essay on conservation of birds in english

Why Birds Matter, and Are Worth Protecting

They help the environment, but they also help our souls. in 2018 we’ll explore the wonder of birds, and why we can’t live without them..

This story appears in the January 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine.

For most of my life, I didn’t pay attention to birds. Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling and who hurries out to see a golden plover that’s been reported in the neighborhood, just because it’s a beautiful bird, with truly golden plumage, and has flown all the way from Alaska. When someone asks me why birds are so important to me, all I can do is sigh and shake my head, as if I’ve been asked to explain why I love my brothers. And yet the question is a fair one, worth considering in the centennial year of America’s Migratory Bird Treaty Act : Why do birds matter?

My answer might begin with the vast scale of the avian domain. If you could see every bird in the world, you’d see the whole world. Things with feathers can be found in every corner of every ocean and in land habitats so bleak that they’re habitats for nothing else. Gray gulls raise their chicks in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth.

Emperor penguins incubate their eggs in Antarctica in winter. Goshawks nest in the Berlin cemetery where Marlene Dietrich is buried, sparrows in Manhattan traffic lights, swifts in sea caves, vultures on Himalayan cliffs, chaffinches in Chernobyl. The only forms of life more widely distributed than birds are microscopic.

To survive in so many different habitats, the world’s 10,000 or so bird species have evolved into a spectacular diversity of forms. They range in size from the ostrich, which can reach nine feet in height and is widespread in Africa, to the aptly named bee hummingbird, found only in Cuba. Their bills can be massive (pelicans, toucans), tiny (weebills), or as long as the rest of their body (sword-billed hummingbirds). Some birds—the painted bunting in Texas, Gould’s sunbird in South Asia, the rainbow lorikeet in Australia—are gaudier than any flower. Others come in one of the nearly infinite shades of brown that tax the vocabulary of avian taxonomists: rufous, fulvous, ferruginous, bran-colored, foxy.

Birds are no less diverse behaviorally. Some are highly social, others anti. African queleas and flamingos gather in flocks of millions, and parakeets build whole parakeet cities out of sticks. Dippers walk alone and underwater, on the beds of mountain streams, and a wandering albatross may glide on its 10-foot wingspan 500 miles away from any other albatrosses. I’ve met friendly birds, like the New Zealand fantail that once followed me down a trail, and I’ve met mean ones, like the caracara in Chile that swooped down and tried to knock my head off when I stared at it too long. Roadrunners kill rattlesnakes for food by teaming up on them, one bird distracting the snake while another sneaks up behind it. Bee-eaters eat bees. Leaftossers toss leaves. Thick-billed murres can dive underwater to a depth of 700 feet, peregrine falcons downward through the air at 240 miles an hour. A wren-like rushbird can spend its entire life beside one half-acre pond, while a cerulean warbler may migrate to Peru and then find its way back to the tree in New Jersey where it nested the year before.

Birds aren’t furry and cuddly, but in many respects they’re more similar to us than other mammals are. They build intricate homes and raise families in them. They take long winter vacations in warm places. Cockatoos are shrewd thinkers, solving puzzles that would challenge a chimpanzee, and crows like to play. (On days so windy that more practical birds stay grounded, I’ve seen crows launching themselves off hillsides and doing aerial somersaults, just for the fun of it, and I keep returning to the YouTube video of a crow in Russia sledding down a snowy roof on a plastic lid, flying back up with the lid in its beak, and sledding down again.) And then there are the songs with which birds, like us, fill the world. Nightingales trill in the suburbs of Europe, thrushes in downtown Quito, hwameis in Chengdu. Chickadees have a complex language for communicating—not only to each other but to every bird in their neighborhood—about how safe or unsafe they feel from predators. Some lyrebirds in eastern Australia sing a tune their ancestors may have learned from a settler’s flute nearly a century ago. If you shoot too many pictures of a lyrebird, it will add the sound of your camera to its repertoire.

But birds also do the thing we all wish we could do but can’t, except in dreams: They fly. Eagles effortlessly ride thermals; hummingbirds pause in midair; quail burst into flight heart-stoppingly. Taken all together, the flight paths of birds bind the planet together like 100 billion filaments, tree to tree and continent to continent. There was never a time when the world seemed large to them. After breeding, a European swift will stay aloft for nearly a year, flying to sub-Saharan Africa and back, eating and molting and sleeping on the wing, without landing once. Young albatrosses spend as many as 10 years roving the open ocean before they first return to land to breed. A bar-tailed godwit has been tracked flying nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand, 7,264 miles in nine days, while a ruby-throated hummingbird may burn up a third of its tiny body weight to cross the Gulf of Mexico. The red knot, a small shorebird species, makes annual round-trips between Tierra del Fuego and the Canadian Arctic; one long-lived individual, named B95 for the tag on its leg, has flown more miles than separate the Earth and the moon.

There is, however, one critical ability that human beings have and birds do not: mastery of their environment. Birds can’t protect wetlands, can’t manage a fishery, can’t air-condition their nests. They have only the instincts and the physical abilities that evolution has bequeathed to them. These have served them well for a very long time, 150 million years longer than human beings have been around. But now human beings are changing the planet—its surface, its climate, its oceans—too quickly for birds to adapt to by evolving. Crows and gulls may thrive at our garbage dumps, blackbirds and cowbirds at our feedlots, robins and bulbuls in our city parks. But the future of most bird species depends on our commitment to preserving them. Are they valuable enough for us to make the effort?

Value, in the late Anthropocene, has come almost exclusively to mean economic value, utility to human beings. And certainly many wild birds are usefully edible. Some of them in turn eat noxious insects and rodents. Many others perform vital roles—pollinating plants, spreading seeds, serving as food for mammalian predators—in ecosystems whose continuing wildness has touristic or carbon-sequestering value. You may also hear it argued that bird populations function, like the proverbial coal-mine canary, as important indicators of ecological health. But do we really need the absence of birds to tell us when a marsh is severely polluted, a forest slashed and burned, or a fishery destroyed? The sad fact is that wild birds, in themselves, will never pull their weight in the human economy. They want to eat our blueberries.

What bird populations do usefully indicate is the health of our ethical values. One reason that wild birds matter—ought to matter—is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They’re the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it. They share descent with the largest animals ever to walk on land: The house finch outside your window is a tiny and beautifully adapted living dinosaur. A duck on your local pond looks and sounds very much like a duck 20 million years ago, in the Miocene epoch, when birds ruled the planet. In an ever more artificial world, where featherless drones fill the air and Angry Birds can be simulated on our phones, we may see no reasonable need to cherish and support the former rulers of the natural realm. But is economic calculation our highest standard? After Shakespeare’s King Lear steps down from the throne, he pleads with his elder two daughters to grant him some vestige of his former majesty. When the daughters reply that they don’t see the need for it, the old king bursts out: “O, reason not the need!” To consign birds to oblivion is to forget what we’re the children of.

A person who says, “It’s too bad about the birds, but human beings come first” is making one of two implicit claims. The person may mean that human beings are no better than any other animal—that our fundamentally selfish selves, which are motivated by selfish genes, will always do whatever it takes to replicate our genes and maximize our pleasure, the nonhuman world be damned. This is the view of cynical realists, to whom a concern for other species is merely an annoying form of sentimentality. It’s a view that can’t be disproved, and it’s available to anyone who doesn’t mind admitting that he or she is hopelessly selfish. But “human beings come first” may also have the opposite meaning: that our species is uniquely worthy of monopolizing the world’s resources because we are not like other animals, because we have consciousness and free will, the capacity to remember our pasts and shape our futures. This opposing view can be found among both religious believers and secular humanists, and it too is neither provably true nor provably false. But it does raise the question: If we’re incomparably more worthy than other animals, shouldn’t our ability to discern right from wrong, and to knowingly sacrifice some small fraction of our convenience for a larger good, make us more susceptible to the claims of nature, rather than less? Doesn’t a unique ability carry with it a unique responsibility?

A few years ago in a forest in northeast India, I heard and then began to feel, in my chest, a deep rhythmic whooshing. It sounded meteorological, but it was the wingbeats of a pair of great hornbills flying in to land in a fruiting tree. They had massive yellow bills and hefty white thighs; they looked like a cross between a toucan and a giant panda. As they clambered around in the tree, placidly eating fruit, I found myself crying out with the rarest of all emotions: pure joy. It had nothing to do with what I wanted or what I possessed. It was the sheer gorgeous fact of the great hornbill, which couldn’t have cared less about me.

The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value. They are always among us but never of us. They’re the other world-dominating animals that evolution has produced, and their indifference to us ought to serve as a chastening reminder that we’re not the measure of all things. The stories we tell about the past and imagine for the future are mental constructions that birds can do without. Birds live squarely in the present. And at present, although our cats and our windows and our pesticides kill billions of them every year, and although some species, particularly on oceanic islands, have been lost forever, their world is still very much alive. In every corner of the globe, in nests as small as walnuts or as large as haystacks, chicks are pecking through their shells and into the light.

Your National Geographic Society membership helped fund this project.

Bird-watcher and novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote about the killing of migrating songbirds for the July 2013 issue of National Geographic.

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Across the Americas, more than 500 native bird species are threatened with extinction — 12 percent of 4,230 species. In the United States alone, nearly 300 of 750 native bird species, or 37 percent, are declining in population.

If these declines in bird populations are not enough, consider these additional reasons that conserving birds is important.

Birds Inspire

People have always admired birds. Species like Golden Eagles , doves, and ravens permeate history and cultures around the world. Images of cranes, falcons, geese, and parrots adorn the walls of Neolithic caves, Egyptian pyramids, Mayan temples — and many American homes today.

Storks deliver us at birth and owls mourn our deaths. Each new generation marvels at the beauty of birds and envies their ability to fly.

Birds Indicate Environmental Hazards

Because they are sensitive to habitat change and are easy to census, birds are an important tool for ecologists measuring the health of environments.

Whether ecosystems are managed for agricultural production, wildlife, water, or tourism, success can be measured by the health and diversity of bird populations.

Birds Promote Conservation

Birds have been a driving force behind the conservation movement in the United States since its early days, when unregulated hunting, use of toxic pesticides , and destruction of wetlands and other habitats threatened wildlife and wild places.

The environmental problems we face today are even more complex, and we need a new generation of committed conservationists to counter them. When people discover the wonder of birds, their interest often leads to support of conservation.

Birds Support the Economy

At last count, the number of birders in the United States stood at 73 million. These bird lovers spend $40 billion annually by feeding birds, purchasing equipment, and traveling in pursuit of birds — including to many ABC-supported reserves .

Birding supports the economy, not to mention the invaluable benefits birds provide to people through ecosystem services such as insect and rodent control, plant pollination, and seed dispersal.

Our Moral Obligation

We at American Bird Conservancy believe that people have an absolute ethical obligation to maintain all other species — regardless of their functional values.

We should no more allow the loss of species than destroy a masterpiece of art: It takes only one look at an incredible bird like the Marvelous Spatuletail  or the awe-inspiring California Condor  to realize the truth of this statement.

The least our generation can do is to ensure that our children inherit as much as we have now. It is on this ethical commitment to the future that American Bird Conservancy is founded.

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Friday essay: on birds — feathered messengers from deep time

Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing, UTS, University of Technology Sydney

Disclosure statement

Delia Falconer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Technology Sydney provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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When I experienced a great loss in in my early forties — almost a year to the day after another — I went to see my mother in the family home. She wasn’t a hugger or giver of advice, so instead we fed the birds. As she had when I was a child, she stood behind me in the kitchen with her shoulder propped against the back door, passing slices of apple and small balls of minced meat into my hand.

Each bird, apart from the snatching kookaburras, was touchingly gentle in the way it took food from my fingers. The white cockatoos ate daintily, one-legged. The lorikeets jumped onto the sloping ramp on both feet, like eager parachutists, to quarrel over the apple and press the juice from the pulp with stubby tongues.

Lined up on the veranda rail, the magpies cocked their heads to observe me before accepting meat precisely in their blue-white beaks. They had a beautiful, carolling song, with a chorded quality in the falling registers. But the bright-eyed butcher birds had the most lovely song of all: a full-throated piping, which I’ve heard compared to the Queen of the Night’s aria in Mozart’s Magic Flute.

Over decades, a family of these little blue-grey birds, had come to stack their hooked meat-eaters’ beaks with mince, which they flew to deliver to young somewhere in our neighbour’s garden, though we had never bothered to try to work out where they lived. This afternoon, when my mother and I opened the door, they landed by our side as they always had, having spotted us from their watching places. For a brief moment, surrounded by these vital creatures, I felt as if I might still want to be alive.

Small agents

Birds have always been small agents charged with carrying the burden of our feelings simply by following the logic of their own existence. The Irish imagined puffins as the souls of priests. The ancient Romans released an eagle when an emperor died in the belief it would “conduct his soul aloft”. In the Abrahamic religions, doves are given powers of revelation. We have even been inclined, right up until the present, to imagine birds as the souls of our recently departed returned to us, if only for a moment.

Even without being recruited into such labour, birds touch on our lives in small but significant ways. Once, in the botanical gardens of Melbourne, a boyfriend laughed until he almost cried at the mechanical, eager hopping of the tiny fairy wrens, a fact that only made me like him more. A friend tells the story of her uncle who ordered quail for the first time at a restaurant and cried when he saw it on his plate. “She had a raven’s heart, small and obdurate,” American author Don DeLillo writes of a nun in Underworld ; it is my favourite description in any novel.

