Bird populations are collapsing in the US and Asia
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Bird populations in Asia and the US are “in crisis”, according to two major studies.
The first concludes there are three billion fewer birds in the US and Canada today compared to 1970 – a loss of 29% of North America’s birds.
The second outlines a tipping point in “the Asian songbird crisis”: on the island of Java, Indonesia, more birds may now live in cages than in the wild.
Scientists hope the findings will serve as a wake-up call.
The two studies are published in the journals Science and Biological Conservation.
One North America study revealed how many birds were being lost across every type of habitat – from grasslands to coasts to deserts. While it did not directly assess what was driving this, the scientists concluded that, among multiple causes, the major factor was habitat loss driven by human activity.
This study, explained lead researcher Dr Ken Rosenberg from the Cornell lab of Ornithology and the American Bird Conservancy, was the first to “run the numbers” on bird populations.
In Asia, as the other study has shown, is a particularly striking case of a human-driven extinction crisis. The buying and selling of songbirds – many of which are caught from the wild – is one of the major factors.
Harry Marshall, who is a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University and Chester Zoo, led a survey of 3,000 households across Java, which is Indonesia’s most densely populated island. From this, he and his colleagues were able to estimate that there were as many as 75 million caged birds living in Javanese households.
There may now be more songbirds living in cages on the island than there are now living in the wild.
