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.

Turns out things are happening with birds, but not exactly in the way I had considered. Flowingdata shared The Washington Post’s Climate Lab: Bird populations are declining. Some are in your neighborhood. piece created with data from eBird.

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.”

Read more from The Washington Post and check out eBird