In Michigan and many other areas in the United States, the bird population has been on a rapid decline.
Experts at the Michigan Department of Natural Resources want people to know why that’s happening and how the trend can be turned around.
Birds are all around us as we feed them, photograph them, and admire their beauty. But, biologists and scientists are concerned about their thinning numbers in the past few decades.
“Research has shown that bird populations have dropped by around three billion birds, so they estimate that in 1970, the bird population for North America had three billion more birds,” said Michigan DNR Wildlife Biologist Steve Griffith.
Griffith says the decline is for various reasons, but habitat loss is the most significant factor.
“Fragmentation is where you have a large piece of habitat or that are different population areas that are connected so that the birds can move between them or to better habitat and so forth,” Griffith said. “And these movement corridors or habitats get fragmented to whether they could be too small to hold a viable population of birds.”
Studies have shown that building collisions are another reason birds are dying off in large numbers.
“A lot of birds will migrate at night,” Griffith said. “And it’s kind of counterintuitive, but you got a lot of these big buildings that are lit up bright. You think well the birds can see them and go around, but it can apparently it confuses them. It attracts them into urban areas, and then they’re more likely to hit buildings.”
Griffith says turning down lights or most lights is a way to reduce the threat to the birds.
“Just turning lights down or most of the lights off during the spring and fall migrations, I think they said up to 60% of the bird collisions can be avoided,” Griffith said. “So just simple practices like that and then maybe it saves some energy to have less lights on.”
Michigan’s bald eagle population had been pushed to the brink of extinction, with just 359 confirmed breeding pairs in 2000. Now, that number has more than doubled to 900.
Experts say bald eagles thrive for three reasons:
- Bans on toxic chemicals
- Increased funding for rearing and releasing programs
- And forestry practices that have brought back the bald eagles preferred nesting habitat.