Deep in a Panamanian rain forest, bird populations have been quietly declining for 44 years.
A new University of Illinois-led study shows a whopping 70% of understory bird species declined in the forest between 1977 and 2020. And the vast majority of those are down by half or more.
“Many of these are species you would expect to be doing fine in a 22,000-hectare national park that has experienced no major land use change for at least 50 years,” says Henry Pollock, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES) at U of I and lead author on the study. “It was very surprising.”
Concerning is Jeff Brawn’s word for it. Brawn is Levenick Chair in Sustainability in NRES and a co-author on the study. He’s also investigated birds at the study site, Parque Nacional Soberanía, for more than 30 years. “This is one of the longest, if not the longest, study of its kind in the Neotropics,” Brawn says. “Of course, it's only one park. We can’t necessarily generalize to the whole region and say the sky is falling, but it's quite concerning.”
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