bird

At the outset, Richard Baines says: “You don’t need binoculars.” This is not what I expect to hear on a walk where the main focus is birds. The sun has yet to rise, but we can see our way across muddy ground crunchy with ice. That is the next surprise in a day that will be full of them: we are still in February but Richard points out that ornithological spring is well under way. “Birds are starting to sing,” he says. “Some, like the crossbill, might already have laid eggs.”

We follow a path up to an open ridge, but bird sounds are conspicuously absent. Richard turns back and heads down into a sheltered wooded valley. We have driven up from Pickering to the North York Moors, an area he has been exploring for more than 40 years, his experiences charted in recent memoir The Rarity Garden. As a 14-year-old budding ornithologist he decided to learn bird songs and calls. “I had spent too many woodland walks being disappointed by not seeing any birds, but I could hear a great deal,” he says. “When I started to prioritise sound above sight, the trees came alive and I have never had a bad woodland walk since.” Our walk today aims to land that message for me.

As we drop down into a wooded glade, a large bird flits out of the trees, turns and is gone. “Great start!” says Richard. “Male goshawk.”

Now we stop in front of a small stand of alder and hazel. A bird is singing, so I get out my phone and load Merlin, the app that has revolutionised my ability to identify birds. “Yes, let’s see what you get,” says Richard with a twinkle in his eye. I glance down and see three bird names quickly ping on to the screen. Song thrush, chaffinch and blackbird. I look up. Something is not quite right: all the sounds are emanating from the same place. And then it happens: an unmistakable mewling cry, coming from the top of the alder, where all the other sounds have originated. Merlin duly obliges: “Buzzard.”

Richard is chuckling. “Any thoughts?”

“That thrush just did something incredible.”

We listen a little longer, then Richard explains how a lifetime of learning bird sounds took an unexpected turn in 2014 when Cornell University brought out its gamechanging app, Merlin, a bird-sound identifier that now has more than 10 million users worldwide.

“It’s a brilliant tool for learning birdsong, but it’s also revealing lots of unexpected information,” he says.

One such moment came on a walk in May 2025. Richard was leading a group looking for nightjars in clear-felled areas of plantation woodland near where we are walking. A participant who had lagged behind suddenly came running back to the group with the news that Merlin had picked up a nightingale’s song. Richard immediately turned the group around and went back. “Nightingales are rarely sighted north of Cambridgeshire, never in the North York Moors,” he says. “It would have been momentous.”

Instead, they found a song thrush.

“It may have learned the song on its spring migration, maybe even in the Mediterranean. Merlin is teaching a lot, but it’s also revealing gaps in our knowledge.”

The song thrush is not the only bird playing tricks. As the bottom of the valley flattens out, I spot a great tit landing in the willows by the stream, then singing like no great tit I’ve heard before.

“It’s mimicking a marsh tit,” says Richard. By the time I get Merlin going, a song thrush has started singing. This time, with the sun risen, we can see it clearly, and Richard whispers: “It’s doing a nuthatch.”

Merlin pops up with: “Coot.”

We both stare at the screen, then replay the recording. Sure enough, there is a snippet of low quacks. This time, even Richard is staggered. “That is a first. There definitely isn’t a coot within 10 miles of here.”

Standing in a puddle of icy water, I am suddenly aware that I may have just witnessed a small addition to human knowledge. Significantly, I have not once thought about taking a picture.

For Richard, these reactions are what make the walks special. “Being thrilled by bird sound really frees people up, especially if you’ve got used to the idea that success is a good photograph.”

He has brought people with sight loss on the walks. “They are often much more sensitive to sound and so it’s fascinating to get their skills involved.”

We carry on and, with Richard’s guidance, a whole new sonic world opens up for me, including, far away, the honking of pink-footed geese arriving from Iceland. They are so high I can’t see them, but Richard thinks he knows where they might land, so we quickly transfer to the nearby flooded fields of Ryedale. Extreme cold in eastern Europe has sent thousands of geese towards the UK, and now we see hundreds of pink-footed geese coming down to land and, among them, the black barred chests of Russian white-fronted geese (“white-fronted” refers to the bird’s forehead, not chest). In a normal year, Yorkshire might welcome a couple of dozen of these, but now we are witnessing several hundred in one place. “A once in a 25-year event,” says Richard.

Having already flown about 3,000 miles from their Siberian breeding grounds to the Dutch coast, these birds have decided that an extra few hundred miles across the North Sea is a good idea. That seems like magic, but there is more. Next day, Richard phones. “I’ve been looking at the photos of those geese and there was something even more unusual among them: another Siberian visitor, a single tundra bean goose.”

