What will it take to save America's birds?

Since 1970, the North American bird population has declined by more than 25%. There are many factors driving this. And several things bird lovers can do to reverse the trend.

Marshall Johnson, chief conservation officer at the National Audubon Society.

François Leroy, researcher in macroecology at The Ohio State University.

Lynn Norton, an eastern Nebraska mail courier, landowner and bird lover.

Zoë Warner, program manager for the Grassland Bird Collaboration.

DD Matz, a Pennsylvania landowner who participates in the Grassland Bird Collaboration.

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I  

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Lynn Norton is a rural male carrier from eastern Nebraska. Where she loads up her trucks in the morning, she usually brings a set of binoculars to look for birds along her route, and she's been doing that for decades.

LYNN NORTON: I got into birding when I went out to college in Northern California and got in with some friends who were birders and just it fascinated me, especially ducks.

I really got into all the water birds and I just changed my view. It really changed my view of how I looked at what was going on around me.

CHAKRABARTI: Lynn is 67 now and owns a small horse pasture about 25 minutes south of Omaha. Her favorite type of bird nightjars. They're nocturnal birds known for how well they camouflage in the twilight.

NORTON: I just think they're just such a cool little bird, watching them fly. Oh God, I miss them. The sound that their wings make when they're taking their dives to go after mosquitoes and other insects in the sky, they're just such an interesting, different little bird.

CHAKRABARTI: In the last few years, Lynn says she's seeing way fewer nightjars.

In fact, she says almost all bird activity has dropped in her area.

NORTON: So in the early 2000s, this area that I would go to has a lake. It's a housing development, and in the spring and the fall, it would just be inundated with inland pelicans and mergansers and geese and shovelers, and oh my God, grebes.

It would just be inundated with bird life. It took me way too long to get my route done because I kept stopping to see all the birds, and I just don't see 'em now.

CHAKRABARTI: Lynn's property is surrounded by corn fields to the south and soybean fields to the north. Her town is also rapidly becoming a bedroom community for Omaha, and she says she's watched suitable bird habitat disappear due to industrial agriculture and development.

So Lynn tries to maintain her little island of bird habitat in the middle of a changing landscape around her.

NORTON: We've really been working hard to keep trees for the wildlife. So there's woodpecker trees and owl trees, and take out what we need to and replant and not spray. We leave a little part of our pasture to come up into the natural prairie grass for the bird life that likes the prairie.

And we leave some thistle for the goldfinches because they like thistle seeds. So we're just this little island within this, we're surrounded by industrial agriculture on all sides of us and trying to keep our little area bird habitat friendly, wildlife friendly. It's hard and it takes constant effort.

CHAKRABARTI: If Lynn Norton's experience feels familiar to you, that's because in North America, we really are seeing fewer birds, billions of fewer birds. Since 1970, the North American continent has lost more than 25% of its total avian population. And new research in the journal of Science published just this year finds that the pace of that decline is even faster than researchers previously thought. François Leroy at the Ohio State University led the research team. He says they studied more than 250 bird species in the U.S. using a massive, decades-old survey of breeding birds in North America, and they found that more than half of them have seen their losses accelerate year over year since the late '80s.

Leroy says it's an environmental warning sign, not just for birds, but for the entire planet.

LEROY: Birds are very good at controlling populations such as pest populations, insects, et cetera. We know that they're very good at provisioning. So for instance, providing food for human populations. They're also very good at supporting ecosystems such as dispersing seeds.

So just looking at birds per se actually allow us to look at a lot of different functions. Almost all of them, of an ecosystem.

CHAKRABARTI: And for birders like Lynn Norton in Nebraska, seeing fewer birds is also a deeply emotional loss.

NORTON: They're such a part of our everyday life, and they are just this little, they're just little sparks of brilliance. And when you get a chance to see 'em, it just makes your, it'sli ke you see hummingbirds fly in and you just get so excited. It's, oh my God. And then they hover there and you get to really see 'em and all life is important and they play such an important part of what goes on in this world.

And we are just dashing 'em aside like they're a mosquito, they're bothersome. We don't need 'em anymore, but we don't understand how much we do need them.

CHAKRABARTI: Today we're going to talk about the plight of America's birds. What are the factors that are leading to this precipitous decline, and is there anything that we can do to stop it?

