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Three billion North American birds have vanished since 1970, surveys show | Science | AAAS

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Three billion North American birds have vanished since 1970, surveys show | Science | AAAS

North America's birds are disappearing from the skies at a rate that's shocking even to ornithologists. Since the 1970s, the continent has lost 3 billion birds, nearly 30% of the total, and even common birds such as sparrows and blackbirds are in decline, U.S. and Canadian researchers report this week online in Science. "It's staggering," says first author Ken Rosenberg, a conservation scientist at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology. The findings raise fears that some familiar species could go the way of the passenger pigeon, a species once so abundant that its extinction in the early 1900s seemed unthinkable.

Grouse Facts

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Grouse Facts

RANGE Ruffed Grouse (Bonasa umbellus) are the most widely distributed resident game bird in North America, living now or recently in all of the Canadian Provinces and in 38 of the 49 states on the continent. Their range in the East extends from near the tree-line in Labrador to northern Georgia and northeastern Alabama, and they once occurred as far south as Arkansas in the central part of the continent, although now they occur only in isolated pockets west of the Appalachians and south of the states bordering the Great Lakes.

Are Birds Actually Government-Issued Drones? So Says a New Conspiracy Theory Making Waves (and Money)

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Are Birds Actually Government-Issued Drones? So Says a New Conspiracy Theory Making Waves (and Money)

"Combine all these conspiracies and you get Birds Aren’t Real, a nearly two-year-old movement that claims the CIA took out 12 billion feathered fugitives because directors within the organization were “annoyed that birds had been dropping fecal matter on their car windows.” The targets were eradicated between 1959 and 1971 with specially altered B-52 bombers stocked with poison. They were then supplanted with avian-like robots that could be used to surveil Americans. "