KPBS Midday Edition

Why A Decrease In 3 Billion North American Birds Matters

By Brooke Ruth / Senior Producer of Audio News, Mark Sauer / Host, The Roundtable

Published October 1, 2019 at 9:06 AM PDT

This story was published more than 5 years ago.

Birds gather to feed in the Tijuana River Estuary on Sept. 5, 2017.

In the half-century since 1970, the number of birds in North America has declined by an estimated three billion — that's a 29 percent decrease.

In the half-century since 1970, the number of birds in North America has declined by an estimated 3 billion — that's a 29 percent decrease, according to a recent study published in Science Magazine.

The decrease in the number of North American birds is being seen across a large variety of species.

This is a direct result, researchers say, of humans altering the natural world.

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Philip Unitt is the author of "The San Diego County Bird Atlas" and a curator and specialist in California birds at the San Diego Natural History Museum. He says the decrease in birds is being caused by habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, pesticide use and climate change impacts, such as drought and fires.

"The planet needs to sustain a broad spectrum of life, it's going to sustain human life," Unitt said. "We still have a very fuzzy idea of all the ecological connections that are out there and to cast aside the pieces that constitute that network when we still don't understand how it works is really shortsighted."

Unitt joined Midday Edition on Tuesday to discuss the study and what bird species are decreasing locally.

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Brooke Ruth

Brooke Ruth is the senior producer of Audio News. She previously served as a producer for "KPBS Midday Edition" and a web producer. Before joining KPBS, Brooke was a web editor for four newspapers and a local television station. She began her career in news at the Imperial Valley Press. She has also been part of the web teams at the Napa Valley Register, North County Times, and U-T San Diego. While pursuing her undergraduate degree at UCLA in psychology, she worked on the student newspaper, the Daily Bruin.

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Mark Sauer

A newspaperman for more than 30 years, Mark Sauer joined KPBS in October 2010 and previously served as the host of the KPBS Roundtable. He spent 27 years as a reporter and editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune after stints at The Houston Post and at two papers in his native Michigan. A features/human-interest writer in the UT's Currents section for many years, Mark also spent about a third of his UT career as an editor and reporter on the Metro Desk. He has covered a wide range of events: Wild fires in Southern California and Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast; Super Bowls and the World Series; foster care and child-abuse issues; the Roman Catholic Diocese's sexual-abuse scandal and bankruptcy; royal visits of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Princess Diana; Republican and Democratic national conventions; high-profile criminal trials; and many other stories, from the silly to the sublime. Along the way, he interviewed everyone from presidents to pan-handlers. His work exposing the false accusations and prosecutions of several San Diegans for murder, rape and child abuse garnered Pulitzer Prize nominations and many regional and local journalism awards, including Best in the West, the Sol Price Award for Responsible Journalism and several San Diego and California bar-association awards. Mark has a degree in journalism from Michigan State University.

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