The smell of baking homemade bread greeted the participants to a potluck at my church, the Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church. It was a crisp, cold day in 1999, and we met that day to hear a presentation by an Audubon volunteer who talked about the dramatic decline in Maine’s backyard birds. We learned that the building boom was causing habitat loss not only here in Maine, but as far away as Mexico, where many of Maine birds spend their winters, and spots along their flight path that were no longer available to them.

Preparations for this day had been long in the planning, and our church members had previously cut out the wooden parts and prepared the instructions for building 21 birdhouses. That cold afternoon, we constructed those 21 birdhouses that later helped to welcome the birds that would return to Maine the next spring. It was a fun day, and it felt good to know that we, in a tiny way, had helped to educate others about the seriousness of the problem of declining bird populations.

Now, Audubon has released a study recently published in the Christian Science Monitor entitled “Common bird species in dramatic decline.” It goes on to report: “From the heartland’s whippoorwills and meadowlarks to the Northern bobwhite and common terns of the nation’s coasts, 20 common bird species tracked by the National Audubon Society have seen their numbers fall 54 percent overall since 1967, with some down about 80 percent.”

This report confirms what we learned that day at my church those many years ago. And the bird songs that I hear each morning and evening confirm it as well. I no longer hear that one beautiful bird song that I heard each evening. Perhaps it was the evening grosbeak, whose sightings are down 78 percent. The Rufous Hummingbird sightings are down 58 percent and the Little Blue Heron down 54 percent.

The report builds on a U.S. Geological Study, some 40 years of data gathered by thousands of volunteers from the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count program. Habitat loss is still the leading cause, but now there are the added huge problems of global warming.

Another study that focused on climate change by Walter Jetz, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of California at San Diego, reports, “At the current rate, global warming and destroyed bird habitat could lead to the significant decline or extinction of at least 400 of the world’s 8,750 bird species.”

We know the cause. The questions remain. “What part do we each play?” And, “What are the long-term effects of this decline in our bird population?” One answer to the first question that comes to mind is to urge our town planners to design tight-knit groups of new homes that could form small communities where smaller plots of land would be cleared. I’ll offer some insight into the second question in a later article.

Meanwhile, bell the cat!