“The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows.”
Adam Smith combined 13 bird counts and millions of radar sweeps across 529 species and got 2.913 billion breeding birds gone since the early 1970s. Ninety percent of the loss sits in just 12 families of common backyard birds like sparrows and finches. Those species get relatively little research and no sense of urgency. Nobody noticed a third of the birds leaving because nobody was counting them.