Billions of Birds Have Vanished in a Generation

A GREAT THINNING of the skies is underway. There are 3 billion fewer birds in North America than half a century ago. Five hundred million fewer in Europe. Seventy-three million fewer in Britain. Worldwide, almost 50 percent of bird species are in decline. What was once called “common” is becoming rare: the “common eider” is now in the same global conservation category as the jaguar.

Dawns and springs are quieter, the air emptier. An ancient avian orchestra is falling silent. An almost unimaginable abundance has been lost.

In August 1861, the American naturalist A. S. Packard described vast numbers of migrating curlews appearing on the south Labrador coastline. “We saw a flock,” he wrote in his journal, “which must have been a mile long and nearly as broad; there must have been in that flock four or five thousand! The sum total of their notes sounded at times like the wind whistling through the ropes of a thousand-ton vessel.”

Two decades later, the English naturalist Richard Jefferies described the profusion of bird life at the edge of London: “The bevies of chiffchaffs and willow wrens . . . the chorus of thrushes and blackbirds, the chaffinches in the elms, the greenfinches in the hedges, wood-pigeons and turtle-doves in the copses, tree-pipits about the oaks in the cornfields; every bush, every tree, almost every clod . . . seemed to have its songster.” Yes—birds could once be seen and heard in a plenitude now beyond our wildest dreams.

Absence is harder to track and feel than presence. The ghosts of gone birds fade quickly from memory. Shifting baseline syndrome habituates us to sparser skies. It does not have to be this way—but we will not save what we do not love, and we rarely love what we cannot name. Noticing is the first step to naming—naming the first step to knowing both things and the relations between things. Knowledge may lead to wonder, wonder to care, care to action, action to change. But this is a fragile chain, easily broken; its links must be reforged and rejoined, over and over again.

Nest is secrecy, Nest is rest. Nest is sanctuary, fastness, absence of fear. Nest is bowl, sphere, burrow, hole, or cradle. Nest is white stork’s bristling cauldron of sticks and soil on a church’s steeple. Nest is skylark’s hollow in a wildflower meadow, or lapwing’s scrape in a pylon’s shadow. Nest happens far from human eyes, and Nest lives hard by people. Nest is blessed.

Nest is ingenuity, intricacy, improvisation. Nest is wren’s ball—pure cocoon. Nest is starling’s mess—all twigs and yarn, untidy as a teenager’s room. Nest is four glowing blue robin eggs tucked in a boot in the daytime dusk of a cobwebbed barn. Nest is bowerbird’s bling and dazzle, Nest is flamingo’s urn of sun-burned clay. Nest is a gyrfalcon eyrie used yearly since long before the Roman Empire faded away. Nest is three swallow chicks packed snug in a cup of mud above a farmhouse door.

Nest begins in spring when the sky comes alive with a million makers: with grass-stem seek-and-finders, with oak-leaf finders-keepers—rooks and crows with beak-clutched sprigs and swifts with feathers and stalks gathered on the wing between snatches of sleep. Blue tit plucks a wisp of wool from a barb of wire that plucked it from a sheep; firecrest sneaks a single strand from a horsehair cushion.

How does any bird learn to fashion such wonders? How does bee hummingbird know to knit a stretchy pot of silk and leaf an inch across, so tiny it might be taken for a branch’s knot? How does reed warbler know to stitch two heavy reeds together to make a nest that rides the wind, that survives the rest of gale or quake? The art of nesting isn’t hard to master, in fact, for Bird is a born builder, and Nest’s structure is vernacular, made from stuff that lies around: fluff and rootlets, reed, bark strip, baler twine and thistledown, the pages of a book, copper wire, the shreds of a plastic bag.

Nest invites dreaming, so let us dream. Which nest would we conjure if we could? Into which would we creep to huddle down among the brood? Mine would be goldcrest’s: three inches wide, bound to the tines of a fork in a pine by spiderweb that flexes as the hatchlings grow and press against the sides. Humans are nesters too. We all seek places of retreat, small shelters from the world’s thunder: under the blankets, a den in the woods, a tree house, an attic, a cellar. These are our nests, our treasure chests, where we’re briefly able to hide our hearts.

A saint once knelt and held his upturned palm aloft and ready for forty days and nights—so steady that a pair of blackbirds first nested there, then laid and hatched a clutch of mottled, sky-blue eggs. Humble, orant, St. Kevin’s posture was a gift, a prayer thrown upward to the creatures of the air—and he held that stance until the brood was fledged and flown.

We have forgotten how to be this still, how to brace and open space for other lives. Bird, you weave your homes with ours, and we must weave ours back with yours. We must understand that Nest’s great task is to make new life, that the abandoned nest is the most bereft.

Egg is a space station, shock absorber, bathysphere, safe harbour, first home. Egg is tiny nation: population one. Inside Egg floats chick: astronaut adrift, patient in flotation tank, wanderer in twilight, diver in the benthic zone. Egg is orb, globe, song maker, earth shaker, alchemist, and conjuror. Egg pulls the oldest magic trick of all: mix shell and albumen, yolk and embryo, and (hey presto!) out comes Bird—liquid turned bone turned feather turned flight. Yes, Egg is a most perfect thing—but to fulfill its task, it must be destroyed as if it never mattered. Perfection cracked, a planet shattered.

Egg’s shell breathes: a pliant porcelain pocked with tiny pores that let oxygen in and keep poisons out. Egg is strong and fragile, Egg is wise, and Egg comes in every hue and size, from sphere to cone, speckle, blotch and wash, freckle, fleek and dapple, teal and turquoise, apple green and cream, mint and iron grey, Bunsen-burner blue and terracotta brown.

