Long-term Population Trends for America’s Birds
~† Shorebirds indicator trend data has not been updated since 2019.~
- 5 Years After the 3 Billion Birds Lost Research, America Is Still Losing Birds: A 2019 study published in the journal Science sounded the alarm—showing a net loss of 3 billion birds in North America in the past 50 years. The 2025 State of the Birds report shows those losses are continuing, with declines among several bird trend indicators. Notably duck populations—a bright spot in past State of the Birds reports, with strong increases since 1970—have trended downward in recent years.
- Conservation Works: Examples spotlighted throughout this report—from coastal restoration and conservation ranching to forest renewal and seabird translocations—show how proactive, concerted efforts and strategic investments can recover bird populations. The science is solid on how to bring birds back. Private lands conservation programs, and voluntary conservation partnerships for working lands, hold some of the best opportunities for sparking immediate turnarounds for birds.
- Bird-Friendly Policies Bring Added Benefits for People, and Have Broad Support: Policies to reverse bird declines carry added benefits such as healthier working lands, cleaner water, and resilient landscapes that can withstand fires, floods, and drought. Plus birds are broadly popular—about 100 million Americans are birdwatchers, including large shares of hunters and anglers. All that birding activity stimulates the economy, with $279 billion in total economic output generated by birder expenditures.
Less bugs (food) from more pesticides and inhospitable mono-culture farm land, suburban sprawl, toxic car infrastructure and global warming are all likely contributors
…as cute as they are… Feral cats are a menace.
That explains why I’m able to sleep peacefully instead of being woken up by the birds in the morning. A great change if you ask me. Damn birds always wake me up in the morning.
Great point! If we keep on driving the earth into an unhabitable state, eventually we’ll all be plunged into the eternal sleep of death and won’t have to wake up early every again!
/s
Silent springs everywhere
America should probably stop blanketing the skies via aircraft with millions of gallons of general pesticide (pyrethroids in most areas I believe) that affect pretty much all insects as part of their mosquito control efforts around communities.
Does this still happen? I recently read Silent Spring and, maybe naively, assumed blanket poisoning from planes would surely have stopped by now.
Oh yes, many counties have mosquito control programs, which is understandable because it’s to reduce the spread of diseases like West Nile virus, Eastern / western equine encephalitis, Zika etc.
But they still use pesticide that affects all insects indiscriminately in most areas via aircraft.
There are products that target only mosquitos, and it’s bacterial not chemical, but you need to apply it to the water while they are still larvae which is harder and more costly. The counties prefer to use the chemical by air because it’s easier and cheaper for the most part.
Very nice infographic that I have shared with my circle.
As an aside, I suspect this was made with R and ggplot2; it’s nice to see the tooling I’m familiar with make such nice graphs.