In Japan, where my partner and I tried to ease our sadness, the calls of crows were ubiquitous in every town. Like the low sounds of its deer, they had a subdued, almost exhausted quality, as hollow as the bells that are rattled to call the oldest spirits to its Shinto temples.

In 1975, when his first wife left him, Masahise Fukase began to photograph these birds, which he had seen from the window of a train. He would keep taking their pictures – on a hilltop tori at dusk, grouped on the budding branches of a bare tree, in flying silhouette – for ten years. Ravens would become one of the most famous books of modern photography , hailed as a “masterpiece of mourning”. While some people see the birds in his photos as symbols of loneliness I see them as embodiments of pure intention. “I work and photograph to stop everything,” Fukase said. As if fulfilling a prophecy, he would spend the last two decades of his life in a coma, after falling down the stairs at his favourite bar.

Yet for all our emotional investment in them, we’ve never treated birds particularly well. To train a falcon in Qatar, owners sew the young bird’s eyes shut, unstitching and then restitching them for longer intervals, until it is entirely dependent on its keeper. In Asia the appetite for caged songbirds is so great that their calls are disappearing from its forests. Our careless acceptance that these extraordinary creatures are subject to our will is perhaps as damning as any direct mistreatment of them. This is symbolised for me by that fact that, in North America, owners of long pipelines add a putrid odorant to the natural gas they carry so that turkey vultures, circling over the deathly smell, will alert them to methane leaks.

We are currently draining marshes globally three times faster than we are clearing forests. Migratory Red Knots fly 15,000 kilometres per year between Australia and their breeding grounds in the Arctic Tundra, but they’re declining because of the industrial development of the Yellow Sea’s tidal mudflats, where they stop to feed and rest. One of the details that most haunted me in the reports of Australia’s mega-fires was the fact that many birds that survived the radiant heat would die of smoke inhalation because the continuous one-way airflow of their breathing systems and air sacs meant they couldn’t cough to clear their lungs.

When we first moved into my childhood home, wattlebirds fed in the grevilleas, calling from the rockery with voices that sounded, as a poet once said to me, like the cork being pulled from a bottle of champagne. While their long forms ending in a slim, curved beak seemed the embodiment of alertness, they were the birds our cat caught most often. To see one, rescued but internally injured, vomit up its honey and grow limp was one of my first intimations as a child of the world’s evils. Unable to bear the thought of their sleek, streaky bodies in the bare earth, my mother would bury them wrapped in tea towels. But it was the 70s and no one thought to keep the cat inside.

As my mother entered her nineties, her life contracted around her birds. Although experts were now advising that the lack of calcium could soften chicks’ bones, I continued, against my conscience, to put through her weekly grocery order, which contained as much bird mince as food for herself. She had stopped feeding the cockatoos, which had chewed her windowsills and the struts of the back door, but when they heard us in the kitchen they would still plaster their chests like great white flowers against the window or poke their heads through the large holes they’d made over the years in the door’s wire fly screen.

But it was only the butcher birds that ever entered through these gaps to wait for her by the sink, feathers fluffed calmly. Once or twice, one would come and find her in the dining room and quietly walk back ahead of her to be fed. When I came with the children, she would press food into their hands as she stood behind them at the door, leaning against the kitchen counter for support. So she continued to be one of the estimated 30 to 60% of Australian households that fed wild birds, a statistic that suggests that we need them far more than they need us.

Scientists began to think in the 19th century that birds might have evolved from dinosaurs, when the 150-million- year-old fossil skeleton of Archaeopteryx — which we now know was capable of short bursts of active flight — turned up in a German quarry.

The Victorian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley observed the bony-tailed, feathered fossil’s striking resemblance to small dinosaurs like Compsognathus and proposed that it was a transitional form between flightless reptiles and birds. Huxley’s theory fell out of favour until the last decades of the 20th century, when a new generation of palaeontologists returned to the similarities between the metabolisms and bird-like structures of dinosaur fossils and birds, and there is now a consensus that birds are avian dinosaurs. That the birds with which we share our lives are the descendants of the hollow-tailed, meat-eating theropods is a true wonder that never fails to thrill me.

Birds, like us, are survivors. They escaped the Cretaceous-Paleogene (or K-Pg) mass extinction event 65 million years ago: the fifth and last great dying in the history of our planet, until the Sixth Extinction taking place around us now.

Scientists were able to work out, from unusually high deposits of rare iridium (which mostly comes from outer space) in the Earth’s crust that a ten-kilometre-wide asteroid hitting the area that is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula had killed off three quarters of the world’s living creatures by causing forest fires and then a freezing “nuclear winter,” which inhibited photosynthesis and rapidly acidified the oceans. Its blast was thousands of times more powerful than the combined force of all the nuclear weapons in the world today. The dust and debris it dispersed into the atmosphere eventually settled into a thin grey band of iridium-rich clay, which came to be called the K-Pg boundary and, above it, no trace of a non-avian dinosaur can be found.

In historical ironies whose obviousness would shame a novelist, it was geophysicists looking for petroleum in the 1970s who would discover the existence of the Chicxulub crater. Walter Alvarez, who discovered the “iridium anomaly”, was the son of physicist Luis Alvarez, a designer of America’s nuclear bombs, with whom he posited the asteroid strike theory; Alvarez senior had followed in a plane behind the Enola Gay to measure the blast effect as it dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima.

The ground-dwelling, beaked avian dinosaurs were able to scratch out a life for themselves in the ferny “disaster flora” that replaced the obliterated forests; their intelligence, their feathery insulation, their ability to feed on the destroyed forests’ seeds, and to digest the “hard, persistent little morsels” as one writer puts it, would help them to survive, and later flourish.

More incredibly, these dinosaurs were already recognisably bird-like, inside and out; capable of at least short horizontal flight like quails, the parts of their brains that controlled sight, flight and high-level memory as expanded as those of modern birds’, while our early mammal ancestors — small, nocturnal, insectivorous, shrew-like mammals — were hiding in clefts and caves.

It is now thought that the world’s oldest modern bird, Asteriornis maastrichtensis , could probably fly and was combing the shallow beaches of today’s Belgium, in the way of modern long-legged shore birds, 700,000 years before the K-Pg mass extinction.

Because of a wealth of new fossil evidence in China, we now also know that feathers are far more ancient than we once thought; they didn’t evolve with birds 150 million years ago but are instead probably as old as dinosaurs themselves. In fact, many of the dinosaurs that we have been trained to think of as scaly, were at least partially feathered, including the fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex , which may have used its primitive feathers, like a peacock, for display.

Powerful electron microscopes have allowed scientists to determine that the long filaments covering 150-million-year-old Sinosauropteryx , the first feathered non-avian dinosaur discovered, in China, in 1996, were “proto-feathers”; and even, looking at the melanosomes inside them, that they were ginger, running in a “Mohican” pattern down its back and ending in a stripey white-and-ginger tail. Similar examination of the melanosomes of another Jurassic-era theropod found that it had a grey-and-dark plumage on its body, long white and black-spangled forelimbs, and a reddish-brown, fluffy crown.

Scientists are puzzled about what dinosaurs’ feathers, which developed before the capacity of feathered flight, were “for”, but I don’t really care: the fact of them is startling enough, along with the imaginative readjustments we have to make in seeing the fearsome creatures of paleoart that we grew up with, locked in orgasmic conflict, as softly plumaged. Did their young call for them with the same open-mouthed yearning as baby birds, I wonder? Did they possess their own sense of beauty? If we imagine dinosaurs as being less alien and fluffier, does it make our own era’s potential annihilation seem more real?

Read more: Meet the prehistoric eagle that ruled Australian forests 25 million years ago

Over the last century folkorists and psychoanalysts have kept trying to account for birds’ deep hold over our imaginations; as agents of death, prophets, ferriers of souls, omens, and symbols of renewal and productivity. Some attribute it to the power of flight and their ability to inhabit the heavens, others to the way eggs embody transformation. But could it be that the vestigial shrew-like part of ourselves has always recognised them instinctively as the emissaries of a deep past, much older than we are? “We float on a bubble of space-time,” writes author Verlyn Klinkenberg , “on the surface of an ocean of deep time”.

Recently, this deep past has begun to reassert itself as, even during coronavirus lockdowns, burned fossil fuels continue to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, bringing its concentration in the air to levels not seen since the Pliocene three million years ago when the seas were 30 metres higher. To try to help us understand the literal profundity of this moment in the history of the earth, writers have been looking increasingly below its surface, far beyond the human realm, to its deepest, billions-of-years-old strata.

In his astonishing Underland , English writer Robert Macfarlane travels physically far underground into caves, mines, and nuclear waste bunkers, to revive our ancient sense of awe as forces and substances once thought safely confined there begin to exert themselves above ground, but also to convey the enormity of the long shadow we will cast into the future of a planet that has already seen periods of great transformation.

In Timefulness , geologist Marcia Bjornerud argues that understanding the Earth through her discipline’s vastly expanded time-scales can help us avoid the almost unthinkably grave consequences of our actions. We live in an era of time denial, she writes, while navigating towards the future with conceptions of the long patterns of planetary history as primitive as a 14th-century world map. And yet, she writes, “as a daughter, mother, and widow, I struggle like everyone else to look Time honestly in the face.”

Yet here, I think, all around us on the surface of the planet, are our vivacious and inscrutable companions, feathered messengers from deep time, who still tell their own story of complex change.

What lives and dies

At a writer’s festival in northern New South Wales, I remember, a magpie lark landed between the chair and speaker on stage to let forth a cascade of liquid notes, “as if, to say,” a droll friend sitting next to me said, “I too have something to contribute!” while I found myself wondering, yet again, how something with such a small heart could be so alive.

To think about dinosaurs, as evolutionary biologist Steven Brusatte writes , is to confront the question of what lives and what dies. To think that dinosaurs were far more complex than we imagined, Klinkenberg muses, interrupts the chain of consequence we’ve been carrying in our heads, which assumes that deep time’s purpose was to lead to us as the end point of evolution. The history of feathers and wings, in which the power of flight appears to have been discovered and lost at least three times, shows that evolution is not a tree, but a clumped bush. And yet, Klinkenberg writes, “Because we come after, it’s easy to suppose we must be the purpose of what came before.”

The same could be said of mothers. When the time came to choose the photographs for my mother’s funeral, the images of her as a child in Mexico and Canada seemed as unreal as dispatches from the moon. The photographs of our mothers as young girls are so affecting a friend wrote to me, because they show them living lives that were whole without us. Now my own children turn their heads away from pictures of me as a girl, because, they say, “You don’t look like you.” And yet, if our minds struggle to encompass the deep time of our mothers, I think, how can they hope to stretch across aeons?

On my last visit to my mother, I left her on her front step throwing meat to the two magpies which had learned to come around from the backyard, away from the other birds, and would follow her on stilted legs around the garden. When she pressed her emergency pendant the next morning, I missed her call; it was my partner, hearing her faint answers, who called the ambulance. Unconscious in the hospital, she died having never known that she had left her home. When I stopped back at the house afterwards, one of the butcher birds, which I had never seen around the front, was on the windowsill of her dark bedroom, break pressed against the glass, looking for her.

This is an extract from Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss by Delia Falconer, published by Simon and Schuster.

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Essay on Birds for Students, 500 Words Essay

Essay on Birds: Birds are a diverse group of feathered, warm-blooded, egg-laying, and vertebrate animals. They are found all over the world and can be found in a wide range of habitats, from deserts to rainforests, and from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Birds are known for their ability to fly, which is made possible by their lightweight, hollow bones, and powerful muscles.

Essay on Birds

Introduction, types of birds and their characteristics, the role of birds in the ecosystem, threats to bird populations.

Birds have a wide range of physical characteristics, depending on the species. They come in many different shapes, sizes, and colours , and have a variety of beak and feather types. Birds also have specialized adaptations that help them to survive in different environments, such as webbed feet for swimming and talons for hunting.

Birds play an important role in the ecosystem. They are important pollinators, seed dispersers, and pest controllers. They also play a role in the food chain, serving as both predators and prey. Many bird species are migratory, travelling long distances between breeding and wintering grounds.

Birds are facing many threats, including habitat loss, pollution, climate change, and hunting. These threats have led to a decline in bird populations and many species are now considered endangered. Conservation efforts are being made to protect bird populations, such as habitat restoration and protected areas, but more work is needed to ensure their survival.

• Sparrows are small, brown birds with short beaks.
• Eagles have large, powerful bodies and sharp talons for hunting.
• Pigeons are plump, gray birds that are often found in cities.
• Hawks have sharp beaks and talons and are strong flyers.
• Parrots are brightly coloured birds with curved beaks, they are known for their ability to mimic human speech.
• Robins have red breasts and are known for their cheerful, melodic songs.
• Peacocks are large, colourful birds with long tails and are known for their distinctive calls.
• Ostrich is the largest bird in the world with long legs and necks, they can run at high speeds and cannot fly.
• Swans are large, graceful birds with long necks and pure white feathers.
• Hummingbirds are tiny birds known for their rapid wing beats and ability to hover in mid-air while feeding on nectar.

