Scott Taylor: It sounds cliche, but it's hard to notice something change unless it's very drastic and something close to home. For me, one of the biggest changes to the place I grew up was the development of a subdivision. As a kid I had free reign of the cedar forest that blanket the shoreline of Lake Huron. Just South of our house. The road turned from tar and chip to gravel and eventually to a well worn footpath through the woods. Things have changed there a lot. Where there was once a dense forest, there are now $1,000,000 homes. The lots have been stripped of their trees and people have put in lawns. It's much rarer now to see a ruffed grouse or a pileated woodpecker, both species that favor dense forests to urban settings, and this is an example from my life, but I'm sure you can think of your own. Habitats across the world are being lost at alarming rates, and as they disappear, so do the birds and other creatures that use them. The consequences of this add up to numbers that are hard to comprehend, which brings us to today's question. OK, but how do you lose 3 billion birds? To tackle this hard to comprehend loss, we'll talk with Dr. John Fitzpatrick, former director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and one of the brains behind modern birding. Both eBird and Merlin were developed while John was director of the lab. It's one of those numbers that's hard to even wrap your head around. 3 billion birds gone. Since 1970, North America has lost nearly a third of its total bird population. That's not just a few rare species going extinct, it's common ones. The ones we grew up seeing out the window, declining the background characters of our daily lives. red-winged blackbirds, meadowlarks, sparrows and warblers. Somewhere between the malls and highways and pesticides and light pollution, the skies got a lot quieter. And The thing is, most of us didn't even notice. Because the loss wasn't sudden. It wasn't dramatic. It was slow, sneaky, and staggeringly widespread. This episode isn't about despair. It's about understanding. We'll look at what the data actually shows, why birds are declining, and what it means for ecosystems, agriculture, and, yes, us. Because birds aren't just pretty. They pollinate. They control pests. They distribute seeds. They're indicators of a healthy planet. And right now, the alarm is going off. Stay tuned. All right. So welcome back, everyone. I'm excited today to have Fitz with us to talk about in the broadest sense, bird conservation. Thanks for joining us.

John Fitzpatrick: Oh, it's great to be here. It's great to see you Scott, and happy to be part of this.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, it's awesome to awesome to connect after having spent some time together at the lab of Oh, for sure. And I wanted to start off, I guess just with this, this study that came out when you were director of the lab. So you were director of the lab for, and correct me if I'm wrong, 26 years?

John Fitzpatrick: That's right. 26 years directing this for me before I started there.

Scott Taylor: This mythical place, the lab of Ornithology on Sapsucker Woods Road Towards the end of your time as director, this study came out that highlighted that, you know, we've lost around 3 billion birds in just North America since the 1970s. And I was curious, what were your first reactions when that research team came to talk to you about their their findings?

John Fitzpatrick: Well, it was first. It was stunning. And as you might remember or might know that the that study was actually several years in the making. It was a it was a collaborative effort between a bunch of lab of Ornithology scientists plus colleagues in Canada and others around the US. And the initial results just seemed too staggering. So there was a lot of of revisiting the data, checking on the data reviewers for certain of the a couple of the initial submissions were skeptical about methods. And so there was actually a lot back to the drawing table, in part because it was such a stunning number, but everything got, you know, refined statistically to the point where we could really believe it from for several different sources. And the, the reaction that I had was parallel with the reaction that the, that the world had. I mean, it made the front page papers and magazine headlines certainly as it deserved to. The idea that we've lost something close to 30% of the breeding birds in North America over just 50 years really brings home the fact that we're in this, we're in danger of being in this huge mass extinction period that, you know, otherwise it's a mythical feature of the distant past and Earth. So yeah, it's, and of course, the immediate response on everybody's part are two, number one, why and #2 what do we do about this? And so that's really what we said about trying to work on after that 2019 publication.

Scott Taylor: People on this thing might not know that it takes a while to get science published. You have to be very confident and what you're saying and often come at things from different angles. So how did the team approach that with this paper?

John Fitzpatrick: As a result of some reviewers, the way science works in its best possible context is professionals who review a paper potentially for publication bring up several really important things that were either not considered or methods that allowed biases to creep in.

