This is NPR's life kit. I'm Audrey Wen.

Springtime is here.

It's very beautiful here in Ithaca.

I can see the pond and yeah, pretty soon leaves are gonna be popping, not quite yet.

That's Miyoko Chuu. She's the director of communications at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

It's a particularly exciting time to be talking to her because spring migration is happening in

my neck of the woods. While some birds live by us year round, there's lots of birds that will

split their time between their breeding grounds in the summer and their non-breeding grounds in the winter.

Miyoko's interest in birds started when she was young.

I grew up near San Francisco and I used to go into Chinatown with my dad now and then.

And we were passing a poultry truck. They were selling pigeons and chickens and other birds

for the dinner table but I started to cry because I didn't want them to end up on the dinner table.

So on the spot, they bought some pigeons and brought them home.

They built a coop and Miyoko would sit inside of it just watching the birds interact with each other.

And that was my entry point to birds. I hadn't really noticed them around my yard before then.

But after that, the whole world opened up in terms of, wow, birds are all around us and they're

doing amazing things just like my pigeons. A few years back, a study led by the Cornell Lab of

Ornithology found that the North American bird population was down nearly 3 billion breeding

adults. You're probably familiar with the birds that have been hit the hardest.

More than 90% of these losses have come from quote-unquote common birds, species that lots of people

see on the rag, you know, sparrows, blackbirds, finches, wardlers. The situation feels pretty

dire but don't abandon hope quite yet. Birds tend to be really resilient as long as they have the

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