Editor's Note

“Look around you, at today’s world. Your house, your city. The surrounding land, the pavement underneath, and the soil hidden below that. Leave it all in place, but extract the human beings. How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap on it and our fellow organisms? And what would become of the species that shared the planet with us?” Alan Weisman ponders this haunting and fascinating scenario in his new book, The World Without Us, from which we excerpted his chapter on birds. With chilling efficiency, he catalogues “an unintended carnage” caused by modern hazards such as transmission and cell towers, windows, and feral cats. For an array of species to “revive and thrive,” Weisman argues, human civilization must mitigate its pervasive and lethal impact.

To see why it’s such an urgent matter, read "Common Birds in Decline," Audubon’s latest State of the Birds Report. This time we focus on our top 10 common birds whose populations are experiencing the steepest declines (or read the full report, which includes the 20 most threatened of these species). Since 1967 the average population of these species—including the northern bobwhite and the grasshopper sparrow—has fallen 70 percent, from 17.6 million to 5.35 million individuals, according to 40 years of data examined by Audubon biologists. “Much of the concern stems from the wide variety of birds affected,” laments Greg Butcher, Audubon’s director of bird conservation. “As a result, the joyful sights and sounds of birds that we shared as a matter of course with our parents a generation ago are already harder for our children to experience today.”

For his part, in an essay on another new book, Silence of
the Songbirds, Frank Graham surveys an “impending intercontinental collapse” of warblers, thrushes, and other neotropical migrants, whose populations have dropped by almost half during the past four decades—a blink of an eye, really, in history’s vast continuum—mainly due to the destruction of their forest habitats. “Despite the best efforts
of avian biologists to keep our forests vibrant with birdsong,” writes Graham, who has covered these issues for Audubon over the same span, “Rachel Carson’s nightmare of a silent spring looks, to this reader anyway, closer than it did even a half century ago.”

Throughout this issue, as in every issue of Audubon, you’ll find all sorts of valuable advice about saving birds, whether it’s putting out safe birdseed or lobbying elected officials. Please take it to heart, so that our skies are filled with the ineffable beauty and wonder of birds for all generations to come.—David Seideman