Scott Taylor: Interesting.

John Fitzpatrick: One of the things that I remember being specifically being a an issue in that paper was how to graphically display the results and some of the reviewers comments and frankly some of my own were had to do with. I don't I don't see these graphs illustrating the thing that you're talking about carefully enough or well enough or clearly enough. So there was actually a fair amount of time just getting the physical presentation of the data such that it could be viewed by anybody from the professional science community down to the general public, which of course we want that to be a feature of the paper, so.

Scott Taylor: What was it like to be the director of this place that people look to for science of birds, but also appreciation and conservation of birds at a time where you had to tell everyone, like, look, the last 50 years have been extremely bad for breeding birds in North America. And, and, you know, this trend extends broader than North America. But what was it like to be like at the helm of the place that people look to and then have to deliver this message?

John Fitzpatrick: Well, your question gives me is goosebumps a little bit, frankly, because it was pretty darn exciting. As a scientist, one of my biggest hopes for the Cornell Lab Ornithology was when I got there in 1995 to increase its impact on the world as a result of really deep, hard hitting scientific research that passes all the musters of review that this particular effort. We had just crossed the threshold in the our ability to use the NEXRAD radar system to actually count the number of flying objects that were migrating North and South during the a course of every day and accumulate that over the course of this last 20 years. And the idea that we were capitalizing on this completely modern technology of being able to understand the ecology of airborne animals as they're moving and use that, along with more traditional methods like the breeding Bird survey, which began back in the 60s, so independently evaluating bird numbers was really that to me was one of the most exciting features of this discovery.

Scott Taylor: It's interesting to think about. When NEXRAD was established, no one, I'm sure, thought this system could be used to evaluate how many birds are flying through the skies of North America. And yet.

John Fitzpatrick: That's right. That's right. And now and now we have, we have people who are who who just, you know, they treat the weather as noisy problems to get out of the system so we can actually see the interesting stuff. And that's Bird, Yeah.

Scott Taylor: Exactly. I think the first time I ever saw birds on a radar, I it's just like such a shocking thing to realize. You can see them taking off like during the migration period. I show that to my Ornithology students and they're always skeptical that it's actually birds, but yeah.

John Fitzpatrick: It's amazing, Yeah. Yeah. The, the coolest ones are those swallow roosts, which, yeah, emerge suddenly from no, nothing. And you get these circles that just get bigger and bigger and bigger from individual spots, and then they begin to move their directions. So it's a, it's really beautiful.

Scott Taylor: It is. It's very, very beautiful. With respect to this, this drastic decline in North American birds. Which groups or regions have been hardest hit and how did the paper kind of tackle those patterns and communicate about what we might be able to do?

John Fitzpatrick: Yeah, that's a really important question. That's it. It it leads to some interesting potential solutions. The what? What one of the most important features of the results were what was that? It did not. It was not true for all kinds of birds equally. Most important probably from the standpoint of worrying about the future is that there were certain groups of birds, especially those that lived in arid lands and in grasslands, were declining precipitously, so that some of them were dropping down to less than half of what they've been 50 years ago. Whereas a couple of groups in particular that waterfowl actually were increasing. And that itself was a really interesting result because he asked the question quickly, well, why is that?

John Fitzpatrick: And lo and behold, you look back at our own 50 or 75 year history in North America and beginning in the mid 20th century, we, we governments, multiple governments, Canada, US, eventually Mexico began investing heavily in wetland habitats, passing strong Wetland Protection Act, putting lots of money both from government sources and from private sources like Ducks Unlimited into the protection of places where waterfowl breed. Lo and behold, if you invest in the habitat that birds need, here was the data right in front of us. There they, the populations respond and they respond pretty quickly. So the the coolest phrase I remember hearing this was before the paper, well before the paper, but a state game biologist from Tennessee at A at a conference one time stood up and had a had an important talk. And it started to talk by saying, you know, we all have to recognize that birds are just like ducks. If we invest in the habitats that they require to live in, they will respond and the populations will grow again. And the ducks were a perfect example. And the big question, the big process right now over the last 30 years really has been can we expand the investment in the habitats that are required by the rest of the birds, not just the ducks. And the ones that need it the most, frankly, not surprisingly, are the ones that live in the habitats that have been ditched and drained and mowed over and plowed. And those are particularly the arid lands and the grasslands where we still have, you know, really quite a crisis underway. It's not the only crisis, by the way. There's some really surprising ones that have come out since that 2019 paper, mainly as a consequence of of the huge rise and gaining of the power of citizen participation studies like eBird.