Marshall Johnson joins us now. He's Chief Conservation Officer at the National Audubon Society, and he's in Fargo, North Dakota. Marshall, welcome to On Point.

MARSHALL JOHNSON: It's really great to be here with you, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Although under unfortunate circumstances, I have to say. First of all, I'm inspired by Lynn's observations and her little patch in Nebraska.

You're there in North Dakota. Can you tell me, typically, the kind of birds that you see or maybe even used to see on a daily basis where you are in Fargo?

JOHNSON: Yeah, absolutely. Here in Fargo, I've lived here for almost 20 years in the Red River Valley, and this is where I found my love of birds.

My spark bird was introduced to me the Lesser prairie-chicken, which is a prairie obligate bird species, a very charismatic bird out on the prairie. And in this valley, so many prairie obligate species, chestnut-collared longspur, western meadowlark, pipit, just an abundance of bird species that are given to us by the landscape.

Whether it's the Aspen Prairie Parkland or the Missouri Wah’Kon-Tah, these prairie ecosystems that really converge here in the Red River Valley.

CHAKRABARTI: I am an appreciator of birds, but I cannot consider myself a serious birder, throughout today's hour, what I'm going to do as you name bird species, is I'm going to quickly Google them so I know what I'm looking at, but I'm looking at the lesser prairie-chicken right now, and it's beautiful.

It has these little, this little crest on its head. And is it the males that have these sacks underneath?

JOHNSON: Yeah, these air pockets and they fill those in this really amazing courtship ritual that they do ... these areas that the birds come back to every spring, and they dance and strut and sing, and they make this amazing sound that haunts you.

And it's all in pursuit of the perfect mate.

CHAKRABARTI: I love how you call it a spark bird. Is that a common term in the birding world?

JOHNSON: In the birding world it is. It's that bird that whether you are five or 50, it captured your imagination. It drew you in, and you are never able to look or hear birds quite in the same way again.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay. So tell me, how has what and hear around you, has it changed much in the past couple of decades?

JOHNSON: It really has particularly where I live and where I've grown up. I grew up in Texas and the Southwest and now for the last 20 years in North Dakota. So those are prairie landscapes.

These are the old landscapes of the great bison herds. This interplay, this synergy between ... the prairie ecosystems, whether it be the short grass, the tall grass, the Blackland Prairies of Texas. And so this is the epicenter of bird loss. And ecosystem loss. And we see that within the greater grassland biome and ecosystem this we're losing nearly two and a half million acres of prairie every year in the grassland ecosystem.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay. And have you seen the rate of that loss accelerate more recently?

JOHNSON: Certainly, over the last 10 years we've seen an acceleration of grassland loss. That's for sure.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So throughout the hour we're going to discuss why that's happening and the impact that it's having on the birds.

But going back to your own personal relationship with your favorite species, has what you're talking about, the habitat loss or destruction had an impact on the birds that you were talking about earlier.

JOHNSON: It certainly has. But I think for your listeners, and I am a boundless stream of optimism.

Just being a practitioner in grassland conservation and conservation of ecosystems for the benefit of birds and people, you can't help but be optimistic at what is possible when we take action. And so here in the Red River Valley, a number of coalitions and organizations and agencies have worked to protect what's left of the ancient glacial Lake Agassiz beaches.

And that's where we find our prairie. That's where you find prairie chickens. Those populations are pretty stable, within those protected areas. And so again, whether it be protection or the restoration of and sustainability of working lands, we see what's possible when we take action.

CHAKRABARTI:   And how then by the way, Marshall, I just say a man of boundless optimism. You're my kind of guy.

JOHNSON: There we go. (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: We'll talk about further reasons to be optimistic and what we can do a little bit later in this hour. But just for a few seconds before our first break why does it matter that we save birds.

JOHNSON: Our CEO Dr. Elizabeth Gray always says that birds are the sentinels and symbols of ecosystems. And this goes way back to the coal mines in the east where the miners would take down, before sophisticated equipment, coal miners would take down Canary birds.

And when the Canary Birds stopped singing, that was a harbinger of this is not a place where humans should be either.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm teasing you with the sound of birds behind you.

JOHNSON: (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: I'm gonna have to cut you off there for a second, Marshall, because we're headed to a break. And by the way, we asked On Point listeners to send us the sound of birds in their neighborhoods.