Description of different bird families and their unique characteristics

• Sparrows belong to the family Passeridae and are known for their small size, brown plumage, and short beaks. They are found in a wide range of habitats around the world and are known for their adaptability.
• Eagles belong to the family Accipitridae and are known for their large, powerful bodies and sharp talons. They are found on every continent except Antarctica and are known for their hunting and scavenging abilities.
• Pigeons and doves belong to the family Columbidae and are known for their plump, gray bodies and short beaks. They are found on every continent and are known for their ability to thrive in urban environments.
• Hawks belong to the family Accipitridae and are known for their sharp beaks and talons, and strong flying abilities. They are found in a wide range of habitats around the world and are known for their hunting and scavenging abilities.
• Parrots belong to the family Psittacidae and are known for their brightly coloured plumage and curved beaks. They are found in tropical and subtropical regions around the world and are known for their intelligence and ability to mimic human speech.
• Robins belong to the family Turdidae and are known for their red breasts and cheerful, melodic songs. They are found in wooded areas and suburban gardens in North America and Europe.
• Peacocks belong to the family Phasianidae and are known for their large size, colourful plumage, and long tails. They are found in Asia and are known for their distinctive calls.
• Ostriches belong to the family Struthionidae and are the largest bird in the world. They have long legs and necks and can run at high speeds. They are found in Africa and are known for their flightless nature.
• Swans belong to the family Anatidae and are known for their large size, graceful movements, and pure white feathers. They are found in a wide range of freshwater and coastal habitats around the world.
• Hummingbirds belong to the family Trochilidae, they are known for their tiny size, rapid wing beats, and ability to hover in mid-air while feeding on nectar. They are found in the Americas and are known for their bright colours and high energy.

Birds play a vital role in the ecosystem. They are important pollinators, seed dispersers, and predators that help to control insect and rodent populations. They also provide food for other animals, including mammals, reptiles, and other birds. Some birds are also important indicators of ecosystem health, as changes in their populations or behaviour can signal problems with the environment.

Birds are also important for cultural and aesthetic reasons. They are enjoyed by people for their beauty, songs, and behaviour, and many people participate in birdwatching as a hobby. Birds are also important in many cultures and religions and have played a role in the mythology and folklore of many societies.

Birds also have an ecological role, for example, Some birds such as vultures, eagles, and condors are scavengers and help to clean up dead animal remains. Hawks, falcons, and owls are predators that help control rodent and insect populations. Woodpeckers, nuthatches, and other birds that feed on tree-dwelling insects help to control these pests and protect forest health. Many songbirds are important pollinators and help to fertilize plants by carrying pollen on their feathers as they move from flower to flower. Birds also play a role in seed dispersal, helping to spread the seeds of plants over large areas.

Birds play multiple roles in the ecosystem, such as:

• Pollination: Many songbirds help fertilize plants by carrying pollen on their feathers as they move from flower to flower.
• Seed Dispersal: They help to spread the seeds of plants over large areas, and thus play an important role in plant regeneration and forest health.
• Pest Control: Hawks, falcons, and owls are predators that help control rodent and insect populations. Woodpeckers, nuthatches, and other birds that feed on tree-dwelling insects help to control these pests and protect forest health.
• Scavenging: Some birds such as vultures, eagles, and condors are scavengers and help to clean up dead animal remains.

There are various threats to bird populations, some of the main ones include:

• Habitat loss: The destruction, fragmentation, and degradation of natural habitats such as forests, wetlands, and grasslands is a major threat to bird populations. Many bird species are adapted to specific habitats and are unable to survive when these habitats are destroyed.
• Climate change: Climate change is having a major impact on bird populations. Changes in temperature and precipitation patterns can affect the timing of migration, breeding, and food availability, making it difficult for birds to find the resources they need to survive.
• Invasive species: Non-native plants and animals can outcompete native species for food and habitat, making it harder for native birds to survive. Invasive species can also introduce diseases that can harm native bird populations.
• Pollution: Pollution in the form of pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals can harm birds and their food sources, making it difficult for them to survive.
• Overhunting and poaching: Illegal hunting and poaching can have a significant impact on bird populations, particularly in tropical regions where many species are hunted for their feathers, meat, or eggs.
• Human disturbance: Some birds are also threatened by human disturbances such as light pollution, noise pollution and human encroachment, which can disrupt their breeding, migration and feeding.

Overall, these threats are interconnected, and conservation efforts must address multiple issues in order to be effective in protecting bird populations.

In conclusion, birds play a vital role in the ecosystem and are important for cultural, aesthetic and ecological reasons. However, bird populations are facing many threats such as habitat loss, climate change, invasive species, pollution, overhunting and poaching and human disturbance. These threats are interconnected and must be addressed in order to effectively protect bird populations and maintain the balance of the ecosystem. Conservation efforts such as habitat restoration, protection of breeding and migration sites, regulation of hunting and trapping, and reducing pollution and human disturbance are essential to preserving bird populations and the vital services they provide.

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Essay on Birds in English

Welcome to this essay on birds in English, a realm where you'll uncover the marvels of our winged friends. Birds, as you might know, are exceptionally unique creatures with distinctive traits that make them a crucial part of our world's ecology. From the parrot, one of my favourite birds, to the humble sparrow, each bird possesses a unique characteristic that sets it apart. This Essay on Birds in English For Students & Children  will enlighten you about the various aspects of birds, their significance, and the beauty they bring to our world.

Essay on Birds in English: An Insight into Avian Wonders

Imagine a world without the chirping of birds. Sounds bleak, doesn't it? Birds come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, each designed perfectly for their environment and lifestyle. For instance, vultures and other birds of prey have sharp talons and beaks to consume their catch, while parrots use their curved beaks to crack open seeds. Birds are exceptionally unique creatures, and understanding their variety is key to appreciating their role in nature.

Early Birds Catches Worms: A Glimpse into Their Daily Lives

One of the common phrases you might have heard is, "The early bird catches the worm". This saying stems from the fact that many birds start their day at dawn, searching for food and tending to their young. Birds have warm blood and lay eggs, which means they need consistent energy sources. As a result, early mornings become the ideal time for them to forage, away from the threats of predators. Birds are exceptionally unique in their habits and routines, which makes observing them so fascinating.

Favourite Bird: The Vivacious Parrot

The parrot is one of my favourite birds, and for a good reason. These birds are known for their vibrant colors and their ability to mimic sounds. Found across many parts of the world, parrots have a strong sense of intuition and are known to be highly intelligent. They're social creatures, often seen in groups, chirping, and playing with one another. Parrots, like many other birds, play a vital role in the ecosystem by helping in seed dispersal, thus aiding in the propagation of many tree species.

10 Points Essay on Birds

Birds are vital for numerous reasons. Here are 10 essential points to understand:

• Birds are exceptionally unique creatures with distinctive traits.
• They play a pivotal role in pollination and seed dispersal.
• Many birds migrate long distances, showcasing incredible endurance.
• Their diverse diet helps control pests, benefiting human agriculture.
• Birds have a strong sense of intuition, aiding their survival.
• They come in a variety of colors, sizes, and species, making our world vibrant.
• Birds have warm blood and lay eggs, possessing distinctive reproductive methods.
• Many birds are now threatened due to human activities, emphasizing the need for conservation.
• Bird watching can be a therapeutic activity for humans.
• The study of birds, ornithology, has led to many scientific discoveries.

Essay on Birds FAQs

What creatures are birds.

Birds are vertebrates characterized by feathers, beaks without teeth, oviparous reproduction (laying eggs), and a strong yet lightweight skeleton. They belong to the class Aves and are found globally, from icy polar regions to scorching deserts.

How Many Types of Birds Exist?

There are over 10,000 known bird species in the world, each unique and vital to its habitat. From the tiny hummingbird to the majestic eagle, the world of birds is vast and diverse.

What is the Study of Birds Called?

The study of birds is termed ornithology. It encompasses the study of bird evolution, behavior, physiology, and conservation.

How Do Birds Differ from Humans?

While birds and humans are both vertebrates, birds are adapted for flight, with a beak, feathers, and a lightweight skeleton. They lay eggs and have a different respiratory system compared to humans.

Which Birds are Most Common?

Common birds vary by region. However, sparrows, pigeons, crows, and robins are frequently seen in many parts of the world.

Dos and Don'ts

Do respect the natural habitats of birds. Avoid littering or disturbing nesting sites. Remember, many birds are exceptionally sensitive to changes in their environment.

Don't harm or capture birds. They play a vital role in our ecosystem, and disrupting this can have cascading effects.

Do learn about local birds and their behaviors. This can enhance your understanding and appreciation for these creatures.

Don't introduce invasive species, as they can pose threats to native bird populations.

Final Thoughts

In concluding this essay on birds in English, it's clear that birds, being exceptionally unique creatures, hold immense significance in our world. They add color, sound, and vitality to our surroundings. As stewards of this Earth, it's our responsibility to ensure their survival and appreciate the beauty they bring into our lives. So, the next time you come across a bird, take a moment to appreciate its uniqueness and remember the essential role it plays in the grand tapestry of life.

Useful Resources:  https://www.cpomagazine.com/tech/essay-writing-insights-professional-tips-for-students/

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Simple Essay on Birds in English for Kids and Students (500 & 1000 Words)

Essay on birds for students (1000 words).

Birds, members of the class Aves, are one of the most diverse and captivating groups of animals on Earth. With over 10,000 species found in various ecosystems across the globe, they display a wide range of behaviors, adaptations, and ecological roles.

Birds have long captured the human imagination, serving as symbols of freedom, beauty, and mystery. In this essay on birds , we will explore the world of birds, delving into their evolution, anatomy, behavior, ecological significance, and the unique characteristics that make them so fascinating.

Evolution of Birds

1. origins of flight.

The evolution of birds can be traced back to a group of small, bipedal, feathered dinosaurs known as theropods. Approximately 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic period, these theropods began to develop adaptations for powered flight, ultimately giving rise to the first true birds. Archaeopteryx, a famous fossil from the late Jurassic, is considered an important transitional species, showcasing both reptilian and avian features. The evolution of feathers played a pivotal role in the development of flight, providing both insulation and aerodynamic capabilities.

2. Adaptive Radiation

Following the emergence of true birds, they underwent remarkable adaptive radiation, leading to the diverse avian species we see today. This radiation saw the development of various ecological niches and specialized adaptations, such as beak shapes, wing structures, and feeding strategies, which allowed birds to exploit a wide range of environments, from forests and grasslands to deserts and oceans.

Anatomy and Physiology

1. feathers.

Feathers are perhaps the most iconic feature of birds. They serve multiple functions, including insulation, waterproofing, camouflage, and, of course, flight. Feathers are made of a protein called keratin, the same substance found in human hair and nails. The intricate structure of feathers contributes to their remarkable strength and flexibility, enabling the complex motions required for powered flight.

2. Skeleton and Musculature

The skeletal structure of birds is highly adapted for flight. Hollow bones reduce weight while providing strength, and the fused bones in the avian skeleton contribute to its rigidity. Powerful flight muscles, often constituting a significant portion of a bird’s body mass, enable birds to generate the force necessary for takeoff and sustained flight. Additionally, the unique structure of the avian respiratory system, including air sacs, allows for a continuous flow of oxygen, supporting the high metabolic demands of flight.

Birds are renowned for their exceptional vision. Many species have keen eyesight, with some raptors capable of spotting prey from great heights. The adaptations in their eyes, including a higher number of cones for color vision and a specialized structure called the pecten, enhance their visual capabilities.

Behavior and Communication

1. courtship and mating.

Birds exhibit a remarkable diversity of courtship rituals and displays. From the elaborate plumage of male peacocks to the intricate songs of songbirds, these behaviors play a crucial role in mate selection. Monogamy, polygamy, and even cooperative breeding systems are observed in various bird species, each with its own set of social dynamics.

2. Song and Vocalizations

Birds use vocalizations for a variety of purposes, including territory defense, communication within flocks, and attracting mates. The complexity of bird songs is astounding, with some species capable of mimicking other sounds, including human-made noises. The learning and development of songs in species like songbirds offer valuable insights into the neural basis of complex behavior.

3. Migration

Migration is a behavior observed in many bird species, enabling them to cope with seasonal changes in resource availability. The journeys of migratory birds cover thousands of miles and often involve impressive feats of navigation. Advances in tracking technology have shed light on the intricacies of these long-distance migrations.

Ecology and Conservation

1. ecological roles.

Birds play essential roles in ecosystems as pollinators, seed dispersers, scavengers, and predators. Their interactions with plants, insects, and other animals have far-reaching effects on the structure and function of ecological communities. Birds also contribute to nutrient cycling through their activities, such as nesting and foraging.

2. Threats and Conservation

Despite their ecological significance, many bird species face threats to their survival. Habitat loss, pollution, climate change, and invasive species have led to population declines and extinctions. Conservation efforts, including habitat restoration, captive breeding programs, and international agreements like the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, aim to protect these vital members of our ecosystems.

Notable Bird Species

1. bald eagle.

The bald eagle is an iconic symbol of the United States and a conservation success story. Once endangered due to habitat destruction and the effects of the pesticide DDT, the bald eagle has made a remarkable recovery following protective measures.

2. Albatross

Albatrosses are known for their incredible wingspans and long-distance oceanic flights. They are masters of dynamic soaring, a technique that allows them to cover vast distances with minimal energy expenditure.

3. Hummingbirds

Hummingbirds are renowned for their rapid wing beats, hovering abilities, and iridescent plumage. Their unique feeding behavior involves sipping nectar from flowers while hovering, and they play a crucial role in pollination.