Yellowhammer is sometimes called the scribble lark: because each egg’s a one-off miracle of inky jottings, squiggled doodles, Morse-code marks, and writhing noodles. Tinamou’s egg is iridescent: all polish and shimmer, glossy as a pebble picked up from a river. Lapwing lays its olive-green eggs in an inward-pointing clutch to form a muddy four-leafed clover. Blackbird’s eggs are the pale blue of a glacier’s deep-sunk heart; dunnock’s are the blue of a flawless dawn, of the ideal start. Cetti’s warbler lays a copper-coloured egg, smart as a coin. Emu’s symmetrical blue-green orb of treasure has the pitted texture of Damascus steel. Ostrich digs a sandy pit to hold its giant eggs, so vast that we’ve used its shells across centuries as goblets and bowls, water carriers, canvases, lampshades, and reliquaries.

Oology—the study of eggs—is an endless subject. Peer at guillemot’s pear-shaped egg and gaze into a galaxy: those whirls and eddies of worlds, an infinity of forms, those supernovas, dying stars and thousand-year-long storms. Each guillemot egg is differently marked so a mother can tell hers from theirs in a thousand-bird colony on a sea cliff’s edge where the bonxies cruise. The same pigment that gives robins’ eggs their blues forms the hues of moth and butterfly wings—and also lends the violet shadow to a healing human bruise.

Bird, what’s it like to be inside Egg? Do you hear the muffled murmur of the outside world—your mother’s song as she shelters your shelter, as she keeps you warm: incubation as devotion? Is this when you learn the voices of your kind, your paths through the sky, the how of Flight, Migration’s why?

Egg’s last act is selfless. As the time for hatching nears, chick absorbs egg’s calcium to build its bones. Chick grows stronger, Egg weaker, and a tooth forms on chick’s upper beak—a file slipped to the prisoner in a loaf of bread. Chick hacks out and Egg cracks: is shunted aside, falls to pieces, now unwanted. Thus the bittersweet joy of finding two parts of a shell at the foot of a hedge or the base of a tree: the death of a moon and the dawn of a sun—an artwork broken and a life begun.

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Dawn. Spring. The greening of the year. Listen. Open the mind’s ear wide; what does one hear? From treetop and lamppost, chimney and phone mast, from gable and orchard, reed bed and hedgerow, from scrub and sky, from far and near, Song pours forth—a hundred thousand springs and streams and currents of notes that gather together to weave a great braided torrent of stories sung long before writing and long before us, sung from lover to lover and rival to rival: owlish duets and summons to fighting; turf-war rap battles and neighbourhood tattle; nightingale’s ghazals and marsh warbler’s madrigals; grace notes, rills, rattles and whispers, plainchants and motets, aubades, vespers, jazz riffs and solos and arias from aerials; the epic, the lyric, the joyful, the playful, and as the sun sweeps round the turning Earth—pulling dawn with it, thinning night’s ink on its shifting brink—its light calls out, from forest and jungle and meadow and spinney and hillside and garden, this fabulous, ceaseless, planet-wide, history-long flood tide of SONG!

How does Bird do it? How does a backyard troubadour blackbird sing both melody and harmony simultaneously? How does dunnock dream up its song streams of silver mercury? How does sewing-machine wren stitch a dozen needle notes a second through the air? How can brown thrasher—the avian jukebox—remember a thousand different songs? How did starling become such a mimic, sampling ringtones and phone pings, shoe squeaks and car shrieks, to gimmick his rooftop hip-hop homage?

Song is surely the strangest and plainest of wonders of Bird. It happens like this: instead of a larynx, Bird has a syrinx—a two-sided voice box sat low in the throat. Bird can sing through both sides at once: set the soprano part flying while the undersong builds, tightly entwining these two separate lines. Compared with Bird, we’re one-trick ponies, we’re slowcoaches, just plodding along. No wonder Bird’s song for so long has spoken to us of home and exile, of hope reawakened and love unforsaken, of matters of loss and affairs of the heart; no wonder it flows through our poems, our music, our art.

Song is not Bird’s only sound. Think of the cries and calls and chirrups, alarms and babbles, the air-raid sirens that warn of a predator or summon a mob to repel an invader. Yes, the great avian orchestra has a vast range of repertoire. There’s the outer-tail drumming of snipe in flight, and manakin’s manic snap and crackle; there’s magpie’s piratical cackle and mallard’s mad chortle, jackdaw’s yakking and woodpigeon’s murmurs.

Raven’s the gronker, the honker, the trickster, the fixer, the hexer, the curser: it knows where the bodies are buried. Pheasant’s the creak of a hinge on a rusty old gate, oystercatcher’s penny-whistle piping cuts right through the white noise of wave and surf and goldfinch’s singing-bowl notes settle to earth as precious glitter. There’s white stork’s golf club clatter of bills, skylark’s tumbling, cascading trills—and who could forget white bellbird, who lets loose the loudest sound ever heard from a bird: a 125-decibel yell, the blurt of a drill, a bellow from hell, a high-pitched holler on the Devil’s harmonica, a barbaric yawp both ancient and modern—a deafening volley of Stone Age electronica!

How little we listen, though, and how rarely we hear. Spring is billions of birds quieter than a century ago, and there’s no sign that these losses will slow. When a bird goes extinct, a language goes with it; bells fall silent without their ringers. It’s not enough to love the song but forget the singers.

Excerpted from The Book of Birds by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane, 2026, published by House of Anansi Press. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.