(BIRD SOUNDS PLAY)

This is from Karen in West Linn, Oregon. She says the birds you're hearing right now are the lesser goldfinch, the dark-eye junco, and the red-breasted nuthatch. And oh, by the way, a house finch and a song sparrow.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Marshall, I have to beg your forgiveness for how we ended that last segment. Because let me just explain. Yesterday on the show, I put this call out to all of our listeners who love birds, and I said, Hey, do us a favor, take your phones outside and just record the sounds of the birds in your neighborhoods and we got so much good stuff, Marshall, that we decided that we were going to use the bird song as the music that we use for transitioning out of each one of the segments of the show. So that's what we were doing there, which is why I had to interrupt you and you were telling us that the importance of bird or avian preservation. You went back to the foundations of the phrase, the canary in the coal mine, and I had to cut you off there. But keep going about why birds are so indicative of the overall health of our planet.

JOHNSON: Birds are ubiquitous and they are charismatic, and we mark the seasons by the passage and the welcoming and departures of birds. And so when you think of birds, it's not just some hobby. It's not something that is distinct and set apart from humanity. Birds are one of the most accurate and dependable early indicators of something being very right. Or in the case of our topic today, something very wrong in the environment that we humans are dependent on.

Birds are ubiquitous and they are charismatic, and we mark the seasons by the passage and the welcoming and departures of birds.

Marshall Johnson

CHAKRABARTI: So why are birds such indicators? Because I'm thinking of other major indicator species like amphibians and frogs. It makes sense to me because there's, like, literally their skin is a physical interface between healthy environments and not. What is it about birds that make them such powerful measures of the health of an overall ecosystem.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, it's a great question, Meghna. A couple things. Number one, they're ubiquitous. They are on every continent. They call, they're charismatic. You see them, you can observe them, maybe much easier than some amphibians. Maybe easier than other ecosystem indicators. Birds are charismatic and people from your everyday citizen community scientists to your trained ornithologist can partake in the monitoring of birds because they are so ever present in our lives. And to your listener in Nebraska, Lynn's point, that anecdotal story that she shared, we hear a thousand of those stories. And that's the power of birds.

They're an early indicator and a impetus for us to take action.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so the reason why we're having this conversation today, as I mentioned earlier, has to do with this latest research that we encountered in the journal Science. And in preparation for the hour, as I mentioned to you a minute ago, Marshall, we put the call out to all On Point birders across the nation, and we ask them if they have seen fewer of their favorite species where they live.

(MONTAGE)

Yes, with a heavy heart. I respond to your question. I am seeing fewer birds every year.

As a child who grew up in Iowa, starting in the late 1940s through the 1960s, I remember hearing and seeing many prairie species such as the eastern meadowlark, and bobolinks. They're almost never seen in the prairie areas I frequent now.

There's a lot less bird sounds in the morning, especially around 7 a.m., 8 a.m. It sounded like a jungle out there for about an hour after sunrise. Now you barely hear a bird out there.

Not a sound. Complete silence. It is eerie. There are periods when there is not a single bird. That is bizarre.

I feel like I'm seeing far fewer things like yellow-bellied woodpeckers, fewer myrtle warblers, fewer transitory birds like orioles.

Very thrush, typically in the winter they come down. But this was a pretty mild winter and I don't think I heard any except for maybe one.

I really miss hearing the whip-poor-wills and the bobwhites.

My uncle taught me, my first bird to recognize was the bobwhite, and I don't hear them anymore.

I miss tree swallows and the violet-green swallows that used to feed by the dozens in the sky every evening at the end of April. And last two years, I've only seen one pair and I really do miss the swallows.

CHAKRABARTI: You heard there On Point listeners, Paula in Florida, Bill in Iowa, Ivan in North Carolina, James from New York, Robin in Maryland, Jeremy in Oregon, April in North Carolina and Irma from Washington State. So clearly people around the entire nation are noticing this decline. And again, that research that we're referencing from the Journal of Science has found that since 1970, the North American continent has lost more than 25%, a full quarter of its total avian population.

So bird populations are declining, but the rate of decline is much faster in some places than others. So let's go back to François Leroy at Ohio State. He's the researcher who led that that paper in the Journal of Science.

