West Stockbridge — Back in September 2019, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology published a study in Science Magazine that stated that nearly one-third of North America’s bird population, equalling up to 3 billion birds, has disappeared since 2019. According to the organization, most of the losses, approximately 2.5 billion birds, come from common bird families including finches, warblers, blackbirds, and sparrows.
Since the report, scientists, researchers, and farmers have all undertaken projects to keep bird species alive and resilient. In 2021, journalists and married couple Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal traveled across the country, over 25,000 miles, to investigate why bird species are vanishing, and also to interview the people who are undertaking these various projects. In April, their book “A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds,” was published by Simon & Schuster. The couple will give a free talk on their research on Thursday, July 6 at 7 p.m. at the Old Town Hall, 9 Main Street.
In an interview with The Berkshire Edge, the Gyllenhaals said that they have been “birders,” or birdwatchers, for many years. “We both started as ‘bird feeder children’ because we had bird feeders as kids,” Beverly Gyllenhaal said. “But we never really knew about the birds themselves. One time, both of us were camping outside and we found all of these birds all around. Anders is a photographer, and he loves photography.” She said that they took the photos and identified the species on the internet.
“But then we purchased binoculars, and to us, that made all of the difference,” Beverly Gyllenhaal said. “When you see birds up close, they’re like puppy dogs. They all have these expressions and they do these cool things. That is when we just got completely hooked on birdwatching and birds.”
“That was more than 10 years ago,” Anders Gyllenhaal added. “We were kind of hobbyists for about five years, but then we became increasingly obsessed with them to the point where our children would make fun of us. But at the time, we were longtime journalists, and as our full-time work began to wind down, we became increasingly interested in the story behind what was happening.”
Both Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal worked for decades as journalists and editors at various media outlets including The News & Observer and The Miami Herald. “We came to the realization that birds were in trouble, which is why we decided to start writing newspaper and magazine articles about it,” Anders Gyllenhaal said.
“We also started a noncommercial website called Flying Lessons, which at first was just a place for Anders’ photos to live,” Beverly Gyllenhaal said. “But we proceeded to start to write stories about birds and bird species on the website as well, just things that we were observing what was happening.”
The website led a literary agent to contact the couple about writing a book, which led to work on “A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds.”
“There just wasn’t a previous awareness of birds vanishing,” Anders Gyllenhaal said when asked why bird species disappeared. “The forces are primarily a loss of bird habitat. As the country grew up and became developed, we became a world power, in effect. North America used a lot of forest land and grasslands in agricultural areas to feed the world. That slowly eroded what birds depended on. The primary issue is habitat loss, but then there are compounding problems, including the growth of urban areas, high rises, and glass buildings that birds can crash into.”
Anders Gyllenhaal said that other issues include feral cats, which feed on more than two billion birds a year, along with pesticides that have eroded the insect supply that bird species have fed on. “The study released in 2019 gave us a window into these details into this crisis, and powered our interest about what can be done about it,” Anders Gyllenhaal said.
“After the study came out, people were just feeling devastated,” Beverly Gyllenhaal said. “Just bad news after bad news about birds, and then people started to [tune] the news out. But then we became aware of all of these technological innovations to help and save birds and their species, including different methods of conservation that are going on. We wanted to tell these stories and put them all into context.”
Portions of the book are about individual cases of helping bird species and turning around their problems, including the bald eagle and the grasshopper sparrow. “Not all bird species are the same, and what works on bald eagles, for example, does not necessarily work for other bird species,” Anders Gyllenhaal said. “But it can be used as a model for what can be done if we want to turn things around.” The book tells us that “[t]he turnaround is within reach if we listen to what the birds are telling us.”
“One of the fascinating things that is going on is that people are beginning to understand that birds are the modern canary in the coal mine,” Beverly Gyllenhaal said. “Birds are very sensitive to their environment. Thanks to Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Audubon, they have come up with this idea of citizen science where people can go outside and use the eBird app, where they can report what they see and share it with others across the world.”
The eBird app is available for Apple, and Android devices. As described on the app’s page, “eBird Mobile makes it easy to record the birds you find and seamlessly link observations with eBird, a global online database of bird records used by hundreds of thousands of birders around the world.”
Andres Gyllenhaal said that the app has been essential to scientific research when it comes to bird species. “Through tools like eBird, birds are showing us where the troubles are in the world,” he said. “They are interpreting the overall issues that are affecting the entire environment. Our argument is that birds are one of the best ways to envision all these problems because they’re around us all the time. Birds can lead us to recognize that our environment is significantly out of whack. If we do the things that will help the bird species, it will help everything, including the environment. The birds are telling us the things that we need to be doing to protect the environment.”
On the Gyllenhaal’s website is a section with tips on how to save bird species.