Scott Taylor: Can you talk a little bit about those?

John Fitzpatrick: We invented eBird back in the in the Stone Age before the year 2000 were some of its prototypes that crashed and burned. But from those smoldering embers emerged emerged with the help of the National Science Foundation grant. We invented the thing that we now call eBird and we we launched it in 2002. It went global in 2010. This is an opportunity for anybody who watches birds at all to put their sightings into a database submitted through the Internet to the central website and database that's managed at Cornell. And that program grew from a pretty cool, you know, burger game in the early 2000s to a massive global effort in which we now at Cornell receive on the order of two to two and a half million checklists every month from every country, every country in the world, billions now, literally multiple billions of observations of birds. And the key here is that they're all Geo located because people put them in by phone or on a dot on a map. So we now can map with incredible accuracy the distributions of essentially every species of bird in the world during every single week of the year. So we can watch migrations happen, we can see distributions, the little nuances of distributions. And all the while, through the 22 thousand 2000s and the 20 teens we at the Cornell Lab, and you might remember this, Scott, because you were there during that period. We were, we were all saying, well, the Holy Grail for this project is, is it possible that we're going to get enough data coming in that we can start with great statistical power, we can start using eBird to measure trends of populations. Again, that's was that had to do with the 2019 paper, but eBird wasn't, that wasn't mature enough with enough data to use for that paper. But since that time, it has really gained use authority and incredible power for understanding really fine grain details down to the 27 kilometer pixel across the landscape of where birds are increasing and where they're declining. So the it's really fundamentally revolutionary in our understanding of the biology of planet Earth.

John Fitzpatrick: I'll give you one example that has really captured my attention and I've begun to read trying to help the process of understanding why this happening. But we're seeing birds declining right now that are the some of the commonest birds on on the continent. In the case of North America, we're talking about birds like barn swallows, tree swallows, birds that are just feeding in, in the air. They're feeding, they're eating our mosquitoes above us. They're eating little flies and little midges and things. And you know what's they're, they nest colonially and they don't really, they're not really limited by nesting sites at all, but they're declining precipitously. So what I want to emphasize is that there are dozens of species of birds across North America that are feeding on things that we would have thought were perfectly fine. They're living in habitats that seem perfectly fine still, but they're declining like crazy red-winged blackbirds in the marshes of the central US, and the suspicion has begun to creep in. And now there's some smoking gun data. Pesticides and in particular neonicotinoids are, are so pervasive in the habitats of the that they that across the continent that they're affecting the emergence of insects so that insect populations all together are declining. And we, of course, we know from independent studies all over the planet now. And we also know from truck drivers in the southern United States, Yeah, we're just not getting as many bugs anymore.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, I mean, I noticed that even when I go home now, the windshield is not the way it was when I was a kid when you drive around at night in the summer.

John Fitzpatrick: And so now I'm just going to say that we are now looking at something even more scary, which is that in places around the world, some of the best examples are in the Amazon basin in South America, where in what seemed to be completely pristine remote sites hundreds of miles away from any human, any obvious human impact species are the insect eating species are declining and they've been declining steadily for the last 20 years. So that in some of these places, a few of the most common ground story birds of the Amazon basin are gone. Really. They're not just rare, they're gone. And I mean, we have no idea why this is true. And I'll just say, and I'm this is, I don't mean to be alarmist, but I'm reading papers increasingly about people who are analyzing rainfall. They're actually analyzing the chemical composition of raindrops and they're increasing number of quotes to saying there is no place on the planet in which the raindrops are free of a whole host of chemical compounds released by humans into the into the air or soils or waters for one reason or another. So the idea that we're, we're not looking at, you know, just issues around rural Illinois that has so much corn that nothing else can live there. We're talking about places in the in the, in Nepal and India and South America and Africa that are potentially watching the impacts of these chemicals reduce the populations of insects and in turn reduce the population of animals that depend on them. So that's a really scary thing to be pondering for the future. And then raises the question, what do we do about it? So, Scott, what the What the hell do we do about it?