And we heard from him earlier and he tells us that his team found that three parts of the country are seeing the biggest declines in bird populations, the Mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, and California.

LEROY: So we were surprised to see those spatial patterns. We didn't really know what we were looking at the beginning.

So we were wondering is this due to climate, climate variables or environmental variables or is it due to human activities? So what we did is that we took a bunch of predictors, and we decided to see which predictor was the best at predicting this acceleration of the decline. And most of the time, all of the time, the best predictor was the intensity of agricultural practices.

CHAKRABARTI: So agricultural practices covers a broad scope of activities, and also Leroy emphasizes that he is not saying that agriculture is directly causing bird declines, but as you heard him say, they are pretty strongly correlated. The dataset show that the more the agriculture in a certain area, the greater the loss of birds.

LEROY: So there are different ways to measure the intensity of agriculture, right? So here we had different variables. For instance, we had the amount of fertilizer use, we had the amount of pesticide use, and we had the amount of crop lines around the sampling points. So when we do those predictive models, it's very hard to disentangle which process of this intensive agriculture is the main driver of this acceleration of the decline. So what we can say is that clearly the intensity of agricultural practices is the main driver of the acceleration of the decline.

CHAKRABARTI: So that is François Leroy, a postdoctoral researcher at the Ohio State University. He also found that climate change is another major factor in bird species decline.

Places in the United States that are warming faster, such as the South also saw greater avian losses. So Marshall Johnson, I would like to spend some time now really focusing on agriculture. Because there's a tension here, right? Obviously avian preservation is important, but agriculture, and particularly in the United States, it feeds the nation.

It helps feed the world here. So first of all, talk to me about the role that you see ag playing in the dynamics of bird populations.

JOHNSON: Yeah. It's agriculture, that's a big umbrella title, right? And you have so much that fits within agriculture. Just take a look. Double click on the Farm Bill.

That is under negotiation right now. And you see all of the forestry management, grassland management, row crop management. Cover crops, so on and so forth. So agriculture, given how widespread agriculture is and how much U.S. agriculture informs, influences agriculture from Saskatchewan to the Southern Grasslands of Brazil, and Argentina. Agriculture is probably the most important topic, both as a solution. And a driver of loss, right? And one of the things that I would, I tend to do and I would ask your listeners to do, is take a step back. Agriculture is one step, but if you take a step back, what we're really talking about is our food culture. How we feed ourselves and whether or not the processes and the signals that we send and the incentive structure that we provide to agriculture is either going to just feed us, or both nourish us and nourish the land. So it's both a driver.

And a solution.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let us talk more about that. Because right now even though there are still many small farms hanging on in the United States, when I think of broad-based industrial agriculture in this country, crop agriculture, first of all, we can also talk about livestock in a second.

But I think of soy and corn monocultures. Is that part of what you're talking about regarding signals in our food culture?

JOHNSON: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you reference family ranches, cow calf operations. I see cow calf operators, family ranches as being one of the key, the most important solutions in recovering, let's say, grassland birds, which are the fastest declining bird species in North America. Period.

So 57% of grassland birds have declined since 1970. No other Swedish species has seen a more rapid decrease. And what we see every day working with thousands of ranches across America, really across the Americas. When we center regenerative agriculture and science-based operational plans in partnership with our family ranches, we see results.

We see birds coming back.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So I love how you keep going to solutions, Marshall.  I'm telling you, you are a man after my own heart and we will continue to talk about them. But I also want to just get a further understanding of this dynamic between, as you said, the sort of market signals, the food culture signals and just the flat-out reality of modern-day, large-scale agriculture, corporate agriculture for example.

We are talking about millions of acres of highly cultivated monoculture crops that are actually, they're commodities, so they're essential for the overall food market. And I'm thinking about what Francois said a little earlier in the tape that we had, his team even tried to disentangle.

Is there one input into our agriculture system that's causing or correlated with higher rates of bird decline, pesticide use, the amount of crop lands in the places that they sampled, things like that. They couldn't actually figure out which one it was. So I'm wondering, speaking of solutions, how it seems like finding working sets of solutions would be even tougher then.

