A couple weeks ago when it was actually feeling like winter in NYC I had to ditch my computer to look out the window – was I actually hearing a flock of geese (or ducks 😅) just now migrating south?! Didn’t that used to happen in the fall? Some quick googling didn’t really help, I couldn’t see who had just zoomed by and I don’t know much about birds.
I’m on a Zoom call with a team of researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, their gridded video feeds a sort of Hollywood Squares of bird nerds, and we’re discussing the decline and fall of North America’s bird population — a staggering loss of 3 billion breeding adults, or nearly 30 percent of the population, in just a half century — when all of a sudden Gus Axelson picks up his binoculars and peers out the window.
“Gus,” I ask, “are you birding right now?”
Axelson, the Cornell Lab’s editorial director, hastily apologizes, but I tell him to go ahead and bird. I have a job, but birders like Axelson have a calling, and no one can predict when nature will call. “I had white-throated sparrows that have been gone for a couple of days,” Axelson, who leads production of Living Bird, the lab’s quarterly magazine, explains when he puts down the binoculars. “They just popped back up.”
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