesson is now among us. Imagine the arts without the following: music without Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, ballet without Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, poetry without Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, literature without JA Baker’s The Peregrine.

‘If you took birds out of the English poetic canon you would have to lose half the nation’s verse.’ Eurasian wren. Photograph: Arterra Picture Library/Alamy

In its 150-year history as a science, ecology has increasingly revealed how life functions as an infinitely complex yet always interconnecting process. Affect a single part of nature and we invariably see major, often unforeseen, even counterintuitive, consequences elsewhere. The best recent illustration of this was a study from Germany in 2017 known as the Krefeld report.

It showed what impacts had resulted from 60 years’ use of agricultural poison – the so-called pesticides that are a default instrument of intensive agriculture. And revealed that Germany’s insect biomass had declined by 75%. Most alarming was the fact that losses were recorded not among serried fields of chemically drenched maize, but inside the nation’s network of protected nature reserves. No arrangement of our affairs in our heads, or on paper, can gainsay life’s indivisible unity. In nature there is only one place. And it is everywhere, even in our towns and cities.

As the most charismatic component of our full wildlife spectrum, birds enjoy major, some would say disproportionate, concern and attention. Our largest wildlife charity is still the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, with 1.3 million members. Yet our so-called feathered friends perform an infallible service to other lifeforms that don’t enjoy the same levels of love such as insects, lichens and fungi.

Birds are the ultimate vertebrate life form arising in almost all environments, whether it is a kittiwake on a sea cliff, or a blue tit hunting for caterpillars in our garden, or a worm-probing curlew on high moorland, or a barn owl patrolling down the cornfield’s hedge border. Each is completely dependent upon the continued healthy functioning of all the other parts of life in their specific places: the bacteria, protists, tardigrades, nematodes, springtails, insects, arachnids, fungi, lichens, mosses, flowers, trees, molluscs, crustacea, fishes, amphibians, reptiles and mammals. If birds are in trouble, then we can be absolutely sure that the rest of the system is in crisis too.

Our own species shares a place at the top of this pyramid of life. If birds continue to decline then so too shall the very network on which the human project depends. And we depend on this network in its entirety.

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