Increasingly, climate change weighing on birds

Amazonian royal flycatcher (nychorhynchus coronatus) (Photo by Emilia Roberts of George Mason University for the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project)

In 2022, a team of researchers published puzzling findings on bird abundance in Panama. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found tropical bird populations had fallen by more than 50% over the 44-year period 1977 to 2020. While global bird population declines are largely driven by habitat destruction, the drop observed in the study occurred inside Soberanía National Park, an area covering 22,000 hectares (54,363 acres) of nearly intact, protected forest. The results matched similarly surprising findings produced by long-term, tropical-bird population studies in Latin America. A study published in 2021 in Ecology Letters found eight tropical bird species had declined 50% over a 35-year period at a remote Amazonian research site in Brazil. In 2015, scientists working in Ecuador’s Yasuní Biosphere Reserve, one of the most biodiverse places in the world, found that capture rates of birds had declined... Read more →