Year in review: The post-pigeon century

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News of bird troubles received an eerie emphasis in 2014 when biologists marked the 100th anniversary of the death of the last known passenger pigeon.

For the occasion, the slim, coffee-and-cream-colored taxidermy mount of that final pigeon, named Martha, came out of storage at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. (SN: 8/23/14, p. 28). Visitors puzzled anew at how a species once numbering several billion birds vanished in decades.

Readers of the 2014 State of the Birds report from government and private sources may wonder about perils to today’s abundant birds. Among the report’s somber assessments is a list of 33 “common birds in steep decline” (SN: 11/1/14, p. 4). Common grackles, eastern meadowlarks and northern bobwhites, among others, are still too abundant to classify as threatened. Yet each has lost more than half its population during the last 40 years.

“I am more concerned than ever about our state of the birds,” says Peter Marra of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in Washington, D.C. “I think we need to move faster than ever to understand the declines and to try and stop them.”

Today’s biggest threat to birds is habitat loss, the report says. Papers by Marra and collaborators also calculated the tolls of more direct — and possibly more controllable — ways that humankind causes bird deaths.

Between 365 million and 988 million birds in the United States each year die crashing into windows and buildings, Marra and colleagues estimated (SN: 3/22/14, p. 8). Other bird killers include automobiles, smashing up to 200 million birds annually, and wind turbines, taking an estimated 234,000. Not even buildings, however, approached the death toll for birds caught by cats, estimated by Marra and colleagues at 1.3 billion to 4.0 billion (SN: 2/23/13, p. 14).