Scott Taylor: What the hell do we do about it? Fitz? I don't know. I mean, this insect apocalypse, obviously, you know, we've been hearing about it for more than a decade at this point. And in different places, it does seem like there are different potential drivers, whether they're pesticides or, you know, slight temperature shifts that are actually really difficult for tropical insects to handle. I think for me, one of the most one of the ways that hit home obviously was going home in the summer and not seeing the windshield covered by insects the way it used to be. But then hearing about, yeah, these studies from remote places like that, there was a rainforest study from Puerto Rico that showed this crazy decline in what they consider to be primary pristine rainforest. And yeah, what do we do?

John Fitzpatrick: I mean, get a better handle on what's causing it and then policy. Policy can help, right? We cannot, we can't, we cannot forget that. I mean, we cannot give up on that. The, the, the politics of policy move up and down like like sine waves. But hopefully like sine waves, they'll actually come back into a force where we can actually come to grips with some of the at least the worst things that we're doing. That they're most obviously affecting living creatures around the world.

John Fitzpatrick: One of the things that came out the back in the 1960s and 70s when it proved that the the pesticide DDT was causing the inability of birds like peregrine falcons and bald eagles and Ospreys to breed because their egg shells are too thin. The idea that DDT was poisoning these birds made people look, look in the mirror and say, you know, this is what kind of poisoning us too. We're eating. We're eating the fish out of the sea that are, you know, concentrating all this stuff. And so we have to be able to project into the future about that kind of a principle. If we understand and use birds as the Canary in the coal mine that are giving us a signal that something's going wrong, that's the opportunity for us to say, let's look at that clip more closely. Let's examine whether we're using these chemicals in appropriate amounts and appropriate places and, or, and in fact, needing to ban them all together. And again, here's the positive part. Once we banned DDT in North America, instantly the populations of bald eagles, peregrine falcons, Ospreys, a number of other predators like Cooper's Hawks and other things, they they began to rebound. The population curve of the bald eagle from 1940 to the present looks like a great big V down, down, down, down, down until the early 1970s, and it's been goes steadily up ever since. So birds are they are capable of a quick responses when we realize what's going on and change our behavior.

Scott Taylor: You've talked, I'm sure, to policy makers and the public a lot. There was a big response to our understanding that North American populations of birds have declined and, and that responses because, as you said, people love birds and want birds to be around. And what have you taken away from those conversations, either about the public or about how to influence policy in the in with regards to birds and why? I don't know. Birds seem like this powerful tool for all of that to me.

John Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I'd say I'd take away a couple of negatives and a couple of positives. The positives are that birds are increasingly popular. The number of proportion of people, not just in the US but across the planet who are interested in birds, who know about birds, who take advantage of modern tools like the ones we've invented called Merlin and eBird and so on. The bird watching and bird appreciation is rapidly growing still and that that's a good sign. And because what that leads to at local levels, at individual levels, from backyards to local land trusts to friends of, of wildlife refuges and so on, as increasing public attention to what we can do as individuals to save little bits and pieces of our habitat to affect the policy locally or regionally about protection of important areas, wetlands, uplands, grasslands, forests.

John Fitzpatrick: A negative side, I guess I would say is I'm still appalled, appalled, surprised. I'll just say no, I'm appalled actually at how how some of the myths continue to persist. That's like if the birds have, if the habitats gone here, they, well, they can just, they can fly, they can go somewhere else. If the birds, you know, they lose their habitat here, but they, they can move, you know, they're not like a tree. They, they can move And of course, well, where are they moving to? They're moving to other places that already have a bunch of birds there. So you can't, you can't just keep packing birds into smaller and smaller pieces of habitat.

