this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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A Third of North America’s Birds Have Vanished (nautil.us)
submitted 1 year ago by SemioticStandard@beehaw.org to c/science@beehaw.org
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Like many of you, birds are very special to me. I connect with them like I don’t any other living creature, save my wife and kids. I photograph them. I’ve covered my body in nothing but bird tattoos.

To see that a THIRD of them have disappeared is like a knife to the heart.

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[–] SmokeInFog@midwest.social 5 points 1 year ago

This coupled with the decline of insect populations (as someone who regularly drives from Missouri to Georgia in the states, you can count me as one of the anecdotal points of the windshield phenomenon) is like the icing on top of my climate doomerism. It's hard to find reasons for optimism.

On the other hand, I'm even more vindicated in my desire to keep moving toward a plant based diet:

The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows. That equates to 750 million birds, from bright yellow Eastern and Western Meadowlarks with their incessant morning songs to the stately Horned Lark with black masks across the male’s eyes and tiny hornlike feathers that sometimes stick up from their heads.