Birds are amazing. They show how animals can change and adapt over time. Birds started out as feathered dinosaurs. Now they fly high in the sky like eagles. Or sing beautiful songs.

Birds do interesting things. Their bodies are complex. They play key roles in nature. So we should protect birds and their homes. This will keep them around for future generations. It will help keep nature in balance.

Birds Essay in English (500 Words)

Introduction: Birds, the feathered denizens of the skies, are a fascinating and diverse group of creatures that have captured the human imagination for millennia.

From the majestic eagle soaring high above the mountains to the tiny hummingbird, hovering delicately by a flower, birds inhabit virtually every corner of our planet, adapting to a wide range of environments and playing vital roles in ecosystems.

In this essay, we will delve deeper into the captivating world of birds, exploring their remarkable adaptations, behaviors, and ecological significance.

The Wonder of Avian Adaptations

1. feathers: nature’s masterpieces.

Feathers are the defining feature of birds, serving multiple functions beyond flight. While they enable powered flight in species like eagles and sparrows, feathers also provide insulation, waterproofing, and camouflage.

Their astonishing diversity includes everything from the iridescent plumes of peacocks to the specialized wing feathers of owls, allowing for silent flight.

2. Beaks and Bills

Birds exhibit a stunning variety of beak shapes and sizes, each finely tuned to their dietary preferences. From the long, probing bills of hummingbirds to the powerful, hooked beaks of raptors, these adaptations enable birds to access and consume a wide range of foods, including nectar, seeds, fish, and insects.

3. Migration Marvels

Many bird species engage in remarkable long-distance migrations, covering thousands of miles. These epic journeys are driven by seasonal changes in resource availability. Navigation and orientation abilities honed over generations allow them to traverse oceans, deserts, and mountains with astonishing precision.

The Symphony of Birdsong

1. communication and song.

Birds are renowned for their vocalizations, with each species having its unique repertoire of calls and songs. These sounds serve various purposes, from attracting mates and defending territories to communicating within flocks and warning of predators.

The songs of birds, such as nightingales and canaries, have inspired human musicians and poets for centuries.

2. Complex Learning

The ability of some bird species, notably songbirds, to learn and imitate songs is a testament to their cognitive prowess. Young birds learn their songs from adult conspecifics, and this process involves the brain regions responsible for learning and memory. Studying this behavior has provided insights into the neural basis of complex learning.

Ecological Significance

1. pollinators and seed dispersers.

Birds play crucial roles in ecosystems as pollinators and seed dispersers. Hummingbirds and sunbirds, for example, are effective pollinators for numerous plant species. Additionally, birds consume fruits and disperse seeds, aiding in the regeneration of forests and the diversity of plant life.

2. Pest Control

Many bird species are voracious insectivores, helping to control insect populations. Barn swallows and purple martins, for instance, consume large numbers of flying insects, benefiting agriculture and reducing the need for chemical pesticides.

Conservation Challenges

1. habitat loss.

Habitat destruction remains one of the most significant threats to bird populations worldwide. Deforestation, urbanization, and agricultural expansion continue to fragment and degrade natural habitats, pushing many species towards endangerment or extinction.

2. Climate Change

Climate change poses additional challenges to bird populations. Shifts in temperature and precipitation patterns can disrupt migration timing, alter food availability, and impact nesting success. Birds must adapt rapidly to these changing conditions, often facing an uphill battle for survival.

The preservation of birds and their habitats is not merely an ecological concern but also a moral and cultural imperative. Conservation efforts, from establishing protected areas and wildlife corridors to reducing pesticide use and promoting sustainable land management practices, are essential to safeguarding avian biodiversity.

Birds, with their stunning adaptations, captivating songs, and vital ecological roles, enrich our lives in countless ways. They remind us of the intricate web of life that connects all living beings on our planet. As stewards of the Earth, it is our responsibility to cherish and protect these feathered wonders, ensuring that the skies continue to be filled with their symphony of life and diversity for generations to come.

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Article Contents

Lay summary, introduction, social science can benefit bird conservation, benefits of, and barriers to, integrating the conservation social sciences with ornithology, toward a culture of disciplinary inclusion, acknowledgments, literature cited.

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Advancing scientific knowledge and conservation of birds through inclusion of conservation social sciences in the American Ornithological Society

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Ashley A Dayer, Jessica C Barnes, Alia M Dietsch, Jacqueline M Keating, Liliana C Naves, Advancing scientific knowledge and conservation of birds through inclusion of conservation social sciences in the American Ornithological Society, Ornithological Applications , Volume 122, Issue 4, 2 November 2020, duaa047, https://doi.org/10.1093/condor/duaa047

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Conservation efforts are shaped by individual and collective human behaviors, cultural norms and values, economic pressures, and political and organizational structures. As such, the conservation social sciences—disciplines that draw on social science theories and approaches to improve conservation efforts—can play a vital role in advancing the science and practice of bird conservation. We connect the rich, ongoing discussion about the vital role of the conservation social sciences to the specific context of bird conservation and make an argument for the importance of proactive inclusion of these sciences in ornithological societies. First, we introduce the conservation social sciences and illustrate how they can improve the design and implementation of conservation programs and policies for birds. Drawing on discussions from a symposium we organized at the 2019 American Ornithological Society (AOS) annual meeting, we encourage the AOS to make institutional changes that could further support the inclusion of conservation social sciences. These changes ideally would include a working group, conference plenaries and themes, and high-quality social science publications, along with support and encouragement for ornithologists and bird conservationists to partake in trainings and collaborate with social scientists. Strategies for how to do so effectively can be adapted from other conservation societies that have paved the way for disciplinary inclusivity.

Los esfuerzos de conservación están orientados por comportamientos humanos individuales y colectivos, normas y valores culturales, presiones económicas y estructuras políticas y organizacionales. De este modo, las ciencias sociales de la conservación—disciplinas que se basan en teorías y enfoques de las ciencias sociales para mejorar los esfuerzos de conservación—pueden jugar un rol fundamental en avanzar la ciencia y la práctica de la conservación de las aves. Vinculamos la rica y continua discusión sobre el rol vital de las ciencias sociales de la conservación con el contexto específico de la conservación de las aves y discutimos la importancia de la inclusión proactiva de estas ciencias en las sociedades ornitológicas. Primero, introducimos a las ciencias sociales de la conservación e ilustramos cómo pueden mejorar el diseño y la implementación de los programas y las políticas de conservación para las aves. Aprovechando las discusiones de un simposio que organizamos en la reunión anual 2019 de la Sociedad Americana de Ornitología (AOS por sus siglas en inglés), alentamos a la AOS a realizar cambios institucionales que podrían apoyar aún más la inclusión de las ciencias sociales de la conservación. Estos cambios deberían idealmente incluir un grupo de trabajo, conferencias plenarias y temas, y publicaciones de las ciencias sociales de alta calidad, junto con apoyo y estímulo para los ornitólogos y los conservacionistas de aves para que participen en entrenamientos y que colaboren con los científicos sociales. Las estrategias para hacer esto de modo eficiente pueden adaptarse a partir de otras sociedades de conservación que han allanado el camino para la inclusión disciplinaria.

• The conservation social sciences investigate how people think and act in relation to biodiversity, including birds and the habitats that support them.

• Application of conservation social science findings can improve the effectiveness of bird conservation.

• The American Ornithological Society and its members can take specific steps to facilitate integration of the conservation social sciences with ornithology.

The dire rate of loss of both rare and common birds ( Rosenberg et al. 2019 ) indicates that knowledge generated from ornithological research alone does not adequately meet the complex challenges of bird conservation in the 21st century. On a planet impacted by human activity in even the most remote locations ( Boivin et al. 2016 ), bird conservation requires effective strategies grounded in understanding people as well as birds ( Dayer et al. 2020 ). After all, conservation is fundamentally about people and the political structures, economic pressures, and cultural norms and values that prompt or preclude individual and collective conservation action ( Mascia et al. 2003 , Balmford and Cowling 2006 ). Human behavior, as well as its drivers and implications for conservation outcomes, are systematically investigated through a suite of disciplines and methods collectively known as the conservation social sciences. Conservation social science disciplines include psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science, among others, and methods include surveys, interviews, experiments, predictive modeling, and more ( Bennett et al. 2017a ). Calls for the incorporation of social sciences into conservation have ranged from enabling managers to understand diverse stakeholders and monitor human attitudes and behaviors ( Decker and Enck 1996 ) to blurring “the edges of conservation biology into a broader conservation science” through “fusion” of the social and natural sciences ( Balmford and Cowling 2006 :694).

Here, we focus on the ability of the conservation social sciences to improve conservation efforts for birds by illustrating the value of applying these sciences in bird conservation. Building on a symposium at the 2019 American Ornithological Society (AOS) annual meeting, we address the barriers to, and benefits of, stronger integration of the conservation social sciences into bird conservation. We provide recommendations for the AOS and individual ornithologists and conservationists to foster the involvement of conservation social scientists in determining how to best address bird conservation challenges in complex systems. We adapt and build upon strategies that have been effective in other conservation societies (e.g., Society for Conservation Biology) that have a longer history of engaging conservation social scientists.

Theories, methods, and insights from the conservation social sciences are indispensable to the conservation of birds, due to the intersection of birds and human cultures, economies, and daily life. Recognition of the importance of studying the economic impacts of birds to society dates back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the field of “economic ornithology” applied primarily biological methods to assess the costs associated with services and disservices of birds ( Whelan et al. 2015 ). As Dayer et al. (2020) recently reviewed for the case of Neotropical birds, addressing many of the most significant contemporary threats to birds, including habitat loss, overharvesting, human–bird conflict, and invasive species, requires better understanding and addressing human behavior. The conservation social sciences can answer questions such as: Why do people care about birds? What motivates behaviors that benefit (e.g., planting native vegetation or keeping house cats indoors) or threaten bird populations (e.g., engaging in illicit pet trade or using harmful pesticides)? Which kinds of messages and methods affect human attitudes and actions toward birds? What are the economic and social benefits of birding and bird-related tourism? And how can policy be structured to support bird conservation across landscapes and geopolitical boundaries? Below, we illustrate the utility of conservation social science using 2 examples of applied conservation contexts in which insights from the conservation social sciences contributed to more effective conservation strategies.

Harvest Management

In the United States, the social sciences have helped bird and human communities thrive through better-informed management of bird harvests. Wild birds remain an important source of food, recreation, and cultural engagement for people around the world ( Whelan et al. 2015 ), and the conservation social sciences have contributed to the sustainable harvest and just governance of these activities. For example, the 1918 U.S. Migratory Bird Treaty Act successfully curtailed commercial overharvest of migratory birds, but it failed to consider the socioeconomic impacts of associated regulations on subsistence harvest by Alaska Native peoples. As issues were raised by indigenous leaders, social science research conducted over several decades played a key role in demonstrating the importance of birds as food and cultural resources in subsistence economies, describing geographic and seasonal harvest patterns, and, ultimately, amending the Treaty to directly include Alaska Native peoples in harvest management and bird conservation ( Wolfe et al. 1990 , Naves et al. 2019 , Alaska Migratory Bird Co-Management Council 2020 ). Contemporary management of sport waterfowl hunting has also benefited from social science insights into geographic variation in hunter perceptions and preferences, resulting in more meaningful, region-specific regulations ( D.J. Case and Associates 2006 ).

Human Disturbance

Conservation social science research has also helped park and beach managers understand and shape the behavior of recreationists to reduce impacts on bird populations and communities. For example, visitor surveys and interviews, messaging analysis, and park observations informed changes to the communication materials used in the network of Redwood National and State Parks in California, USA, about the role of food debris in recruiting predatory Steller’s Jays ( Cyanocitta stelleri ) into the breeding habitat of threatened Marbled Murrelets ( Brachyramphus marmoratus ) ( Ward et al. 2011 ). Comparisons of biological monitoring data collected before and after use of the new communication materials showed declines in the number of Steller’s Jays at park campsites and reduced levels of Marbled Murrelet nest predation ( Goldenberg et al. 2016 ). In other cases, social science research has clarified that increasing knowledge is often not enough to change attitudes or behavior. Jorgensen and Bomberger Brown (2015) evaluated the attitudes of U.S. dog owners toward off-leash dogs on beaches that serve as critical habitat for Piping Plovers ( Charadrius melodus ) and found that frequent visitors were less receptive to proposed conservation actions despite knowing more about threats to Piping Plovers. Instead, encouraging human conservation behavior requires minimizing barriers to conservation action and maximizing benefits through incentives, disincentives, and establishing norms ( Mengak et al. 2019 ). Barriers to leashing dogs include owners’ perceptions that leashing limits dogs exercising and socializing, as well as beliefs that their dogs will respond to voice commands; and perceived benefits often center around better controlling one’s dog and its possible impacts on birds or other people ( Comber and Dayer 2019 ). These insights have been applied in a universal sign campaign on the Atlantic Flyway of the United States and in site-specific outreach efforts.

These examples underscore the promise of understanding the drivers of human behavior and bringing conservation social sciences to bear on challenges typically addressed by the natural sciences alone. Additional examples that demonstrate the breadth and depth of social science applications to bird conservation in a North American context have been compiled by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative (NABCI) at https://nabci-us.org/success-stories/ .

