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Three Billion Birds Revisited

Scientists published the most innovative and consequential avian research in decades in September 2019, documenting the loss of nearly a third of North America’s birds over the past 50 years. On the five-year anniversary, we look at how this unprecedented project that has altered the knowledge of birds at a crucial time. Here’s our library of posts, as well as links to the best journalism done on this topic.

“Not nearly enough,” says leading scientist

Sept. 22, 2024

One of the nation’s leading bird scientists who helped write the Three Billion Birds report asks why there hasn’t been more progress. “We’re not protecting birds the way they should be protected,” he says.

Nonprofit chief: “This can be turned around”

Oct. 17, 2024

The nonprofit executive who helped launch the Three Billion Bird report is leading a repeat of the innovative research to see what progress has been made. “This can be turned around,” Mike Parr told us.

Birds are drawing more interest than ever

Nov. 1, 2024

Miyoko Chu, who led the partnershhip that spread the word on the massive loss of birds, sees more public support for conservation than ever, but an uphill climb in converting that to action.

Spread of innovative solutions for birds

Nov. 12, 2024

Now that researchers have learned more about the massive losses of birds, they’re turning to a menu of innovative and precision tools to find ways of responding.

“We take two steps forward and one back.”

Nov. 29, 2024

Lynn Scarlett, former top leader at the Interior Department who went on to work in a variety of conservation roles, looks at the future of birds.

Time for far stronger leadership on birds

Dec. 29, 2023

Our essay that ran on CNN calls for the kind of leadership on behalf of birds that has defined the best of this country’s conservation history.

Links to Three Billion Bird packages worth reading:

Here are pieces and posts we’ve curated published in the wake of the Three Billion Bird research:

In our book on bird conservation, we tell the story of how the Three Billion Bird research came about and what it took to gather, massage and come up with the statistics. The American Bird Conservancy, whose director helped lead the quest, reprinted that chapter here.

Scores of traps used to capture wild birds for sale on the black market are piled up in the evidence room of the state’s wildlife agency.

A commanding essay by Cornell Lab director emeritus John Fitzpatrick and scientist Peter Marra: The New York Times opinion piece makes the case that is a moment for fundamental changes in how North America protects and seeks to understand its birds.

The global view comes from worldwide nonprofit Birdlife International, which published this update on populations around the earth in this 2022 study of the broader picture.

The research includes a massive amount of calculations on a topic very hard to pin down — since the hemisphere’s many billions of birds are constantly moving, very hard to count and include hundreds of species. Here’s an intriguing essay that digs into the data with a skeptical lens and has provoked much discussion about the value of trying to apply numbers to the loss of populations.