I like that. Despite my new interest in sound, I’ll hang on to my camera.

Yorkshire Coast Nature offers various nature walks, including Bird Sound Safaris, from £40

WASHINGTON — Billions fewer birds are flying through North American skies than decades ago and their numbers are shrinking ever faster, mostly due to the combination of intensive agriculture and warming temperatures, a new study finds.

Nearly half of the 261 species studied showed losses important enough to be statistically significant, and more than half of those in decline have seen losses accelerate since 1987, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. The study is the first to look at trends in their decrease, where they are shrinking the most and what the declines are connected to, rather than total population.

“Not only are we losing birds, we are losing them faster and faster from year to year,” said study co-author Marta Jarzyna, an ecologist at Ohio State University. “Except for forest birds, almost every group is doing poorly. So we need to ask ourselves a question. How do we protect these groups of birds?”

The only consolation is that the birds that are shrinking in numbers the fastest are species — such as the European starling, American crow, grackle and house sparrow — that aren’t yet at risk of going extinct, said study lead author Francois Leroy, also an Ohio State ecologist.

“The thing is that species extinction, they start with a decline in abundance,” Leroy said, adding that “the decline is somehow maybe giving a preview of what it could lead to in terms of species extinction.”

Cornell University conservation scientist Kenneth Rosenberg, who wasn’t part of the study, said the species declining fastest in the new research “are often considered pests or ‘trash birds,’ but if our environment cannot support healthy populations of these extreme generalists and extremely adaptable species that are tolerant of humans, then that is a very strong indicator that the environment is also toxic to humans and all other life.”

A 2019 study by Rosenberg of the same bird species found North America had 3 billion fewer birds than in 1970, but didn’t look at changes in the rate of loss or causes.

Biggest bird losses in areas warming most

The biggest locations for acceleration of bird loss were in the Mid-Atlantic, the Midwest and California, the study found. And geography proved important when Leroy and Jarzyna looked for reasons why so many bird species are shrinking ever faster.

When it came to population declines — not the acceleration — the scientists noticed bigger losses farther south. When they did a deeper analysis, they statistically connected those losses to warmer temperatures from human-caused climate change.

“In regions where temperatures increase the most, we are seeing strongest declines in populations,” Jarzyna said. “On the other hand, the acceleration of those declines, that’s mostly driven by agricultural practices.”

Farmland issues speed up bird declines

The scientists found statistical correlations between accelerating decline and high fertilizer and pesticide use and the amount of cropland, Leroy said. He said they couldn’t say any of those caused the acceleration of losses, but it indicates agriculture in general is a factor.

“The stronger the agriculture, the faster we will lose birds,” Leroy said.

Jarzyna said there is a “strong interaction” between climate change and agriculture in their effect on bird populations.

“We found that agricultural intensification causes stronger accelerations of decline in regions where climate warmed the most,” Jarzyna said.

McGill University wildlife biologist David Bird, who wasn’t part of the study, said it was done well and that its conclusions made sense. With a growing human population, agriculture practices are intensified, more bird habitats are being converted to cropland, modern machinery often grind up nests and eggs, and single crop plantings offer less possibilities for birds to find food and nests, said Bird, the editor of “Birds of Canada.”

“The biggest impact of agricultural intensity though is our war on insects. Numerous recent studies have shown that insect populations in many places throughout the world, including the U.S., have crashed by well over 40 percent,” Bird said in an email. “Many of the birds in this new study showing population declines depend heavily on insects for food.”

Birds do a lot for humans

This study is both “alarming” and “sobering” because of the sheer numbers of losses and the patterns in those accelerating declines, said Richard Gregory, head of monitoring conservation science at University College London. He was not part of the research.

The paper shows that people need to change the way they live to reduce human-caused warming, reduce agricultural intensity, monoculture of crops and broad application of chemicals, said Cornell University ornithologist Andrew Farnsworth, who wasn’t part of the study.

“Here is why this study is especially important. Birds do a lot for humans,’’ McGill biologist Bird said in an email. ”They feed us, clothe us, eat pests, pollinate our plants and crops, and warn us about impending environmental disasters. With their songs, colors, and variety, birds enrich our lives … and recent studies show that their immediate presence actually increases our well-being and happiness and can even prolong our lives! To me, a world without birds is simply unfathomable.”

Borenstein writes for the Associated Press.