At the 2019 annual meeting of the AOS, we organized a full-day symposium titled “Permeable Boundaries in Biological and Social Sciences: Human Dimensions in Bird Research and Conservation” with 15 presentations demonstrating a range of applications of the conservation social sciences. The session concluded with a facilitated discussion about the integration of the social sciences with ornithology. Symposium participants responded to open-ended questions in real time (using www.mentimeter.com ) about the benefits of, and barriers to, integrating the social sciences with ornithology and bird conservation. Benefits included increasing the relevance of research to on-the-ground avian conservation (particularly through community engagement and communication), expanding knowledge and inquiry by considering diverse ways of knowing, and achieving better scientific and conservation outcomes.

Symposium participants also identified challenges, including a lack of knowledge about the social sciences and the value they contribute, different epistemologies (i.e. ideas about what constitutes scientific knowledge) between natural and social scientists, perceived lack of funding for interdisciplinary research, and uncertainty about how to best work together across disciplines. Although these barriers are substantial, they are not insurmountable or unique to ornithology. In fact, the barriers expressed during our symposium closely align with those noted for the integration of social sciences into conservation more broadly ( Fox et al. 2006 , Bennett et al. 2017b ). Thus, we can draw on lessons learned through ongoing efforts to mainstream conservation social sciences across diverse contexts as we move toward the inclusion of conservation social sciences in avian research and conservation, especially through the efforts of professional societies and their members.

Professional societies—key hubs for defining priorities, informing research agendas, and providing opportunities for learning and networking—have recognized and made strides to meaningfully include the conservation social sciences. Notably, in 2003, Mascia et al. called upon the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) to “highlight the vital importance of the social sciences to conservation through concrete action” (p. 649). The SCB subsequently formed a Social Science Working Group (SSWG), which now engages nearly 2,000 social and natural scientists and practitioners worldwide and provides opportunities for research collaborations and professional development. Social science research is now published in all of SCB’s journals, leading to “conservation and society” being the most common topic in the articles published in Conservation Biology and Biological Conservation since 2000 ( Hintzen et al. 2020 ). Similarly, the social sciences have also been embraced within The Wildlife Society (TWS), a professional association for the management and conservation of wildlife populations and habitats. In 2002, Riley et al. (2002) described a new paradigm for wildlife management based on the integration of biological science and human dimensions. Today, social science articles are published in the society’s journals. Also, the society’s Human Dimensions Working Group routinely coordinates topical sessions and networking events at TWS conferences to build the community of social science researchers and foster connections with wildlife biologists. The activities of these societies demonstrate a common trajectory of incorporating the social sciences into professional societies traditionally focused on the natural sciences.

Drawing on these strategies from other societies, the discussion from our symposium at the AOS meeting, our own experiences working at the intersection of the conservation social sciences and bird conservation, and literature on overcoming barriers to the integration of conservation social sciences, we provide recommendations for further inclusion of conservation social sciences in the work of AOS and individual scientists and conservation professionals.

The Role of AOS

Although the conservation social sciences have not been an explicit focus of ornithological societies to date, avian conservation social science research is already beginning to permeate the activities of the AOS, whose mission includes “promoting a rigorous scientific basis for the conservation of birds.” Specific steps that would support further integration of the conservation social sciences into AOS activities include:

Provide institutional support in the form of an AOS statement calling for the application of conservation social sciences for bird conservation and clarifying that social scientists are encouraged to fully participate in the society in ways such as attending meetings, publishing in AOS journals, and competing for awards and grants.

Establish a working group tasked with developing a plan to better support the integration of conservation social sciences in AOS activities, including addressing barriers to this integration. Such a social science working group could follow the successful approaches established by other societies.

Further encourage publication of conservation social science research in AOS journals, such as those published in The Condor: Ornithological Applications (e.g., Epps 2014 , Belaire et al. 2015 , Naves et al. 2019 , Dayer et al. 2020 ). As of fall 2019, The Condor specifically calls for social science research in support of its goal of publishing scientific theory and methods applied to bird conservation, management, and policy ( AOS 2020 ). Proactively publicizing that The Condor now accepts social science through communication channels that reach conservation social scientists (e.g., Tweets with the hashtag #consocsci) could encourage prospective authors to submit appropriate articles.

Ensure the scientific rigor of submitted conservation social sciences papers through evaluation following discipline-specific standards, such as correct application of social science theory and use of established methods for data collection, reporting, and analysis in social science research. This requires recruiting an adequate number of editors and reviewers with social science training and expertise ( Teel et al. 2018 ). A requirement that social science research submitted to the journal must follow human subjects ethical standards is also needed.

Purposefully include themes and plenaries focused on human dimensions in AOS conferences and cosponsor such activities in conservation social science conferences. Sessions on human dimensions and social sciences, such as the one we hosted in 2019, increasingly occur as part of ornithology meetings ( Dayer et al. 2020 ). To support the inclusion of traditional and indigenous knowledge, AOS can invite expert speakers and culture bearers, encourage presentations on traditional ecological knowledge, and facilitate copresentations by interdisciplinary and cross-cultural speakers. AOS can also promote training, workshops, and resources focused on social science methods and tools via AOS communication channels and conferences.

The Role of Scientists and Bird Conservation Professionals

While institutional change through AOS and other ornithological societies plays a key role in addressing barriers to the integration of the conservation social sciences with ornithology, individual scientists and bird conservation professionals can also facilitate disciplinary inclusion.

Learn more about social science theories and methods relevant to bird conservation by accessing published literature and attending webinars or in-person trainings. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Conservation Training Center has archived over 20 conservation social science broadcasts including 3 specific to bird conservation, which were cohosted by the NABCI ( https://nctc.fws.gov/resources/knowledge-resources/video-gallery/human-dimensions.html ). Through these trainings, individuals can meet future collaborators and consider applications of the social sciences to their own research or applied conservation efforts.

Proactively engage with social scientists. For example, individual ornithologists and applied conservation practitioners can facilitate participation of social scientists in ornithological meetings, especially through invitations to present in sessions or symposia.

Develop research collaborations with social scientists. Conducting quality social science research requires unique expertise and training ( Martin 2020 ); consequently, working across natural and social science boundaries requires better understanding of disciplinary norms and assumptions, but can result in greater research impact ( Cooper and Larson 2020 ).

With social science collaborators, access funding opportunities available for interdisciplinary socio-ecological research (e.g., National Science Foundation’s Dynamics of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems (DISES) program [ https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=13681 ]; National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center [ https://www.sesync.org ]).

Get involved with or follow the communication channels of efforts focused on integrating the social sciences and bird conservation such as the NABCI Human Dimensions Subcommittee or the North American Waterfowl Management Plan Human Dimensions Working Group.

In the past 2 decades, AOS has led important changes to advance knowledge and conservation of birds, including envisioning its active role in conservation ( Fitzpatrick 2002 ) and conservation science arbitration ( Walters et al. 2014 ). This journal issue marks the beginning of a concerted effort by AOS to include the conservation social sciences in The Condor: Ornithological Applications . We invite ornithologists and conservation practitioners around the world to engage with this initiative as another opportunity to expand our collective capacity for successful avian conservation. Cultural, legal, political, economic, and other social conditions will continue to influence both the status of bird populations and the feasibility and success of conservation efforts. Comprehensive avian science and conservation is impossible without understanding and working alongside the diverse human communities that are inextricably connected to birds.

We thank the presenters and participants of the human dimensions symposium held during the 2019 American Ornithological Society meeting for sharing their insights and enthusiasm. The Editor-in-Chief provided useful feedback on an early draft of the manuscript, as well as our submission to the journal. Additionally, we thank the Associate Editor and 2 anonymous reviewers for their comments, which improved our manuscript.

Funding statement: The USDA Forest Service (Grant Contract 16-DG-11132544-022) and North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission (Grant Contract AT-32732) provided support for Barnes’s contributions to this manuscript. Contributions by Naves and Keating were funded by the Divisions of Wildlife Conservation (Reimbursable Services Agreement 1166085) and Subsistence of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Migratory Bird Management, Alaska Region (Cooperative Agreement F17AC00179).

Author contributions: All authors conceived of this paper. All authors contributed to the writing and editing of the article with A.A.D. coordinating the writing effort and developing the first draft.

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Essay on Conservation of Nature for Students and Children

500+ words essay on conservation of nature.

Nature has provided us numerous gifts such as air , water, land, sunlight , minerals, plants, and animals. All these gifts of nature make our earth a place worth living. Existence on Earth would not be possible without any of these. Now, while these natural resources are present on Earth in plenty. Unfortunately, the necessity of most of these has increased extremely over the centuries due to growth in the human population.

What is Conservation of Nature?

Conservation of nature means the preservation of forests, land, water bodies, and minerals, fuels, natural gases, etc. And to make sure that all these continue to be available in abundance. Thus all these natural resources make life worth living on Earth. Life would not be imaginable without air, water, sunlight as well as other natural resources present on the earth.

Thus, it is essential to conserve these resources in order to retain the environment integral. Here is a look at the types of natural resources existing on Earth and the ways to conserve these:

Types of Natural Resources:

• Renewable Resources : These are resources such as air, water, and sunlight that refill naturally.
• Non-Renewable Resources: These are resources like fossil fuels and minerals that do not restock reform very slowly.
• Biotic: These originate from living beings and organic material like plants and animals.
• Abiotic: These come from non-living things and non-organic material. These comprise air, water, and land as well as metals like iron, copper, and silver.

Natural resources are also categories such as actual resources, reserve resources, stock resources and potential resources based on their development stage.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How to Conserve Nature and Its Resources?

Many of the natural resources are being used at a faster rate as compared to their speed of production. There is so a necessity for conservation of nature and the natural resources it offers. Here are some of the ways in which these resources can be conserved:

Reduce Water Consumption

Water is available in abundance on Earth . This is one of the reasons people do not consider much before using it. However, if we keep using it at this speed. In the future, we may not be left with as much of it. Therefore, simple things such as turn off the tap while brushing or reuse the leftover water to water the plants can help in this direction.

Reduce Usage of Electricity

Use only as much energy as you require. It is thus advised to limit the usage of electricity. Simple habits such as turning off the lights before parting your room, turn off the electric appliances after use.  Switching to energy-saving fluorescent or LED bulbs can make a change.

Restrict Usage of Paper

Paper manufacturing depends only on trees. Increasing the use of paper means encouraging deforestation . This is one of the key reasons for concern is in today’s time Always ensure you use only as much paper as necessary. Stop taking print outs and use e-copies instead to do your bit.

Use Newer Agricultural Methods

The government must aware the methods such as mixed cropping, crop rotation. Also, the government should teach the minimum use of pesticides, insecticides. Appropriate use of manures , bio-fertilizers, and organic fertilizers to the farmers.

Spread Awareness

Spreading awareness about the conservation of nature is always a necessary step. It can be achieved only when more and more people understand its importance and the ways in which they can help. Besides this, it is essential to plant more and more tress. It is necessary to contribute towards lowering air pollution. We must use shared transport and employing rainwater harvesting systems to conserve nature.

Nature comprises of everything that surrounds us. The trees, forests, rivers, rivulets, soil, air all are the part of nature. Keeping nature and its resources integral. So, it is very important for the continuation of life on earth. It would be difficult to imagine life on earth, which has a spoiled natural environment.

Therefore, taking appropriate steps to conserve nature in its untouched form. It must be a priority for the human race. Only human beings with their power and ability can save nature in its purest forms.

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These Birds Are National Symbols but Getting Harder to See

The populations of some Latin American birds are declining, even in the countries they symbolize.

An Indigenous man seated near an Andean condor at Puracé National Natural Park in Colombia. The condor is a sacred bird for many Indigenous communities and is Colombia’s national bird. Credit... Luis Robayo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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By Elaine Chen

• March 8, 2024

The American tropics are uniquely blessed with birds. Thirty-six percent of the world’s 11,000 bird species live in the region south of the border between the United States and Mexico, more than in Asia or Africa.

That diversity is reflected in the national birds chosen to represent the countries of Latin America, from the slight southern lapwing — Uruguay’s avian symbol — to the 30-pound Andean condor, the national bird of four countries. Some birds carry Indigenous cultural importance; others were once ubiquitous in, or are endemic to, their countries.

But an increasingly common characteristic is a decline in their numbers, sometimes even in the nations they represent.

Golden eagle (Mexico)

Every child in Mexico learns the story: During nomadic times, the Aztecs had a prophecy that they should settle in a place where they saw an eagle eating a snake while perched on a cactus. That sighting led to the founding of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, later Mexico City.

The golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) can be found in Russia, Central Asia, Europe and the Americas. Mexico is the eagle’s southernmost range, according to Ernesto Ruelas Inzunza, an ecologist at the University of Veracruz. Although the bird is featured on items like coins and soccer jerseys, it is endangered in Mexico, and its population is probably shrinking .

Recent estimates suggest that there may be only about 200 adult birds left in Mexico, Dr. Ruelas said, although more formal nationwide surveys need to be conducted.

“It’s a beautiful bird, and it’s well ingrained in our history,” Dr. Ruelas said. “But we don’t see them very often.”

Resplendent quetzal (Guatemala)

Habitat loss is a major factor in the decline of bird populations across the region. Around 13 percent of forest in Latin America and the Caribbean has been lost in the last 30 years, primarily because of agriculture and cattle ranching. Brazil accounts for most of that loss, but Guatemala alone lost more than 26 percent of its forests 1.25 million hectares — from 1990 to 2020.

That change has had a stark effect on Guatemala’s national bird, the resplendent quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno), which breeds in high-elevation cloud forests and feeds in lower-elevation forests.

