3 Billion Birds Gone

Research published in September 2019 by the journal Science shows that there is a net population loss of almost 3 billion birds across all bird species in the continental United States and Canada since 1970. This staggering revelation represents a 29% reduction in total breeding bird abundance, or a loss of more than a quarter of our birds over a single human lifespan. Common birds represent some of the greatest losses. Fifty years ago there were more than 260 million red-winged blackbirds, a bird that we associate with marshes, meadows, prairies and old fields. Today, we have lost an estimated 93 million red-winged blackbirds — a 37% population decrease in a half century, possibly echoing the decline and eventual extinction of the passenger pigeon. Ken Rosenberg, the study’s lead author, says, “We’re squeezing the planet so hard in terms of using resources and space, and now we’re reaching this tipping point.”

According to the authors, habitat loss is a driving factor in these widespread declines, particularly agricultural intensification and development. Forests alone have lost 1 billion birds, and grassland birds have declined by 53% since 1970. We know private lands matter when it comes to bird conservation, as roughly 60% of the land area in the United States is privately owned, including 911 million acres of farmland and another 400 million acres of private forests. Eighty-three percent of Eastern forests and over 80% of all grasslands in the United States are privately owned. According to an Enterprise op-ed written by David Moulton, a board member of the Patuxent Tidewater Land Trust and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “Over 90% of the land in Maryland is in private hands, not public parks or wildlife refuges, so private landowners must be part of the solution.”

Land trusts maintain stewardship responsibilities with the land and can be critical drivers of conservation success by focusing on priority birds within specific regions. For example, in Maine, the accredited Coastal Rivers Conservation Trust worked with the Somerset County Soil and Water Conservation District in 2017 to provide financial incentives to farmers to delay their mowing for hay and to make other sustainable birdfriendly land management changes, improving the opportunity for nesting success of bobolinks and other critical grassland birds. This experience led CRCT and SCSWCD to co-sponsor the Ag Allies program ultimately funded by a Cornell Land Trust Small Grant, to target farmer assistance payments to land trust properties. Ag Allies worked with 18 land trusts in 2018, providing grassland habitat workshops, signage and both financial and technical assistance. This effort resulted in eight land trusts making management changes to benefit grassland birds as well as continued support for those already on a delayed mowing schedule to help with maintenance and enhancement of the quality of the habitat. Ultimately, CRCT added grassland bird management to its field lease agreements, protecting valuable and productive bird nesting habitat in perpetuity and eliminating the need for incentive funds.

In old-growth cottonwood habitats of Colorado, the accredited Central Colorado Conservancy used citizen science and a charismatic bird species to build capacity through a volunteer base that is ultimately leading to critical riparian land protection and helping CCC better understand the conservation value of its service area. Staff tapped into existing public interest for birding and used eBird, a free and easily accessible data and monitoring tool, as well as informative flyers, to engage community members not already familiar with the bird community. CCC trained more than 70 volunteers interested in assisting with surveys to monitor for the Lewis’s woodpecker, a species of greatest conservation need in Colorado, in target areas across its easement and fee-owned holdings and beyond. The initial year of the Lewis’s Woodpecker Project resulted in 150 Lewis’s woodpecker sightings entered into eBird, 65 phone calls and emails from flyer advertisements (asking people to report sightings) and nearly 100 community participants in trainings and presentations highlighting the program.

For a land trust focused on land and water protection, gathering information and developing tools to help identify priority target areas for land conservation is key. CCC used the woodpecker project data to determine population centers of Lewis’s woodpecker activity and compared it with parcel ownership and land use, helping it pursue active protection of identified parcels. Andrew Mackie, CCC’s former executive director, says, “If you’re protecting riparian forests for birds, you are protecting land for fish, reptiles, amphibians, large game animals and for people, so it’s an overall win for everything we aspire to do at CCC.”

Two conservation projects are currently moving forward, thanks to nesting Lewis’s woodpecker populations on the properties. One is a 500-acre ranch in Chaffee County where the landowners became interested in conserving their ranch through the bird project and are now working with CCC to place a conservation easement on the property.

In Oregon and Washington, the accredited Center for Natural Lands Management currently leads a cooperative conservation collaborative called the Cascadia Prairie-Oak Partnership, which combines the partners’ expertise in land management, habitat restoration and rare species recovery. A 1,600-acre conservation easement in Oregon’s Willamette Valley protects actively grazed working lands encompassing some of the area’s most sizable and intact prairie habitat, and is home to the region’s largest known population of Oregon vesper sparrow, a species petitioned for listing under the Endangered Species Act.

“Done correctly, grazing replicates the natural disturbance process that historically created habitat conditions needed by vespers,” says Gary Slater, CNLM’s avian conservation program manager.

Utilizing the partnership’s established infrastructure and with participation by the landowner, CNLM is conducting habitat management and teaching conservation partners and private landowners about the plight of the sparrow. Activities include implementing a community outreach event to encourage participation in sparrow recovery and an on-site workshop to demonstrate the effective use of grazing as a management tool and strategy for land trust partners, land managers and practitioners. Monitoring will contribute to a time series of data instrumental in tracking changes in sparrow abundance and distribution to guide future management actions. “We want to attract and educate more private landowners to increase the amount of suitable habitat in the region for this rare grassland bird and its associate species,” says Elspeth Kim, CNLM’s cooperative conservation program manager. Results from this project will improve conservation outcomes for the sparrow and other vulnerable grassland bird species by increasing implementation and effectiveness of compatible habitat management practices.

As these examples show, by acquiring private lands and easements and then managing them in ways that protect and restore breeding and migratory bird habitat, land trusts can play a crucial role in the larger recovery effort of declining bird populations.

For more information about how land trusts can help birds, and birds can benefit land trusts, please visit the Cornell Land Trust Bird Conservation Initiative. The initiative features land trust success stories, which serve as examples of how organizations have advanced the pace and impact of their protection and stewardship efforts through birds. Cornell’s land trust small grant program supports projects that facilitate bird conservation on private lands through activities such as strategic planning, outreach, habitat management, stewardship and capacity building.