What Birds Do for Us and What We Can Do for Them

We want to return to our lives and livelihoods without sacrificing the natural world that supports us in body and in spirit.

This spring, the dawn chorus sounds different. In the dark hours before sunrise, my yard whistles, chips, hoots, and trills with deafening birdsong. The birds caroling at my home in Virginia — robins, mockingbirds, warblers, cardinals, titmice, finches — sound more numerous, boisterous and energetic than in past years, all singing raucously at the same time, like a poetry slam where everyone’s reading at once.

Have the lockdowns resulted in more abundant birds? Is our behavior changing theirs, making them bolder, louder, more present in our yards and parks, or is the birdsong just more audible because there’s less ambient roar from cars, overhead jets, construction?

Or is it we who have changed, taking more notice of bird life now that our own lives have slowed?

The studies aren’t in on the impact of shifting human patterns on bird activity during the pandemic. It will most likely take years before we have firm data. But the anecdotes, from all around the world, are intriguing. My friends in Australia and New Zealand tell me that since the lockdowns began, flocks of spine-tailed swifts have swelled, more fairy-wrens are popping up at their bird baths and kereru — big pigeons that swallow large fruit — are perching on their back fences. “The lack of people is indeed being noticed by the wildlife,” said Darryl Jones, an ecologist at Griffith University specializing in the interaction between humans and wildlife. He points to the pair of very rare glossy black cockatoos that showed up on the vacant Griffith campus near Brisbane, along with more than 50 koalas in the nearby forest.

When the lockdowns were in full force, birds appeared to be thriving with the dip in noise and light and air pollution, along with emptied-out parks and public gardens that are usually a crush of people and traffic congestion. Here in the United States, ravens normally on edge around their nests in Yosemite were more relaxed, even playful in the empty parking lots, and endangered piping plovers had the beaches to themselves. One friend of mine from New York wrote to say, “There seem to be birds everywhere in the city, more than usual, having parties in the bushes, quarreling, singing.”

Roadkills have most likely been down, the naturalist and conservationist Kenn Kaufman told me. “In open country, they have not been happening at nearly the same rate,” he said, “sparing roadside species like meadowlarks and redheaded woodpeckers.” There have also been far fewer bird strikes by airplanes, decreasing kills of kestrels, killdeer and other species.

The reduction in noise may have a more subtle but still beneficial effect. Birds sing in the early morning to mark their territory and attract mates. Their efforts, however, often coincide with the roar of early morning rush hour. A few years ago, scientists from the University of Florida found that noisy highways prevented tufted titmice and northern cardinals from hearing alarm calls from fellow birds, warning of dangerous predators in the area, putting them at greater risk of becoming prey.

Now that things are opening up, all of this may be changing. Those ravens in Yosemite parking lots and shorebirds nesting on once empty beaches must now contend with returning crowds. The human din is beginning again.

The more enduring change may be in human behavior around birds. At the moment, most serious bird-watchers are not sashaying out to distant locations to spot a vagrant species or catch the big waves of migratory species passing through, but rather, observing more birdlife close to home. The American Bird Association, which calls the shots on ethical birding, advises: “Keep your eyes on the skies but your butt close to home.” And at least for now, that’s what most birders are doing (including Christian Cooper, whose experience safely birding in peace in Central Park was stolen from him).

Mr. Kaufman laments missing his regular visits to Magee Marsh Wildlife Area in Ohio, a famous hot spot for spring migration on the edge of Lake Erie, still rightly closed to the public. “Ordinarily at this season we would be going a few times per week to see water birds like herons, grebes, and coots,” he says. “At the water’s edge, long-distance migrant shorebirds like pectoral sandpipers, lesser yellowlegs, and American golden-plovers would be showing up, coming from South America, gradually making their way to nesting grounds on Arctic tundra. Back in the woods, the first wave of songbird migrants would be pumping in: fox sparrows, purple finches, rusty blackbirds, hermit thrushes, lots of golden-crowned kinglets.”

But, he says, he really can’t complain. He’s just focusing more on the birds in the habitat of his yard. “There was a fox sparrow here the other day — one of my favorite birds. It felt like a blessing.”

A lot of us, even those of us who aren’t hard-core birders, are turning more toward our yards and gardens, noting birds and bird activities we’ve never seen before — not because they’re new, necessarily, but because we’ve just never paid such close attention. One neighbor walking her dog remarked that she’s seeing more of spring than ever. “I just saw an early indigo bunting flying through our yard,” wrote a friend. “Ordinarily they don’t love my neighborhood and especially our overgrown yard, so I am ecstatic.”

With any luck, this human shift may stick: People noticing the birds around them more and finding entertainment, solace, even wisdom in watching them going about their lives in a regular way, finding mates, building nests, raising young, resilient and persistent. Birds may have something important to tell us about what it takes to navigate this world, especially under difficult circumstances. In exploring new discoveries in bird science, I’m struck by how birds play, adapt, innovate, and especially, work together in tough times. Birds cooperate and collaborate in everything from hunting, courting, and migrating, to raising and defending their young, sometimes even across species lines.

While the pandemic may have brought birds into closer focus for many of us, it has also given our current administration cover for rolling back vital environmental policies that protect birds, easing limits on auto emissions, restricting the reach of the Endangered Species Act and eviscerating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Ending the five-decade-old practice of pressuring industries to take measures to prevent unintentional killing (or “incidental take”) of migratory birds is likely to result in the catastrophic death of hundreds of millions of birds every year. The long-term impact of all of these changes will harm both birds and people.

We want to return to our lives and livelihoods, but not by sacrificing the natural world that supports us in body and in spirit. One older bird-watcher I know described the effect of seeing a bluebird in his urban backyard during the lockdown, for only the third time in sixteen years. “The aura of it was bigger than the essence, the cold hard fact, of it,” he said. “A bluebird on my backyard fence is just a bird sitting on a piece of metal. But what it does to me is so much more, the emotional and psychological uplift, the brightening. In three minutes, the bird was gone, but my day had utterly changed.”

Jennifer Ackerman (@JenGAckerman) is the author, most recently, of “The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think.”

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