The quetzal’s iridescent green feathers adorned Quetzalcoatl, the serpent-headed god of the Aztecs and the Maya, and were once used as money; the currency of modern Guatemala is called the quetzal. But the quetzal’s habitat requirements and reliance on varieties of avocado make it vulnerable to climate change and deforestation. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has classified the resplendent quetzal’s population as near threatened .

Andean condor (Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador)

Across most of the world, the Andean condor (Vultur gryphus) is identified by a version of its Quechua name, kuntur . It is one of the largest flying birds, has a 10-foot wingspan, and weighs up to 33 pounds. Bolivia and Chile are strongholds for the species, but the population as a whole is vulnerable, and the condor barely has a presence in Colombia and Ecuador. A survey in 2015 by the Andean Condor Foundation estimated that only around 100 adults remained in Ecuador.

Despite the bird’s importance in some Indigenous cultures — it is thought that condors carried souls to heaven — it is hunted and poisoned, typically by farmers concerned about their livestock. Condors compete with feral dogs to find carrion, and have sometimes resorted to killing baby cows.

“That’s a big problem with raptors in places where local communities are close by,” said Eliana Montenegro, a conservation officer based in Ecuador with BirdLife International.

The intimidating features and size of raptors, such as the golden eagle, the condor and Panama’s harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja), make them charismatic national symbols but can also attract human persecution.

Southern lapwing (Uruguay) Rufous hornero (Argentina)

The southern lapwing (Vanellus chilensis) and the rufous hornero (Furnarius rufus), both of which prefer grasslands and pastures, have actually benefited from the conversion of woodlands into farms and cattle ranches.

Common birds like these still have a role in mobilizing support for conservation efforts, said Luis Miguel Renjifo, a conservation biologist at the Pontifical Javeriana University.

Most Argentines can easily find their national bird, the hornero — named for the oven like clay nests, or horneros, it builds — even in the parks of Buenos Aires. “They get people excited,” Dr. Renjifo said. “It brings that connection between birds and people.”

Scarlet macaw (Honduras)

With so many beautiful birds in Latin America, poaching for the international pet market has become a significant problem, including for the scarlet macaw (Ara macao).

The ancient Maya believed that macaws could travel between Earth and heaven, and their colorful feathers adorned the Maya and Aztec elite. Today those feathers — as well as the bird’s tolerance for captivity and its ability to mimic human voices — make macaws a desirable pet that can fetch upward of $3,000.

Populations are dwindling in much of Central America, and the scarlet macaw is vulnerable in Honduras. But it has made some recent progress in the region , thanks to forest preservation efforts; programs like Macaw Mountain , which combines tourism with conservation; and arrangements, like one in the Mosquitia region, that pay former hunters to become stewards .

But those accomplishments remain tenuous.

Can a symbol galvanize conservation efforts?

Understanding species population trends requires long-term data collection, and conservation efforts can take decades to yield results.

“It has required resources that have not been available in a lot of the countries where most biodiversity exists,” said Viviana Ruiz-Gutierrez, co-director of the Center for Avian Population Studies at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

And the decline of a species in one country is less likely to attract international funding if the bird’s global population is not concerning.

Still, Dr. Ruelas and other scientists hope that the local decline of bird species, especially those that are national symbols, will prompt the public to participate in monitoring efforts or support research and conservation policies.

“A symbol of national identity should be something that makes us work together,” Dr. Ruelas said.

Elaine Chen joined The Times in 2017 from WNYC public radio. Before media, she was a lawyer for the New York City government. She now works on Times events. More about Elaine Chen

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The Surprisingly Long History of the Movement to Make Buildings Safer for Birds

One of New York City’s little-known and mostly unseen wonders is that, in the dark of night during spring and fall, millions of birds fly directly over Manhattan on a migration path that their ancestors have been traveling for millennia. For some, the journey stops short here: Astonishingly, the city sees nearly 250,000 bird deaths from collisions with glass every year.  

As a bird enthusiast, I knew that the city’s position on the Atlantic Flyway makes it a risky place—that the built environment and a preponderance of glass create a dystopian house of mirrors for migrants drawn in and disoriented by electric lights. But I didn’t grasp the problem’s scale until, in 2020, I stumbled across a photo on social media of 26 birds that struck one building in a single morning. In an instant, the abstract idea of window collisions became concrete. I couldn’t remain a passive witness.

That fall, I began volunteering to log collisions with New York City Audubon’s Project Safe Flight . Started in 1997, the community science initiative puts boots on the ground during migration season to record birds injured or killed by window strikes. As with similar efforts around the country, trained volunteers walk prescribed routes at deadly hotspots citywide to collect comprehensive data about the victims they encounter. NYC Audubon uses the information to support advocacy, legislation, and research. 

When I first started leaving my house before dawn to comb the sidewalks around a cluster of buildings in downtown Manhattan, I was optimistically naive. I imagined Disney princess moments of swooping in to rescue injured warblers and sparrows. The actual narrative was much darker.

Though the city is barely simmering when I start, each morning is hectic: a race against building staff who sweep up evidence of window strikes and an awakening surge of cars, pedestrians, and cyclists, as well as hungry squirrels, gulls, and curious dogs. Searching sidewalks, awnings, and streets, I place injured birds in individual paper bags and collect dead birds in another sack. When I’m done, I take a 30-minute subway ride to drop off patients at Wild Bird Fund, the city’s only wildlife rehabilitation clinic, before heading back downtown to start my workday (my office is housed in one of the very buildings I monitor). Unfortunately, roughly 7 out of 10 birds I find are dead, and many I rescue eventually succumb to injuries.

Like other collision monitors I know, I now have dozens of slow-motion scenes etched in my memory. I see the Northern Flicker cartwheeling through the air to the pavement, shuddering, and then dying in my hands. I replay the giant lump of a Chuck-will’s-widow, a near-threatened oddity I never expected to observe alive in the woods, let alone dead in downtown Manhattan on a cool April morning. I rewind my recollections to see a squirrel devouring a stunned warbler, and the aghast face of a pedestrian as she registers that she just kicked a songbird down the sidewalk. 

Yet no scene haunts me more than that of September 14, 2021. Until then, I had collected at most a handful of birds along any single facade. As I exited the subway that morning, I saw dark shapes in every direction from half a block away, as if someone had strewn sacks of birds across the sidewalks. I’m not easily rattled, but for the first 10 minutes, all I could do was murmur, “Oh my god,” as my trembling hands scooped up carcasses. Across four World Trade Center towers, over a 92-minute whirlwind, I picked up 229 dead birds (primarily warblers), photographed another 40 on out-of-reach awnings, and collected 29 birds with injuries. Reports indicate that my tally was just a fraction of the citywide toll, all victims of what I learned was an unfortunate confluence of conditions: stormy, low-visibility weather; a heavy migration pulse; and brightly lit buildings serving as lethal beacons in the dark.

ack home, in a surreal stupor, I shared my photos and a video to social media, thinking local birders might see them. Instead, local, national, and international media picked them up, making my day one of the most publicized mass-collision events in recent New York City history. My online followers surged, and the rest of September became a blur of interviews. I’d unintentionally become a spokesperson for the issue, though I was far from an expert. At some point during the commotion, a friend at the Wildlife Conservation Society sent me an account detailing a similar event that they’d come across—only this mass collision had occurred 135 years earlier.

I was perplexed. I thought bird strikes were a modern issue, born of our love of glassy skyscrapers and bright cities. I wanted to know more about the origins and evolution of the city’s collision problem, and I figured diving into the past might also help me grapple with the emotional impact of the work and make me a better advocate.

I turned to Dustin Partridge, director of conservation and science at NYC Audubon, to understand why birds are drawn to this urban expanse in the first place. He helped me picture my lower Manhattan route as it existed centuries ago: a thick stand of hickory and chestnut trees amid a rich mix of waterways, wetlands, and upland habitats. Birds stopped to rest and refuel on their migratory journeys, which they navigated with the help of the planet’s magnetic field, as well as the moon, stars, and landscape features illuminated in the otherwise pitch-dark night. It’s just bad luck for birds that cities tend to develop in biodiversity havens. “The same things that make a landmass or an area good for people are also usually good for birds,” Partridge says. “These long-term routes are ingrained over millennia...they are not just going to stop flying along the flyway because the city is here.”

In fact, because of our lights, the modern city may attract  a higher density of migrants today than the area did centuries ago. Scientists still don’t know exactly why artificial illumination entices and disorients birds, says Andrew Farnsworth, a migration ecologist and visiting scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, but the answer is likely buried deep in evolutionary history. What has never been a mystery is that our illuminated cities coupled with man-made structures make a fatal combination: Our bright skies draw in wild birds, and the hazards we’ve erected kill them. 

Early reports of avian collisions in North America date back to oil-fueled lighthouses in use well before the advent of electricity. But when Thomas Edison famously electrified lower Manhattan with incandescent bulbs in 1882, he sealed a grim fate. Four years later, the Statue of Liberty opened and began operating as the country’s first electric lighthouse. Her illuminated torch, poised 305 feet above sea level, was a beacon for passing ships and a lure for passing birds. For years, reports poured in of disoriented birds that either collapsed from exhaustion or collided with the structure (including the mass-collision event my friend had sent me). However, “thanks to the protests of bird lovers and especially half-dazzled pilots of passing vessels,” as naturalist William Beebe later wrote, Lady Liberty’s lights were eventually adjusted some decades later and collisions subsided.  

Even as that landmark’s threat diminished, many more bright lights rose to fill the darkness as new technologies allowed architects to design taller buildings. Opened in 1931 and topped with a searchlight shortly after, the Empire State Building became the site of dramatic collisions that made the news with surprising frequency. Again, advocates successfully spoke out: In the late 1950s, working with the National Audubon Society, the Empire State Building began turning off lights during migration.

By the time planners envisioned the original World Trade Center towers in the 1960s, advances in air conditioning allowed buildings to use expansive glass designs without overheating. This design trend compounded the problem: more illuminated buildings at night and more deadly illusions of sky and vegetation in the day. By then, wildlife groups were taking a proactive approach.

In 1967 The New York Times quoted members of the Linnaean Society of New York, who warned that the Twin Towers would “do incalculable damage to our night-migrating birds.” Nonetheless, the soaring structures—and their 600,000 square feet of glass—opened in the 1970s and, as predicted, bird fatalities ensued.

But the Linnaean Society was wrong: The toll was in fact calculable; there just were no organized efforts to conduct the necessary surveys. At least not yet. 

or years, Financial District worker Rebekah Creshkoff had been finding dead birds near her office. She wasn’t the only person to do so but was unique in that she couldn’t let it go. In 1997 she contacted Toronto’s Fatal Light Awareness Program Canada, which four years earlier became the first collision-prevention project in North America, and told its co-founder, Michael Mesure, that she wanted to get building managers to take action. “He had a good chuckle at my naivete,” Creshkoff recalls. Nobody was going to turn out their lights, he advised her, without evidence of the problem.

Creshkoff began surveying every morning, though she, like me, found it hard to encounter so much death. “Initially I really had to drag myself down there. I just wanted to wave a magic wand and have the issue be fixed,” she says. Creshkoff recruited a few others to help and joined forces with NYC Audubon, which has been running what became Project Safe Flight ever since. 

By 2000, their data already made a dent: Surveys pinpointed 2 World Trade Center’s most lethal area—an expanse of glass that reflected nearby trees—and building management agreed to put up barely visible fine-mesh netting along the first-floor windows. The simple intervention reduced collision deaths by about 65 percent, and in May 2001, more netting went up on other problem areas of the towers.

Though the September 11 attacks destroyed the buildings months later, the campaign’s remarkable start, marked by collaboration and momentum, went on to inform a much larger local movement. Since its early days, Project Safe Flight has marshaled more than 1,000 volunteers in total, says Jessica Wilson, NYC Audubon’s executive director. In 2014 the group also launched dBird.org to crowdsource collision reports, a project that has expanded across the continent.

Armed with numbers, solutions, and volunteers spread across communities, NYC Audubon has persuaded managers and owners of a wide range of buildings and sites to alter or dim their lighting and mitigate their glass, often with the simple addition of unobtrusive grid-pattern film. Some redesigns have gone much further: Wilson points to the 2013 bird-friendly overhaul at the sprawling and especially fatal Jacob K. Javits Convention Center as a successful stand-out , one that became a model for others. As I travel around the boroughs, I am heartened by a growing patchwork of bird-deterring patterns on glass—a hotel here, a condominium building there. Downtown, my data and documentation have played a role in installing window collision film on some truly diabolical expanses.

Meanwhile, the records collected during more than 25 years of Project Safe Flight— along with those from dozens of other local monitoring and advocacy programs that now exist across the country—have been instrumental in moving solutions beyond piecemeal actions to a far larger scale. Scientists understand more than ever about what causes the greatest lethal risk. For example, while skyscrapers have historically received the most attention and may harm more birds per building, data make it clear that glass on lower levels and on lower-rise buildings and homes—especially when it reflects vegetation—takes a greater overall toll.

Today, New York City leads the nation in bird-friendly legislation. In 2019, a coalition of advocates won one of the country’s strongest ordinances, which requires that new and significantly renovated buildings use materials that reduce collision risk. “Beyond saving birds in New York City, Local Law 15 inspired similar requirements across the country and helped expand the market for bird-friendly glass, lowering prices and making it more accessible,” Wilson says. A pair of bills enacted in 2022 require city-owned and -managed buildings to turn off nonessential outdoor lights during migration and use motion sensors to minimize lights inside. A groundbreaking proposal to apply similar rules to privately owned commercial buildings was introduced by a city council member in 2023.