John Fitzpatrick: And a recent study that I thought was super important using eBird data, but it's a parallel to some of the other ones that we've done. It's a study by a Princeton graduate student that showed that the largest drops in bird populations in the US are among species that are common and well known across the landscapes. And the drops basically reflect land use change. And you know, anytime you take a flight over the US and look down out of a window, I always take a window seat for this reason. I just want to get a picture of what the landscape is like. And we've used up a whole lot of the landscape. And it is so urban sprawl, suburban sprawl, horizon the horizon, agriculture, some of the ways in which we are using the landscape. One could actually argue that some of that is wasteful. But certainly what it's doing is, is reducing the opportunity for even some of our most common birds to make a living regionally. So we we can change that by doing, you know, more thoughtful zoning laws and some fairly common, you know, local civic attention to the fact that we really need to make sure we're investing in the living creatures that are side by side with us out there.

Scott Taylor: I think of my own family. My dad became a birder in his retirement and so he's he often has the best yard in Canada on eBird now.

John Fitzpatrick: Really.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, yeah, he's really, he is down. There in Canada and he never was a birder before. He didn't start birding until after he retired. Yeah, he he says now he wishes he'd paid more attention to what I was doing when I was, you know, in high school.

John Fitzpatrick: Instead of lecturing you that you should be a doctor or a lawyer.

Scott Taylor: He never, he knew I was never going that direction. I think he when I asked him if I ended up in the right job, he's like, I don't know what else you would have done. This is. Perfect for you, but Ditto me.

John Fitzpatrick: Ditto me, yeah.

Scott Taylor: But it's neat because since he started using eBird, he notices the cost of a pasture being turned into a cornfield. Or, you know, like you're talking about when they're putting in the drainage tiles and just completely obliterating these habitats where, you know, a year ago you could have gone and seen snipe in the spring. There's, you know, little low wet areas that attract migrating shore birds and the speed at which those kinds of habitats are declining where I grew up is is crazy. You know, it used to be a pasture county. You know, our our mascot is big Bruce, a large steer. The habitats that are getting converted to cash crops are actually really good for many grassland birds that now are among the fastest declining in Ontario. And my dad didn't really notice all of that until he started using eBird and logging his observations year after year and wanting to go to these places to see specific birds. And yeah, you show up at your favorite pasture and all of a sudden it's been completely flattened and turned into a cornfield. And yeah, birds can't live there. But you don't notice it until you notice it, I guess is the thing. And I think that's such a great power of eBird, getting people out and, and collecting these long term data sets.

John Fitzpatrick: Yeah. One of the things that I've I've certainly experienced myself and I hear a lot of people who have been bird watching for a long time have said about eBird is that it really changes. It changes how you bird. It makes you attend much more to numbers. You know how many snow geese are in that flock? Come by or. Is that even possible to figure out? Exactly how many Pelicans in that Lions? That's 22 Pelicans. Paying attention to numbers does make you actually think longer term about you know the numbers aren't the same as what they used to be.

Scott Taylor: Is that what you expected like when you guys conceptualized eBird? I just for everyone listening to like eBird is now the largest citizen science database on planet Earth. You know, you, you can't use a superlative that's incorrect when you're talking about eBird. But when you guys conceptualized it, did you think we would get here?

John Fitzpatrick: No, I mean, I, we could have dreamed, maybe listen, a couple of belts of whiskey at night and we would have said, yeah, yeah, you know, someday we'll get 100,000 checklists in a in a weekend, but we're getting more than that.

Scott Taylor: Wow.

John Fitzpatrick: So, no, I mean, we at the very beginning, not long after I got to the to Cornell couple of people, Ken Rosenberg, Rick Bonney came into my office and said, we really think it's time to do to organize a national checklist so we can get people from around the country that are bird watching to send in their bird observations. Keep in mind that would have been by the US Postal Service remarkably inefficient way to gather data. My first response to the idea of a national checklist was, are we really going to learn more anything that we don't already know about birds? You know, there couldn't have been a more stupid and ignorant response on the part of a director of the Cornell Lab than than that. Of course, it was the advent shortly thereafter of the Internet that allowed us to, to imagine that one could actually do this efficiently. And then teaming up with Frank Gill and the Audubon Society during that 1990s, late 90s period, you know, trial and error getting some things going. But we we, we dreamed about occasional big days or something like that, but we did not recognize how how powerful and how pervasive and how important this project would end up being.

