Can Saving Birds Save the Planet? Scott Weidensaul’s Case for Hope and Resilience Amid a Dire Era of Bird Loss

“A spot that’s good for birds is nice for everybody,” writes naturalist and creator Scott Weidensaul in The Return of the Oystercatcher: Saving Birds to Save the Planet. Whereas lots of his earlier books on pure historical past spotlight the threats going through birds throughout their ranges (together with the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Residing on the Wind: Throughout the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds), his newest providing strikes a extra hopeful tone, regaling readers with tales of chook populations bouncing again.  

Some readers could be skeptical of the optimism: North America has misplaced an estimated three billion birds since 1970, and the 2025 State of the Birds report revealed that species throughout all habitats have declined. Grassland birds have been hit the toughest—their inhabitants has dropped 40 p.c prior to now few many years—and even widespread birds like Mallards are doing poorly. Weidensaul says he’s on no account “a Pollyanna,” however he desires individuals to know that “little advances could make an enormous distinction.” And he has discovered loads of success tales. 

Overlaying excess of the titular oystercatchers, every chapter in Weidensaul’s new ebook options a special chook species or household that has rebounded, together with the individuals and legal guidelines accountable for these conservation wins over the previous century. From duck victories within the prairie pothole region and work in Hawaiʻi to guard albatross and shearwaters from feral cats, to Bulgarian vulture conservation and rewilding efforts across Europe, Weidensaul learn extensively (you possibly can obtain a full bibliography from his web site) and traveled the globe to trace down tales of restoration. The result’s greater than 300 pages of information-dense however conversational storytelling—and the ebook seemingly might have been for much longer. “Over the course of quite a few years, I used to be a packrat gathering concepts,” Weidensaul says. 

Fantastically descriptive writing brings all that analysis to life: You’ll be able to virtually hear the cacophonous, now-thriving puffin and tern colony Weidensaul visits on Jap Egg Rock in Maine, and his vivid account of a Higher Sage-Grouse lek within the western United States transports readers to the courtship dance-offs, even when they’ve by no means personally witnessed the males’ elaborate shows of booming air sacs and tail fanning.  

The final portion of the ebook, which Weidensaul says was essentially the most shifting part to report and write, focuses on Indigenous-led conservation within the boreal forest. “The dimensions of conservation that they’re doing up there, it’s staggering.” Led by the Dene individuals in northwestern Canada, the Thaidene Nëné Indigenous Protected Space safeguards 6.5 million acres of vital boreal forest habitat utilized by over 300 species throughout the breeding season. The Dene “have been simply actually ripped off the land and shoved into essentially the most god-awful situations conceivable for a era, after which you understand, they mentioned, ‘screw this, we’re going again to the land,’ and so they’ve rebuilt their lives and their group and their tradition,” Weidensaul says. 

The ebook arrives in a dire and fast-changing second of slashed environmental legal guidelines, gutted federal companies, and authorities shutdowns that upend vital chook monitoring and conservation. And but, impressed by the flourishing of state, personal, and Tribal-led efforts to guard individuals and locations world wide, Weidensaul nonetheless finds hope for birds.

In spite of everything, when Weidensaul graduated highschool within the bicentennial 12 months of 1976, there have been solely round 1,000 Bald Eagles within the contiguous United States. “In case you had advised me that on the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding that there could be 400,000 Bald Eagles within the Decrease 48, I might have thought you have been delusional,” he says. “We are able to change issues for birds after we put our minds to it.”

Weidensaul can also be a contributing author for Audubon journal; his latest feature explored the enlargement of limpkins throughout the southeastern U.S. 

The Return of the Oystercatcher, by Scott Weidensaul. 368 pages, $32.99, W. W. Norton & Firm. Out there here from W. W. Norton.