It’s more than a little mind boggling. Consider dreaming up a way to monitor, with statistical rigor, the populations of virtually all the hundreds of bird species that breed in the U.S. and southern Canada. It probably goes without saying that this will require credibly identifying and counting birds in more than four thousand locations following a careful and time-consuming protocol. Every year it will require more two thousand people highly skilled in the identification of birds by sight and sound. Then it will need to be done year after year after year for decades (forever?).

Now, find a way to do it with just a couple of paid staff!

That’s exactly what visionary ornithologist Chandler Robbins dreamed up back in the 1960s when he started the Breeding Bird Survey (BBS). The BBS is a federal government program that enlists thousands of volunteer expert birders to count birds in early summer for ten minutes every half-mile over a 24.5 mile pre-assigned route along secondary roads. That adds up to 50 ten-minute counts—starting a half hour before dawn! If the start of the route is in the middle of nowhere, and it takes hours to drive there, that means that you may be getting up at one or two in the morning to arrive on time!

And yet people VOLUNTEEER for this opportunity! That’s what has made it possible to carry out Robbin’s vision since 1966 with almost no budget—only a few people are hired by the government to coordinate and to crunch the numbers. The United State is one of few nations on the planet that has any idea how its bird populations are faring with any precision or geographic detail.

It’s a triumph, both as an incredibly good deal for taxpayers (back of the envelope guess would be tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars in volunteer investment for every dollar of government money spent) and as a very effective and unique wildlife monitoring system.

And yet the current administration planned on cancelling it this past year—until enough people who care made a fuss.

Thousands of studies have published using the BBS data set. A few weeks ago, a new one came out. Published in the prestigious journal "Science," the paper was titled, “Acceleration hotspots of North American birds’ decline are associated with agriculture.” Some of the findings were a little shocking, even for the seasoned among us. The researchers found, for example, that total bird abundance declined from 1987 to 2021 on 718 (70%) of the 1033 individual BBS routes in the dataset.

Perhaps even more shocking, they found that the rate of decline was accelerating on average across the U.S. and southern Canada.

Perhaps not too surprising, the decrease in abundance was most strongly correlated with warming temperatures. But perhaps more surprising for some, increasing rates of decline were found predominantly in areas with high-intensity agriculture (areas with high fertilizer or pesticide use or with large areas of croplands).

And although BBS routes in Maine showed the same pattern of declines in overall bird abundance, there was some good news: the average rates of decline were slowing, though the reason for this is not yet known.

Whether good news or bad news, without the BBS, we wouldn’t ever know how bird populations are doing. Knowing the truth is the step in collective action to make things better. Let’s all find some ways to make things better.

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Vice President of Boreal Conservation for National Audubon. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists. He is a coauthor of the seminal “Birds of Maine” book and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the popular books, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” (Down East Books) and “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao: A Site and Field Guide,” (Cornell University Press).