Scott Taylor: It's influenced the world and our understanding, like you said, just a biodiversity of the planet and made things so much more accessible for for really everyone, right. And then you add Merlin on top of that. I mean, Merlin is, is incredible right now. How, how, How would it have changes people's lives?

John Fitzpatrick: It totally does. And then you see, you know, you see people. You never would have expected one to pay attention to birds that use both eBird and Merlin.

Scott Taylor: And they're talking about on these global stages that it just, I don't know, even when I was at the lab, you know, we were just starting to analyze eBird data for me in the context of hybridization and hybrid zones and how they respond to climate. And we can do so much more of that now. And it's been, you know, just over a decade. It's pretty impressive.

John Fitzpatrick: I just came back from a, a trip to Seychelles and Kenya and there's several different places when people and I learned I was from Cornell as I wear a current Cornell hat, you know, and then as I say, well, you're, you're at the Cornell lab. Were you involved in eBird? And he's like, Oh my God, how about your picture? I'm like, it was taking a picture with you. These guys from out in the middle of the, you know, wild lands and wild oceans. They're they're using Merlin and eBird. Oh, I get these little Taylor Swift moments where I can just stand next to somebody. I get my picture taken.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, that's awesome. We didn't talk about cats, which I maybe is for the best. I'm gonna.

John Fitzpatrick: I can talk about cats. Yeah. God, You know, talking about cats is one of the major predators of birds across North America, across the world, Yeah, literally across the world.

Scott Taylor: I know.

John Fitzpatrick: Cats you get Think about what they are the domestic cat. It's a subsidized recreational killer.

Scott Taylor: Yep. Yeah. And when you see them, like you're on one of the Galapagos Islands and you see these cats just like killing the rarest birds, you're like, why? Why do humans have to bring cats everywhere? This is. Ridiculous.

John Fitzpatrick: The world now, some of them are still the various birds that the only way that the bunch of these birds are alive at all is that they a few got rescued and put out onto little islands in which they had freed the island of cats. So, yeah, cats, a major predator. It's not the only one, of course. Mongoose. Mongooses are huge in the across the tropics and well, hell, goats and pigs and other things too, that we've introduced. But cats are direct killers of organisms.

Scott Taylor: I know anyone who says that, but not my cat. They're just wrong. I don't care how fat your cat is A. Consultual. I love the examples. I've seen a few of them where people put little, you know, Cam camcorders, mini camcorders on their cats. Yeah, they say no, look at that. My my cat doesn't do it. Yeah, yes, your cat does. If you let it outside, it does.

John Fitzpatrick: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Scott Taylor: All right, so we've reached the part of the show that we call that's BS. So that's bird stuff where we give our guests a chance to debunk a myth that really ruffles their feathers. So Fitz, what do you want to call BS on?

John Fitzpatrick: I want to call BS on the idea that birds, because they can fly, they're actually safe from the effects of humans, that that's just, it's malarkey. What do we think the birds, if we use up a patch of habitat that they just fly to some other spot and go to, you know, use that, what do they think they're flying into? What do these people think they're flying into? They're flying into places that are already populated with birds. So you can't keep loading, you know, otherwise good looking pieces of habitat with more and more birds because the place they used to be has been taken away. That's that's the pure BS. It's one of the worst and most common public misconceptions that there is.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's been really great chatting. I I really appreciate it and it's good to always.

John Fitzpatrick: Great to see you, always great to talk about birds. Happy to do it in this context and congratulations on a cool podcast.

Scott Taylor: Birds are dinosaurs, and around here we like our snacks, so we end each episode with a dinosaur nugget. Today's nugget is that massive bird loss can happen right under our noses. When we treat habitat loss like no big deal, birds can't just move on. And when we spray pesticides, we're not just killing pests, we're wiping out their food. The good news? Smart policy and habitat protection can turn it around. We've seen this with rebounds of Raptor populations after DDT was banned and waterfowl population increases with wetland protections. That's a wrap on this week's episode. OK, but how do you lose 3 billion birds? If you like this episode, leave a comment, like and subscribe. We'll catch you next time. Byeee.

This transcript was generated using AI-assisted transcription and may contain errors or omissions. Please refer to the audio or video episode for the most accurate representation.