Victoria Erhart, 2020
It was heartbreaking. If you love and watch birds, a 2019 Science article reporting a decrease of 3 billion North American birds since 1970 was not so much a surprise as a confirmation of your worst fears. I’ve been a regular birder for over thirty years, and every spring in recent years have seen a lot of communal commiseration over the lack of birds, warblers in particular. I have a message from Tom George, former executive director of Madeline Island Chamber Music and a warbler aficionado: “I want to cry when I see the loss of three billion birds since 1970. But we’ve observed this over the years, haven’t we?”. Yes we have, but seeing a label like three billion applied to a general sense of unease is devastating.