North American songbird populations have declined by nearly 3 billion birds since 1970. This loss represents an enormous welfare crisis affecting individual birds and ecosystem health.
The decline of 3 billion birds represents an enormous welfare crisis at both the individual and population level. Every bird dying from pesticide-related starvation, window collision, cat predation, or habitat-driven failure to reproduce represents individual welfare harm to a sentient being capable of suffering. The aggregate scale - nearly 3 billion fewer individual birds experiencing life than 50 years ago - is difficult to comprehend but real. At the population level, the collapse of songbird communities represents a cascading welfare crisis: species that depend on abundant insect prey, which themselves depend on healthy plant communities and unpolluted environments, are experiencing systemic breakdown of the conditions needed for thriving wild lives. Individual actions multiply into population-level effects when adopted at scale.