Audubon Society: Populations of 20 Common Birds Are Down by Half Over Past 40 Years

Populations of 20 Common Birds Declining
Audubon Society Study Finds Populations of 20 U.S. Birds Are Down by Half Over Past 40 Years
By SETH BORENSTEIN

WASHINGTON - The populations of 20 common American birds from the fence-sitting meadowlark to the whippoorwill with its haunting call are half what they were 40 years ago, according to an analysis released Thursday. Suburban sprawl, climate change and other invasive species are largely to blame, said the study's author Greg Butcher of the National Audubon Society. "Most of these we don't expect will go extinct," he said. "We think they reflect other things that are happening in the environment that we should be worried about."...

Some of the birds, such as the evening grosbeak, used to be so plentiful that people would complain about how they crowded bird-feeders and finished off 50-pound sacks of sunflower seeds in just a couple days. But the colorful and gregarious grosbeak's numbers have plummeted 78 percent in the past 40 years. "It was an amazing phenomena all through the '70s that's just disappeared. It's just a really dramatic thing because it was in people's back yards and (now) it's not in people's back yards," said Butcher.

For the study, researchers looked at bird populations of more than half a million which covered a wide range. They compared databases for 550 species from two different bird surveys the Audubon's own Christmas bird count and the U.S. Geological Survey's breeding bird survey in June. The numbers of 20 different birds were at least half what they were in 1967. Today there are 432 million fewer of these bird species, including the northern pintail, greater scaup, boreal chickadee, common tern, loggerhead shrike, field sparrow, grasshopper sparrow, snow bunting, black-throated sparrow, lark sparrow, common grackle, American bittern, horned lark, little blue heron and ruffed grouse.

The northern bobwhite and its familiar wake-up whistle once seemed to be everywhere in the East. Last Christmas, volunteer bird counters could find only three of them and only 18 Eastern meadowlarks in Massachusetts. The bobwhite had the biggest drop among common birds. In 1967, there were 31 million of this distinctive plump bird. Now they number closer to 5.5 million. "Things we all think of as familiar backyard birds ... they appear in books and children's stories and suddenly some of them are way less familiar than they should be," said John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell ornithology lab, who was not part of the study...

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=3279448

One of the things I noticed living in an urban area was how the bird population was being depleted. You simply didn't see the huge swarms of birds in a city that you used to. I move out to the country four years ago and started seeing those huge flocks again, but it is still noticeable that the the bird population is down out here.

Really a shame, and one of the reasons that I feed the birds. They need all the help they can get.

:cry:

When I was growing up every farmer had pastures for grazing for his farm animals. We would walk those pastures hunting gophers with our 22's. There were always plenty of kilderes (sp), meadowlarks, etc. in those fields and/or sitting on the fence lines calling and no we DID NOT shoot at them, just the rodents.

I drove by that area last summer. There is not a pasture to be found. Everything has been turned to corn to fuel ethanol plants. Miles & miles of nothing but corn.

heard in my neighborhood