Beyond New York City, dozens of municipalities and states have passed a range of policies, while advocates are pushing for stronger actions at all levels, including in New York State and in Congress . From my perch, progress can’t come quickly enough. 

n a landmark 2019 study, scientists estimated that North America had lost 3 billion birds since 1970—a nearly 30 percent decline. For many of us dedicated to picking up broken birds from sidewalks, those losses are ever-present and dispiriting. Over seven monitoring seasons since 2020, I’ve documented nearly 1,800 window-struck birds on what I call my “sad birding” roster of nearly 80 species, including many considered vulnerable and near-threatened. When I think of warblers still hitting windows that Creshkoff patrolled decades ago, I want to retire my collision backpack and move to the woods.

But to give up hope would be to give up on birds, and local advocates agree that it’s important to persevere. Window collisions are a severe issue and contribute to the loss of avian populations across North America, Partridge points out. “But I’m optimistic,” he says, “because it is something that we can relatively easily fix.” 

And it’s crucial that I not think of my monitoring in a vacuum. I’m a small link in a long chain going back more than 135 years. Through the efforts of many, the deadliest structures are being made safer. And in recent decades we’ve become even more organized in a growing grassroots movement.

Social media and the press, meanwhile, play a key role in increasing general awareness beyond dedicated bird advocates, planting seeds for further change. After my publicity in 2021, not only was I recognized by a stranger as “the dead bird lady from Twitter”—the perfect epitaph!—but it’s also not unusual for downtown residents walking kids to school to wave me down and hand over an injured bird or for community members and building workers to lament to us volunteers about dead birds they see.

Making large-scale progress may be a long game, and getting everybody on board is unfortunately complicated, but the idea of saving hundreds of thousands of birds a year in New York alone makes the tough parts worthwhile. While Manhattan will never revert to forest and wetlands, I know we can at least be better hosts to birds as they travel through, heeding the call of migration for millennia to come.

This story originally ran in the Spring 2024 issue as “Reflections of a Bird Collision Monitor.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by  making a donation today .

Pledge to stand with Audubon to call on elected officials to listen to science and work towards climate solutions.

Essay on Birds

Students are often asked to write an essay on Birds in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Birds

Introduction.

Birds are fascinating creatures that can fly. They are warm-blooded, have feathers, lay eggs, and have a beak. They exist in various sizes and colors.

Diversity of Birds

There are around 10,000 species of birds worldwide. They range from tiny hummingbirds to large ostriches. Each species has unique features and behaviors.

Importance of Birds

Birds play an essential role in the ecosystem. They help in pollination, seed dispersal, and controlling pests. They are also an important source of food for some animals.

Threats to Birds

Birds face threats like habitat loss, pollution, and climate change. Conservation efforts are necessary to protect them.

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250 Words Essay on Birds

Birds, a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves, are a diverse and fascinating aspect of our natural world. Their distinct features, such as feathers, beaks, and their ability to fly, set them apart from other animal classes.

Evolution and Diversity

Birds are believed to have evolved from theropod dinosaurs during the Mesozoic Era, around 150 million years ago. This evolutionary history is evident in the fossil record, which shows a gradual transition from reptilian to avian characteristics. Today, there are approximately 10,000 bird species worldwide, each exhibiting unique adaptations to their specific environments.

Morphology and Adaptations

Birds possess a lightweight skeleton, a high metabolic rate, and a four-chambered heart, all adaptations for flight. Their beaks, devoid of teeth, reduce weight while serving diverse functions such as hunting, pecking, and feeding. Feathers, another significant adaptation, provide insulation, enable flight, and play a role in courtship displays.

Behavior and Ecology

Birds exhibit a wide range of behaviors, from solitary to social, with complex mating rituals and nesting habits. They also play crucial ecological roles, such as seed dispersers and pollinators, influencing the health of ecosystems.

Conservation

Despite their importance, birds face numerous threats, including habitat loss, climate change, and pollution. Consequently, conservation efforts are crucial to ensure their survival and the preservation of biodiversity.

In conclusion, birds are an integral part of our planet’s biodiversity. Their evolutionary history, unique adaptations, and ecological roles underscore their significance, while their conservation challenges remind us of our responsibility towards these fascinating creatures.

500 Words Essay on Birds

Introduction to the world of birds.

Birds are one of the most diverse and fascinating groups of animals on Earth, with over 10,000 known species inhabiting every corner of the globe. From the smallest hummingbird to the largest ostrich, each species is uniquely adapted to its environment and lifestyle, showcasing the beauty and variety of nature’s creations.

Evolution and Adaptation

Birds first appeared during the Mesozoic Era, around 150 million years ago, descending from theropod dinosaurs. Over time, they have evolved and adapted in response to environmental changes. For instance, the development of feathers, initially for insulation, later played a crucial role in flight. Similarly, beak shapes have diversified to suit different feeding habits, from the sharp raptor beaks designed for tearing flesh to the long, slender beaks of nectar-feeding hummingbirds.

The Marvel of Avian Flight

One of the most remarkable features of birds is their ability to fly. This capability has allowed them to colonize habitats worldwide, from the icy poles to the scorching deserts. Avian flight relies on a suite of adaptations, including lightweight, hollow bones, powerful flight muscles, and asymmetrical flight feathers. The precise mechanics of flight vary between species, reflecting their different ecological niches and life strategies.

Birds and Ecosystem Services

Birds play vital roles in ecosystems. They act as pollinators, seed dispersers, and scavengers, contributing to plant propagation, forest regeneration, and nutrient cycling. Birds also help control pest populations, benefiting agriculture and forestry. Moreover, they serve as bioindicators, reflecting the health of ecosystems, which is crucial for biodiversity conservation and environmental management.

Threats and Conservation

Despite their ecological significance, birds face numerous threats, primarily due to human activities. Habitat loss, climate change, pollution, and overexploitation have led to population declines and extinctions. Consequently, bird conservation has become a pressing issue. Efforts include habitat protection, captive breeding, and reintroduction programs, alongside legislation to regulate hunting and trade. Public education is also vital to raise awareness and foster appreciation for these remarkable creatures.

The Cultural Significance of Birds

Beyond their ecological roles, birds have profound cultural significance. They feature in myths, folklore, and religious beliefs worldwide, symbolizing everything from peace and freedom to wisdom and prophecy. Birds also inspire art, music, and literature, enriching our cultural landscapes and deepening our connection with nature.

In conclusion, birds are a testament to the remarkable diversity and adaptability of life on Earth. Their ecological roles, evolutionary history, and cultural significance make them a captivating subject of study. However, with the increasing threats they face, it is more important than ever to appreciate and protect these avian wonders. As we continue to learn more about birds, we are reminded of our responsibility to safeguard our shared planet and its incredible biodiversity.

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About Bird Conservation

Updated 10 June 2022

Subject Americas ,  Learning ,  Zoology

Downloads 48

Category Education ,  World

Topic Birds ,  Mexico ,  Study

The primary goal of this research is to locate one of four viable sites for bird protection in four different areas of Belize: Punta Gorda, Cockscomb Basin, Belmopan, and Gallon Jug. Belize is located in Central America, between Mexico and Guatemala, on the Caribbean Sea. The geographical coordinates are 17°15'N 88°45'W, and the tropical climate is hot and humid, with approximately 59% forest. This region's tropical climate is hot and humid, with about 90% of the land covered in trees. The assessment of the four locations is based upon the vegetation diversity of each area, the identified bird species, and the number of individuals in every species of birds (CIA, 2017).Data collection and methodsThree types of data were collected:  point count method whereby 10 minutes at each station, observers wrote down the species of birds and number; MacKinnon method in which observers wrote down 10 species of birds found, then moved to next station and repeated for 15 stations; and vegetation data whereby GIS mapping to record how many hectares of each vegetation type found at the regional level and parcel level. The frequency and number of each bird location were determined using the bird data spreadsheet. The species are then categorized by dominance into frequencies greater than ten individuals. The procedure mentioned above offers the basis for which location could be awarded the most significant conservation benefit.Analysis techniques The Point count method data used the PAST software to determine the diversity indices. This enabled the reflection of how many various types of bird species there are in a dataset and instantaneously considers how consistently the individuals are distributed among those categories. The MacKinnon data used excel to create a species line graph, and the vegetation data was calculated into percentages and presented as pie charts. ReferenceCIA, C. (2017). The World Factbook — Central Intelligence Agency. Cia.gov. Retrieved 4 October 2017, from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/bh.html

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• Conservation of Nature Essay

Essay on Conservation of Nature

Conservation of Nature is one of the most important essays writing topics for students of all classes. The need for conservation of nature and various measures for conservation of natural resources are included in the academic syllabus for almost all classes. Our subject matter experts at Vedantu have prepared an informative essay on the topic of Conservation of Nature, which will act as a guideline for the practice purpose of kids and students. The essay is written in an easy-to-understand manner, so as to help the kids to learn and remember the important points for writing this essay. 

Essay 1: Nature is a blessing 

Nature is the source of energy, source of light, source of oxygen, and in turn, source of life. We are nothing without nature and its components. With an increase in human growth and science, we tend to focus on everything but nature. Building bridges, cities, buildings are not only development but also a setback for nature because all we end up doing is cutting off trees, erasing the environment, and creating a ruckus for nature.

Nature has been providing us with everything, be it water, rain, sunlight, oxygen, shelter, or whatnot. In short, nature is the solution to almost all problems. All we need to do is prevent the human race from obliterating to further obliterate nature. The process of doing this is generally known as conservation. We need to conserve nature, we need to conserve life.

Conserving nature is one way of storing something fruitful for our future self, or the future generation. It is like investing money in a bank, which in turn lets you have more than what you invested eventually. 

To conserve nature would be equal to conversing with the human race. We need to start thinking about it. It might seem like a small or negligent topic to talk about but honestly, nature is getting worse with every passing day and we have to start preserving it today.

There is not much needed to conserve nature. We don't have to give in our everything or leave other things to achieve this one goal, no. All we have to do is take small steps, every day. Small steps like trying to save even one ounce of water each day, or trying to plant at least one plant from your side, or trying to lessen air pollution from your side. Nature doesn't ask much from us.

To achieve this goal, we also need to know to have knowledge about a few other things such as our natural resources. Natural resources are classified into two groups, named, Renewable and Non-RenewableNon Renewable resources. 

Renewable resources are those resources that can be recharged, such as solar panels, geothermal, and so on. On the other hand, Non-renewable petrol renewable resources are the ones that cannot be recharged such as fuels, patrol, and so on. We need to let renewable resources overpower non-renewable resources.

The other thing is being aware of the 3Rs technique, i.e., Reduce, Recycle, Reuse. If we pledge to follow these small rules and live by them, we can achieve a lot more than just nature's conservation.  

With an increase in human growth and science, we tend to focus on everything but not nature. Nature is the source of energy, source of light, source of oxygen, and in turn, source of life. We are nothing without nature and its components. Humans are constantly Building bridges, cities, buildings are not only development but also a setback for nature because all we end up doing is cutting off trees, erasing the environment, and creating a ruckus for nature. When we do something to conserve and protect nature, nature will give tremendous benefits for the survival of human beings on Earth. 

Essay 2: Conservation of Nature

‘In every walk in nature, one receives far more than he seeks.’ Nature is the best surprise gift received from God. Nature has blessed us with a variety of things like water, food, shelter, rain, sunlight, oxygen, and countless other things. These things assist humans in the betterment of their lives. Life is unpredictable and it's very difficult to tackle adverse situations, in such times nature is the solution to all the problems. Conservation is having a straightforward meaning of preservation and protection. 

Conserving nature is just similar to adding or keeping cash in the pocket. Nature is the best friend of a human. Have you ever heard of naturotherapy techniques to cure the patient? Patients are advised to take or spend some time in the native place of animals. There they can keep themselves calm and comfortable so that they feel relaxed at the time of surgeries. Many of the medicines have their ingredients collected directly from the forest. 

Have you ever thought about the amount of water we waste in a day? A great amount of water is wasted in our daily chores which could be helpful at the time of droughts. Also, keeping the water clean by not throwing any garbage in it, is the best way to conserve nature. Things made up of plastic should not be thrown off into water bodies as it never decomposes. 

Natural resources can be classified into two categories which are renewable and nonrenewable. Renewable natural resources are those which can be replenished, like solar, wind, geothermal while on the other hand non-renewable are those which cannot be replenished easily over a short span of time. Non-renewable resources like fuels, petrol, and carbon are available in significant quantities. Renewable natural resources are available in good and significant quantities but their proper and effective use can vanish the utilization of non-renewable natural resources. Such as, electricity can be generated with the help of wind or water. Solar cars can reduce the use of petrol cars. This helps in keeping our earth an evergreen place to live. The conversion of one energy form into another is the best possible way to stop the consumption of non-renewable resources and to start making the best use of renewable energy. 

Urbanization increases the rate of the population on concrete homes and decreases the reserves of natural utilities. 

