I'm about to turn 44 years old. I was born in 1976. Let's say you were born a few years earlier

in 1970. You'd be turning 50 this year in 2020. Congratulations and happy birthday. However, I'm sorry to say

that you and I share an unsettling truth.

In the last 50 years, in your lifetime and a bit more than my lifetime,

North America has suffered a net loss of 30% of its birds.

In other words, the total number of individual birds on this continent

is only two-thirds of what it was just

50 years ago. That's three billion birds wiped out. And this was, of course, at the hands of

humans. There's nothing natural about these declines. To clarify, I'm not talking about the

loss or extinctions of whole species here, but rather of

individuals.

Bird populations are getting smaller and smaller.

If these declines continue, the end result may indeed be extinction for some or many species.

This sobering, horrible statistic comes from an October 2019 study published

in the journal Science. This study revealed that many species in North America have declined,

not just the rare ones, but also some species we consider common. And yes, some species are

stable and even a few have growing populations,

but the overall trend is downward for our birds. This isn't happening only in North America,

and it isn't just birds. The World Wildlife Federation recently reported that global

wildlife populations have declined almost 70% in the last 50 years since 1970.

This has happened in less than one human lifetime.

Absolute insanity.

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