JOHNSON: Yeah. And tougher in some ways and intuitive in others. You take grasslands for example. We're losing nearly 2 million acres of grasslands in the United States alone every single year. The fastest rate of ecosystem loss in the lower 48. What's driving that? The intensification of row crop agriculture which is displacing ranches and grass-based agriculture, right?

And so that's an area where the market, but not just the market, our policies, are sending a signal and instructing everyday landowners to grow this or grow that. And that's an area where, yes, it's the intensification of agriculture, but agriculture exists in many of these areas, particularly in grazing systems, and can be a real positive for birds.

CHAKRABARTI: So when you say grow this or grow that, if we're signaling grow that then those particular mass crops are the things that are requiring. Or at least they're believed to require certain types of fertilizer use, certain amounts of pesticide use. So how would you use these market signals?

How would you change them to then have this larger scale impact that you're talking about? Literally on the ground, in the soil across the United States.

JOHNSON: Yeah, you take the farm bill. Farm bill is almost a $1 trillion bill that sends probably the greatest signal to agriculture as to what the priorities for the nation and the world are.

And we're seeing more an appetite, a bipartisan appetite for the centering of regenerative agriculture in the farm. Bill. And that's very positive and there are real tools that we can use, and we have used, to send that signal. One of the priorities that we have at Audubon is supporting ranchers.

Supporting grass-based agriculture, because there's a symbiotic relationship between cow-calf operations and grazing operations. And available habitat for grassland birds. And we see a receptivity within the ranching community to ranch better, to ranch in a way that is supportive of wildlife and ecosystem services, while also obviously making a living.

And the more we can promote those signals within major pieces of legislation, like Farm Bill that incentivize ranchers in particular and also farmers in growing cover crops and making sure that the soil is protected. We can do this. And I've seen that on literally millions of acres of farmland and ranch land across the U.S.

CHAKRABARTI: I've been focusing on agriculture because it is so large, right? It's so massive. And as you said, that broad, large-scale change can be made through instruments of policy. But François and other researchers over time have also found that obviously climate change is having an impact on bird populations, just the built human environment with birds colliding with buildings. We got about 30 seconds here. Marshall, I also have to quickly ask you, what about all the cats?

JOHNSON: Yeah. It's so important that we, for cats and for birds, that we monitor and manage feral cat populations, right? It's not good for cats. It's not good for birds. And absolutely cats do a number on bird populations.

And cats have always, feral cats have always had that impact. But again, what we're seeing right now in terms of habitat loss accelerating, those are things that we really need to pay attention to.

CHAKRABARTI: I will say that the American Bird Conservancy says that free roaming domestic cats in the U.S. kill anywhere from 1.4 to 3.7 billion birds a year.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: We do want to spend the rest of the show talking about potential solutions and particularly in places where the bird losses seem to be accelerating the fastest. Now, one of those areas is in southeast Pennsylvania. It's an agricultural area known for its production of mushrooms, and those are cultivated in massive indoor facilities. And more directly related to the birds, the region is also known for dairy and hay.

DD MATZ: The bird activity will come late April, early May. It is very busy out in my pastures.

CHAKRABARTI: That's DD Matz, a large landowner in the area who raises cattle and horses, and she also grows hay. DD is a bird watcher in her own backyard, and one of her favorite species is the bobolink. A small songbird.

MATZ: It's like a flying skunk, right? They're these crazy looking little birds. They're basically black, but the males have this incredible white stripe down the middle of their body, and they have this very unusual flight pattern. They're actually aptly named, but in the springtime, the males are popping up all the time calling, looking for females.

It's a lot of fun to watch them in action. They just come popping out of the grass like Jack in the box.

CHAKRABARTI: By the way, the sound of the bobolink comes from DD's own property. The bobolink population has been cut in half in the last 50 years. And remember, as DD said, they're ground nesting birds.

And in southwest Pennsylvania, the birds often build their nests in farmers' fields right at peak harvest season. And the bobolinks are so small that they're really hard to detect when you're sitting up high in a gigantic piece of farm machinery, mowing thousands of acres. Researcher Zoë Warner started noticing this problem about a decade ago when she was doing her PhD.

WARNER: The period of time that these birds need is about 45 days from the beginning of nest building until fledging and the fledging is not just getting out of the nest, because they have about 10 to 12 days where they're walking around not really able to take strong enough flights to get out of the way of the mower.

