Despite some amazing rebounds, six decades after Rachel Carson’s call to curb pesticide use, the world’s birds are in deep trouble assaulted by toxic chemicals, lost habitat, hunting, invasive species, and climate change.
The tooth-billed bowerbird gave itself away with a not-quite-right call. Suspicious, I’d panned my binoculars toward the sound and there he was, the mimic, high in the canopy of a rainforest tree. It was a satisfying sight. Like many of Australia’s wet tropics-endemic species, tooth-billed bowerbird populations have declined rapidly in recent years, their climate […]