Native birds have vanished across the continent since colonisation.

[UngulateNerd92]

Native birds have vanished across the continent since colonisation. Now we know just how much we’ve lost

In the 250 years since Europeans colonised Australia, native birdlife has disappeared across the continent. Our new research has, for the first time, registered just how much Australia has actually lost – and our findings are astonishingly sad.

We focused on 72 species of birds faced with extinction today, including the Kangaroo Island glossy black cockatoo, regent honeyeater, and night parrot. We found 530 million hectares, or 69%, of Australia, has lost at least one bird species. In some parts of the country, we’ve lost up to 17 birds.

Land clearing, along with threats such as cat predation, have driven ten birds to disappear from over 99% of their historical habitat. Indeed, we show the last 250 years has seen more than 100 million hectares of now-threatened bird habitat cleared on mainland Australia – that’s 15% of Australia’s landmass.

For many of the species we examined, their remaining habitats occur in patches surrounded by farmland, towns and cities. To give birds and other animals a chance at survival, we need effective national leadership
not only to
protect existing habitats, but also to restore lost habitat and manage future habitat under climate change.

Native birds have vanished across the continent since colonisation. Now we know just how much we’ve lost

 

[Mr. Zootycoon]

Unfortunately these declines are not limited to Australia. North America lost almost 30% of its birds since 1970, a net loss of 3 billion individuals. Europe, since 1980 the EU alone has suffered a loss of almost 20% of its birds, around 600 million individuals. The European study offered a more detailed view, and corroborated what the American study interpreted but could not truly reveal: that most of the loss was caused by the large scale decline of the most abundant species. Almost 70% of the decline in the EU was explained by the loss of house and tree sparrows, yellow wagtails, skylarks, common starlings, willow warblers, linnets and serins. The American study found that decreases in common and widespread families like warblers, sparrows, finches and blackbirds were responsible for a huge proportion of the loss.

The Australian study only looked at about 70 threatened species. I fear an analysis on common species might reveal even more worrisome patterns. Rare specialized species are prone to disappear when conditions change, that is partly in their nature. But when the adaptable common-as-dirt generalists start to disappear, that may be a sign that something is fundamentally going wrong in the wider ecosystem.



Rosenberg, K. V., Dokter, A. M., Blancher, P. J., Sauer, J. R., Smith, A. C., Smith, P. A., ... & Marra, P. P. (2019). Decline of the North American avifauna. Science, 366(6461), 120-124.

Burns, F., Eaton, M. A., Burfield, I. J., Klvaňová, A., Šilarová, E., Staneva, A., & Gregory, R. D. (2021). Abundance decline in the avifauna of the European Union reveals cross‐continental similarities in biodiversity change. Ecology and evolution, 11(23), 16647-16660.