So they need that full period of undisturbed time when they can mature and develop so that they're eventually ready to take strong enough flights to be able to avoid the mowers when they come into the fields.

CHAKRABARTI: A few years ago, Warner helped start the grassland bird collaboration where she's now program coordinator.

The idea was simple. How could she work with farmers to adjust their mowing schedules around the bobolink?

WARNER: We actually had a meeting the year before we really launched our program and invited farmers and landowners to come and brought our message to them. And there was a lot of interest in, oh, I didn't know, I didn't realize my field was so important.

And so I think the thing about the community that we work in is that I think everyone sees themselves as stewards of the land.

CHAKRABARTI: Warner's program now works with about six different farmers over several thousand acres. Most people she works with can still sell their hay a few weeks later as they adjust their harvest cycle, and some even appreciate spreading out the harvest.

Recently, Warner won a grant that allows her to offer a stipend of just over $1,000 to participating farmers. DD Matz is one of them. She says she's had to make significant adjustments to her haying schedule for the bobolinks. She only cuts some of her fields once instead of twice, which has reduced her production by up to 50% in a given year.

But DD tells us that's not enough to break the bank and it's worth it for the bobolink.

MATZ: It's a real concerted effort and we need landowners who have the financial capability and wherewithal to make the efforts. But we also need the public and our government to understand the importance to these things for the health of humans and our planet.

We ... need the public and our government to understand the importance ... [of birds] for the health of humans and our planet.

DD Matz

CHAKRABARTI: Some other states from Maine to Virginia have similar programs that are working to educate farmers about nesting birds in their fields and also compensate them for adjusting harvesting schedules. So there you go, Marshall, an on the ground example of a solution. Can you talk a little bit more? I think what we heard Zoë Warner say a minute ago is very crucial. That farmers themselves see themselves as stewards of the land. So approaching them shouldn't actually be so difficult when talking about making adjustments to their farming practice.

JOHNSON: No, absolutely not. What you will find, and I've worked with literally thousands of farmers and ranchers across the U.S. and beyond.

They want to do the right thing. They want to be, they see themselves, they take responsibility of being stewards of the land, and that's not some throwaway comment. They mean it. And what they desire is to have the tools, the resources, the incentives to do the right thing, to align with nature in the best way possible.

We see that every single day.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. We keep focusing on direct relationships with farmers and small farmers. I think because they, as you said, are most connected to the land and their caretaking of it. But they're also a small part of the agriculture system overall. Many farmers who are still working the land, but maybe the land is owned by a massive ag corporation, they don't necessarily have the kind of choices that independently owned farms do.

Like they're told what kind of seed they can plant, when they have to harvest. What kind of fertilizer and pesticide to use. How do you incentivize or build the kind of relationships with corporate ag companies that would make a scalable difference.

JOHNSON: Yeah. You used the word there that I think is really important, scale.

Do you know that one in three Americans are birders? That's nearly a hundred million consumers, voters that see themselves as birders, who actively watch track birds in their backyard, in their front yard, that take trips. These 100 million people generate $280 billion in economic impact. That's power.

They have a say and I encourage, and I'm sure a lot of them through my travels, anecdotally it's a firm that at least a third of America are birders. And so we have a choice. We have agency both in the policies that are developed at state houses and in Washington and beyond. And the choices that we make in what we choose to buy, how we choose to nourish our families.

Obviously, a big issue, but we have the power for people that care about the environment and care about birds to make a difference in the marketplace, in the political landscape.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so give me some specific marching orders. What should that 33%, that a hundred million American birders do.

JOHNSON: Number one, charity begins at home, being really deliberate about your backyard, planting native plants, seeking out native plants. We have a plants for birds website that people can go to and find local nurseries that produce local native species for your backyard. That's step one.

And it could be your stoop in your apartment or your yard, and then be really diligent about what type of food are you buying? How is it produced? I think we have with every, most Americans have a phone and there is so much power and information at your fingertips for you to be more diligent and more deliberate about how you source food and products into your household.

I think those are two steps that it's really within our own agency to take those steps, and then being mindful no matter whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or an independent, being mindful of the most important policies and encouraging your representatives to support those policies, be it regenerative agriculture and farm bill, be it the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which is up for reauthorization.

