GoKawiilThe Return of the Oystercatcher: Saving Birds to Save the Planet Scott Weidensaul W. W. Norton (2026)
A Bird’s IQ: Innovation, Intelligence, and Problem Solving in the Avian World Louis Lefebvre, transl. Pablo Strauss Greystone (2026)
How did birds evolve? The answer is wilder than anyone thought
Birds are in trouble. In the United States alone, one-third of bird species are rated as of high or moderate conservation concern. North American forests have lost more than one billion birds in the past half-century. A 2019 study found that grassland bird populations have declined by 53%, and 90% of those losses come from just 12 of the most common avian families, including sparrows, blackbirds and finches (K. V. Rosenberg et al. Science 366, 120–124; 2019).
Naturalist Scott Weidensaul, the author of more than 30 books about birds and nature, calls this trend “a gut punch”. Weidensaul wrote about the wonders of bird migration and the challenges facing migrating birds at a time of rapidly changing climate and massive habitat loss in his 2021 book A World on the Wing. After a colleague suggested that he might write another book about what is going right for birds, Weidensaul responded with his latest work, The Return of the Oystercatcher.
Weidensaul begins the book with the bad news, by taking the reader through a history of escalating threats to birds. Sports hunting of raptors such as eagles and falcons and the shooting of many species for their plumage, used to adorn hats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, decimated bird populations and drove many species close to extinction. Through legislation, some destructive practices were banned and bird populations began to rebound slowly.
Bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) were hunted nearly to extinction in the twentieth century, but conservation efforts have caused the population to make a remarkable recovery.Credit: Smithlandia Media/Getty
But a larger threat loomed: habitat destruction. Coastal development has robbed shorebirds of their nesting grounds, and the destruction of marshes, mudflats and other wetlands has deprived waterfowl of the places where they foraged. Millions of acres of grassland have been converted to agriculture, all but eliminating the native short-grass prairies that birds such as the sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) depend on. Deforestation has also eliminated bird habitats in many parts of North America.
Conservation successes
The good news is that these losses have spurred a wide array of US conservation projects, which Weidensaul reports on. Thanks to government and private-sector efforts, bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) have made a spectacular recovery since the 1970s, going from a low of 417 breeding pairs in 1963 to an estimated 324,000 birds today. He also writes of an effort to reintroduce Atlantic puffins (Fratercula arctica), a cold-loving species, to Eastern Egg Rock in the Gulf of Maine — a project that helped to inspire hundreds of seabird restoration efforts worldwide. There are now around 175 puffin breeding pairs on the rock, despite rising ocean temperatures pushing the fish that the puffins depend on into deeper waters that are difficult for the birds to reach.
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