Nature has a lot to give, but there must be a proper way to store and reuse it. the 3R technique (Reduce, Recycle, and Reuse) proves the best method for conservation purposes. It states first try to reduce the use, or recycle the material or reuse it for other purposes. Many NGOs are spreading awareness among the people regarding this, but in the end, it's up to the self to take an initiative to make a change. As far as possible avoiding the use of non-renewable resources is the best possible way to maintain the reserves. Even keeping the water potable is a way of conservation. We have to start it someday, so why is that someday not today? Taking a step towards conserving nature is just like taking the step to success.

Final Thoughts

In your essay on Conservation of Nature, you should emphasize the need to conserve natural resources and the measures that can be taken for conservation. In the introduction paragraph, you may write about the gifts of nature and how nature actively supports the survival of living beings. For the body of your essay, you may write one or two paragraphs, stating the types of natural resources and how they are beneficial to humans. Also, write about the overuse of natural resources, leading to a faster rate of depletion than they can be replenished. In the concluding paragraph, write about the measures that can be taken to conserve natural resources. You can refer to the essay on this topic available on Vedantu to get a better idea.

FAQs on Conservation of Nature Essay

1. What are the main points to be written in an essay on the Conservation of Nature?

An essay on Conservation of Nature has to be informative and the points in it have to be relevant to most of the readers. The below-given questions will help you frame your essay on the Conservation of Nature.

What are the gifts of nature to living beings?

How does nature help us in rejuvenation?

What are the benefits drawn from natural resources, in our daily lives?

Is there any medicinal benefit that can be derived from nature?

How many types of natural resources are there? What are they?

How can we conserve renewable natural resources?

How can we save our nature from pollution?

What is the 3R technique?

2. How to write an essay on Conservation of Nature?

In your essay on Conservation of Nature you should emphasize the need to conserve natural resources and the measures that can be taken for conservation. In the introduction paragraph, you may write about the gifts of nature and how nature actively supports the survival of living beings. For the body of your essay, you may write one or two paragraphs, stating the types of natural resources and how they are beneficial to humans. Also, write about the overuse of natural resources, leading to a faster rate of depletion than they can be replenished. In the concluding paragraph, write about the measures that can be taken to conserve natural resources. You can refer to the essay on this topic available on Vedantu to get a better idea.

3. What is the 3R principle?

The 3R’s stand for ‘reduce’, ‘reuse’, and ‘recycle’, it is more often referred to as the three R’s of sustainability. The objective of these three R’s is conserving natural resources by cutting down their waste. Recycling and reusing manufacturing wastes and raw materials are meant to reduce the wastage of resources and the energy derived from these resources.

4. Is it important to write about the 3R principle in the essay on Conservation of Nature?

Yes, it is important to write about the 3R principle in your essay on the Conservation of Nature. It is one of the most effective measures to conserve natural resources and is being practiced all over the world. This will make your essay even more informative from the readers’ perspective.

5. Why is the conservation of nature necessary?

The conservation of nature is important because without nature there won’t be life possible on our planet. Nature gives us the necessary value to live our life. It provides us food to eat, eater to drink, and air to breathe. Nature has been providing us with everything, be it water, rain, sunlight, oxygen, shelter, or whatnot. In short, nature is the solution to almost all problems. Also, it provides us with a shelter to live in, and those valuable things that help us to live a good life. 

• Conservation Of Forest Essay

Conservation of Forest Essay

500+ words conservation of forest essay.

Forest conservation is the practice of planting and maintaining forested areas for the future. Forests play a vital role in maintaining the ecological balance and bringing the monsoon. They are essential for the survival of life on Earth as they provide oxygen, which is essential for all living organisms to survive. Apart from these, they provide a wide range of resources we use in our everyday lives. But, human activities are destroying forests to fulfil their greed. Thus, there is a need for forest conservation. Efforts should be made to stop this destruction from causing serious environmental problems. With the help of the conservation of forest essay, students will know various methods of forest conservation to reduce environmental damage. Students must practise CBSE Essays on different topics to gain command over the writing section. This will also help them to score high marks on English papers.

A forest is a complex ecosystem mainly composed of trees, shrubs and herbs. They are home to different plants, birds, insects, mammals, reptiles etc. A large variety of life forms exists in the forests. Even microorganisms and fungi are found in forests, which are important for decomposing dead organic matter and thus enriching the soil. Nearly 30 per cent of the total land area is covered with forest, which accounts for 4 billion hectares of forest on the earth’s surface.

Importance of Conserving the Forests

Forests provide various natural services and products. Many forest products are used in our day-to-today lives. Forests store carbon and act as carbon sinks. They produce oxygen, which is important for the existence of life on earth. That’s why forests are also called the earth’s lungs. They help in regulating the hydrological cycle, purify water, absorb toxic gases and noise, provide wildlife habitat, maintain planetary climate, reduce global warming, conserve soil, reduce pollution, and mitigate natural hazards such as landslides, floods and so on. Thus, forests play an important role in maintaining ecological balance and also contribute to the economy.

Forest Conservation Initiatives

The loss of our forest can be stopped by putting efforts from the citizens, forest conservation organisations, and governments. Various laws, like the Forest Conservation Act, have been prepared and are being implemented by the government of India. The Forest Conservation Act of 1980 was enacted to control deforestation. In 1988, this act was amended to facilitate stricter conservation measures. The government also implements many schemes for the conservation of forests and their sustainable management. The Joint Forest Management (JFM) programme is a good example of involving local communities in managing and restoring degraded forests.

People’s participation in the conservation of the forest is of vital importance. The perfect example of people’s contribution towards forest conservation is the Chipko movement in the Himalayas. The movement was successful due to the efforts of the local residents to save the forest of Tehri Garhwal. The women cling or hug the trees tightly and dare men to cut them. Thus, the movement gained a lot of popularity and became famous around the world. The cutting down of trees in forest areas must be stopped at all costs. At all functions, festivals and celebrations, we must build a habit of planting trees.

Students must have found the Conservation of Forest Essay useful for improving their essay writing skills. Visit BYJU’S website to get the latest updates and study material on CBSE/ICSE/State Board/Competitive Exams.

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8 Bird Conservation Success Stories: Heartwarming Tales

S ince 1970, habitat loss, destructive farming practices, and urbanization have caused the loss of around a quarter of North America’s entire bird population. Around the world, more than half of all birds are in decline. But there is still hope!

Over the past few decades, conservation initiatives have proved that when we come together, humans can also perform miracles to reverse the damage and save species from the brink of extinction.

Here, we’ll look at some of the most impressive bird conservation success stories from around the world that are sure to instill a sense of hope and optimism that everything is possible.

We’ll even cover one species that was long thought to be extinct before it made an epic recovery! Be sure to read to the end for that story.

Sandhill Crane

Let’s launch our uplifting list with a bird that you may well have seen in the skies lately. The sandhill crane is a highly migratory bird that can now be seen across almost all of North America – but that wasn’t always the case.

During the 1800s and early 1900s, overhunting and habitat loss caused sandhill cranes to be wiped out from most of their native range, including most states east of the Mississippi River. By the 1940s, there were only an estimated several thousand remaining.

Cranes are some of the oldest species of bird on the planet. Fossil records suggest a close relative of the Sandhill crane was present in North America 10 million years ago, so it’d be all the more tragic to lose them.

Thankfully, hunting restrictions and captive breeding programs helped the recovery of these beloved birds, and according to abcbirds.org , sandhill cranes now number 650,000 across North America, and are ever-increasing.

As a symbol of peace and prosperity, we should all be celebrating the triumphant victory of these magical birds.

Trumpeter Swan

The trumpeter swan is an impressive bird. Not only are they the largest species of waterfowl in the world and the heaviest of any North American bird , but they’re surely also one of the most beautiful and graceful birds on the continent.

It makes it all the more surprising then, that a hundred years ago, trumpeter swans were nearly driven to extinction. By the 1930s, excessive hunting had reduced their numbers to a mere  69 known specimens in the contingent states.

Realizing they had to step in to save the birds, the government imposed a nationwide hunting ban, since which numbers have recovered dramatically. A continent-wide survey between the years 2000-2005 found the species numbers more than tripled from around 11,000 to almost 35,000 during those 5 years.

The story just goes to show that sometimes some simple legislation is enough to turn around the fate of a glorious bird that might have otherwise disappeared forever. With that safety net, conservationists have further improved their recovery by reintroduction and habitat preservation initiatives.

While hunting, habitat loss, and invasive predators have decimated many bird species, it was the use of an ill-conceived agrochemical that led to the widespread demise of The United States’s totem bird species.

DDT, a poorly researched insecticide, was first released for public sale in the USA in 1945. It quickly became widespread on farms across the country with catastrophic effects on wildlife, especially birds of prey.

After poisoned insects were eaten, the chemical accumulated in the food chain, causing the eggs of raptors like eagles to become fragile, fracture, and fail. By 1970, Bald eagles in the contiguous states numbered just 400 breeding pairs.

The US government eventually gave in to environmentalist campaigns to ban DDT in 1972. Since then, bald eagle numbers have recovered dramatically, and today, there are now  well over one thousand pairs in the contiguous states.

California Condor

While the prize for North America’s heaviest bird goes to the trumpeter swan, the gold medal for the broadest wingspan goes to a species that had an even closer brush with extinction.

The California condor used to be widespread across the West, but lead poisoning, DDT insecticide, collisions with pylons, and the young ingesting rubbish all led to a devastating decline. By 1987, only 27 individuals were left.

Realizing it was now or never, a government program captured the remaining birds to breed them in captivity. Although the long-lived raptors breed very slowly, the captive breeding program has been an overwhelming success.

In 2007, recovery efforts received another huge boost when California banned the use of lead ammunition – one of the leading causes of death of these huge scavengers that often feed on animals that have been shot.

Today, there are more than 300 birds in the wild, and their numbers are steadily increasing.

Black Stilt

New Zealand’s black stilt’s devastating decline is a classic story of the disastrous effects of the careless introduction of foreign predators. The introduction of cats, rats, ferrets, and stoats by both Polynesian and European settlers spelled a wave of extinction for many of New Zealand’s native birds.

Because many of the islands’ birds were flightless and ill-equipped to escape, they made easy pickings for the invasive mammals. With 56 species of bird wiped out, a shocking one-third of New Zealand’s native birds are thought to no longer exist.

While the black stilt, or ‘Kakī ’ does have wings to escape predators, their ground-nesting habit makes their eggs and young vulnerable to predators. By 1981, a mere 23 black stilts were remaining in the wild, prompting extensive conservation efforts from New Zealand’s government to save them from disappearing.

Thanks to predator control and captive breeding programs, black stilts now number  more than 170 individuals . To see the heartwarming breeding and reintroduction of the black stilt, be sure to check out this short heartwarming video.

Eastern Bluebird

Yet another reason for the decline of native birds is competition from foreign bird species for resources such as territories and nest sites.

The eastern bluebird is one such species that suffered substantially from the introduction of invasive birds from foreign lands. During the 20th century, introduced house sparrows and European starlings began competing heavily with Eastern bluebirds for nest sites.

Because the new species were more aggressive, they quickly dominated the suitable cavities that the bluebirds were previously using. Thankfully, citizens of the Eastern states weren’t going to stand by and watch their beloved bluebirds get wiped out.

Organizations like the  North American Bluebird Society have worked hard to raise awareness about bluebird conservation. The widespread installation of  bluebird nest boxes has been instrumental in the recovery of Eastern bluebirds, which now number at least 20 million.

Tibetan Bunting

If you’ve never heard of the Tibetan bunting, you’re not alone. As one of the rarest birds on the planet, the species needed all the help it could get to survive in our fast-changing world. Luckily, there was a remarkable man who decided to devote himself to saving the unassuming songbird.

Tashi Sangpo, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, has been teaching himself about local bird species since childhood. Now in his forties, Sangpo is a leader in Tibetan bird conservation, and has been affectionately dubbed the ‘bird lama’.

By training nomadic yak herders and his fellow monks to monitor bird populations, Sangpo managed to collect enough data to get the Tibetan bunting’s precious remaining breeding grounds protected. In one such valley, the bunting’s numbers increased from 5 individuals to around 30 in just 4 years.

Tashi and his growing conservation team have also managed to get other threatened birds in the region, such as the majestic white-eared pheasant official protection. Part of his success is owed to Tibetan culture, which considers every living creature sacred, and regards birds as ‘bridges between heaven and earth’.

Now for one of the most incredible species recovery stories of the last century! The takahē, a prehistoric-looking, flightless bird of New Zealand was long-presumed extinct when a small population of them was rediscovered in 1948.

Hidden in a remote valley in the Murchison mountains, the species managed to survive the ravages of the many predatory mammals and human hunters that only arrived recently on the islands. Because the takahē can’t fly, exposed populations were easy targets for both hungry mammals and men.

The incredible-looking birds are now maintained by the New Zealand Department of Conservation, which has managed to increase the surviving population on small offshore islands where they’re safe from predators.

Today, their population exceeds 500 individuals, and they recently  made the headlines with their reintroduction to Lake Whakatipu Waimāori Valley, where they haven’t been seen for around 100 years. The video of them running free from their crates might just bring tears to your eyes!

Don’t Despair – Others Care!

Any time someone tells you that the world’s ecology issues are beyond repair, don’t despair! There are a wealth of success stories out there that are sure to evoke optimism and inspiration.

Point your friends towards upbeat articles like this one to show them that when we take responsibility for nature, we really can repair the damage that we’ve done.

Creating a backyard sanctuary for wild birds is one of the best steps you can take to help local species, and by doing so, you may encourage others to do the same. You can find out more about how to do that here .

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