There are ways that we can take control of this issue and protect birds, and in doing so, protect ourselves.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, you keep mentioning the Farm Bill, and I'm glad you do because it's one of the largest pieces of legislation that goes through Congress every time it has to be reauthorized, and it is huge. It's like obviously everything from direct subsidies to farmers, to food assistance for Americans. Are there, I feel like there's a couple of specific things that Audubon has really pointed out that could use strengthening in the Farm Bill, right? Like I'm actually looking at one of them.

The Soil Health and Income Protection Program. What is that?

JOHNSON: Yeah, absolutely. And there are a number of policies that we want to see, either put into the Farm Bill or strengthen. And I think about the Conservation Forage Program. This is a program that we launched in the Dakotas, which helps incentivize landowners to restore crop land back to native grassland.

We see an appetite and interest amongst landowners to get into grass-based agriculture. And this serves a number of different priorities. Number one being the availability of grassland bird habitat, but also pulling some marginal, less productive crop land out of production. This is cropland that's going to take more fertilizer.

Going to happen on more highly erodible, insensitive soil types, get that out of production and put it back into grassland production where it can, yes, be foraged for cattle, but also habitat for grassland birds like the bobolink and Western Meadowlark, Eastern Meadowlark, SPPI and all kinds of grassland birds.

CHAKRABARTI: We've been focusing on grassland birds a lot this hour. Maybe it's just because of where you are, Marshall, but also, the Farm Bill, it deals with everything from row crops to forests. And again, I'm just looking here at parts of the bill and there's the Forest conservation easement program, which I think it helps conserve working forests and makes fewer forest islands. Like it allows for connections between forested areas. And there's also a program to support forest landowners so that they receive assistance to help to adopt more sustainable management practices.

So some room there to also support forest dwelling birds.

JOHNSON: Yeah, that's how pervasive and expansive farm bill is right? The forest service and forest incentive programs for forest landowners. The ones that you alluded to, whether it's for management.

Or landowners that are looking to place a voluntary easement on their land, to ensure that it remains in a forested land use. These are, it really comes down to providing landowners with an assortment of tools to meet their conservation objectives. That's the name of the game, and more often than not, we see whether it's grasslands, rice fields, forests, landowners will choose the path that is mutually beneficial for the bottom line, and for the ecosystem and for nature.

We see it time and time again.

CHAKRABARTI: Marshall, even though my heart sings to your optimism, my brain wants to throw a little bit of cold water onto this conversation, because I keep thinking about since 1970 or the early seventies, a 25% decline in North American bird populations. I can't quite wrap my head around that number.

It is so huge and in discussing the complexities, right, of how vast agriculture is, just even built human spaces as we touched on a little bit. This seems to be such a complex problem that it makes me wonder or doubt that bird populations could ever actually fully rebound, or even if we could slow the pace of loss.

And we've had moments in time where the world's focus has been put on birds. Of course, I'm thinking like, Rachel Carson publishing Silent Spring, but this is harder than that, right? This we can't just point to one chemical that we're applying to the land as causing so much devastation amongst birds, Marshall.

JOHNSON: Oh, Meghna. You have to spend some time with me. You have to spend some time with the 800 Audubon employees that work across 11 countries here in the Western Hemisphere. Your listeners are right to call this appropriately the crisis that it is and the harbinger of a dire future if we don't act.

What gives me optimism? What fires me up? I travel across the western hemisphere, and I was just in Mexico, the Yucatan region of Mexico. And last year, this time I was in Concepción, Chile and I was looking at a lesser yellowlegs. And this is a shorebird that travels one way, almost 8,000 miles.

This bird weighs about as much as five or six sheets of paper. And it makes this journey both ways to the Canadian Boreal Forest and back. And along the way it is stewarded by indigenous leaders in Canada, ranchers in Western Dakotas, gauchos in the southern cone, ranchers in the Midwest, indigenous land stewards in Canada.

That's what gives me optimism. And it's hard when you are so close to this work, it's impossible for me to be dejected. That's not because the issue, the crisis is not huge. And spiraling out of control. It's that we know what to do, we can do something about it. But the birds that have filled our lives with song are now calling out to us through their silence. And that's an impetus, a catalyst for us to take action and we can. And we have the tools. Everyday people, lawmakers, businesses. And so that's what gives me hope. That's what gives me my optimism.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.