Incorporating eBird Trends into State of the Birds 2025

From the Summer 2025 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.

The 2025 edition of the State of the Birds report—published in March by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative, a consortium of more than a dozen U.S. bird conservation groups (including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology)— was the tenth such report, going back to 2009. Produced every few years for the U.S. Department of the Interior, the reports provide regular check-ins on the status of American bird populations in various biomes using long-term Breeding Bird Survey data that dates back to 1970.

This year’s edition was the first State of the Birds report that also extensively incorporated eBird Trends models from the Cornell Lab, plotting onto maps the patterns of bird declines across landscapes over the most recent decade. A few groups of birds, and a few areas of the nation, stood out as the biggest loss leaders—specifically the Corn Belt for grassland birds; the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts for aridland birds; and the Prairie Pothole Region for ducks.

eBird Trends data in these regions could help conservationists identify the best potential areas for boosting bird habitat and avoiding land-use conflicts, says Amanda Rodewald, senior director of the Cornell Lab’s Center for Avian Population Studies.

“Right now there are so many problems we’re facing, so many competing demands for any area of land,” says Rodewald, who was science team chair for the State of the Birds report. “With this information, we can better align where we’re doing conservation and prioritize areas for bird conservation with where we can … protect water quality or improve soil health. Those kind of win-wins.”

Grassland Birds

Accelerating declines with the intensification of row-crop agriculture

The State of the Birds report attributed the steepest losses for grassland birds to conversion for row-crop agriculture and drought.

That’s not surprising to Michael Ward, a professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. Ward studies grassland bird population dynamics in agricultural landscapes, and he says he’s seen the losses in grassland birds firsthand.

“In the 20-something years I’ve been working on birds here, species like Grasshopper Sparrow, Eastern Meadowlark in Illinois are just going down the tubes,” Ward says. “There’s no longer pasture, especially in Illinois. … Corn and soybeans are predominant. The only reason we still have grassland birds, in my opinion, is the Conservation Reserve Program.”

Ward is talking about a voluntary program in the U.S. Farm Bill’s Conservation Title that compensates farmers for converting marginal croplands (such as highly erodible acreage) into vegetative cover, such as native grasses. CRP acreage enrollments have declined in the 21st century, and CRP funding is uncertain in the upcoming Farm Bill reauthorization by Congress.

“Because of changes in policy, people aren’t re-upping [CRP enrollments] to maintain these grasslands, and so species like Henslow’s Sparrows are not there. There’s no habitat for them,” says Ward. “It’s ag policy that dictates what our land use is, and that then ultimately impacts birds.”

“It’s not the farmer’s fault. Obviously, it’s a business, they gotta make the most of it,” Ward says. And, he thinks many farmers would like to help out grassland birds. “I do spend a lot of time in rural Illinois and ask farmers about bird populations. They’ll notice there’s less bobwhite, less birds around.

“I think a lot of times, they have a connection to the land, and so if they’re given the opportunity to set aside some grassland here, have a pasture there, a lot of them are willing to do that. It’s just that policy dictates the economics of it.”

And, he says, the current policy favors “essentially row-to-row corn or soybeans.”

Ward says farming and grassland birds can coexist, if farmers are incentivized to make room for bird habitat: “We didn’t really see huge declines of grassland birds until the 1960s or ’70s. But we’ve had ag for 100-and-something years. It wasn’t until ag practices changed to be so intensive that we really lost those birds.

“So it’s not like we have to go back and make all our corn and soybean fields into prairie. We just need to have policies that incorporate habitat for the grassland birds.” 

Aridland Birds

Drought plus habitat loss is decimating desert birds

The native birds of America’s aridlands in the West are evolutionarily attuned to living in lean, dry places where precipitation is scarce. But even these scrappy species are suffering in the stressed-out 21st century, especially in the Southwest where the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts meet.

Chris McCreedy, the Southwest riparian bird recovery coordinator for the American Bird Conservancy, says that when he looks at these present-day eBird Trends maps, he is reminded of a set of bird distribution maps issued 15 years ago that projected what might happen to bird populations in aridlands if climate change continued unchecked.

“It’s kind of creepy. This [eBird Trends] map shows those predictions, that were kind of dire, bearing out,” he says.

McCreedy says extreme drought in the 2010s and into the 2020s is driving aridland bird declines, but it’s not the only factor. He says urban development and rapid renewable energy development are making a bad situation for birds even worse. Along with rampant wildfires.

“I think you have more acres lost to fires in aridland habitats now than in the past,” he says, citing more people on the landscape and higher fuel loads from flammable invasive grasses that act as wildfire accelerants. “So the fires have fuel to spread to places that didn’t really necessarily burn that often in the past.”

McCreedy also points out that desert bird species are adapted to bouncing back after drought: “Aridland birds will respond if we work to remove the constraints that we place upon them.”

He cites populations of Black-tailed Gnatcatchers, Bell’s Vireos, and other aridland species at a site in the Mojave Desert where his group controlled nest parasitism by Brown-headed Cowbirds (which had moved in along with nearby human developments and their bird feeders). Once the cowbird pressures were removed, the native birds flourished.

“The nest success is off the charts. I had 100% success in 2022, which is insane for open-cup nesting birds,” McCreedy says. “Usually you’re happy with 40% or maybe 50%, but they had 100%.”

Dabbling and Diving Ducks

Recent declines driven by drought, exacerbated by wetland loss

Historically waterfowl have been a bright spot in State of the Birds reports, an increasing group of birds that benefitted from dedicated habitat conservation programs such as the federal Duck Stamp and the North American Wetlands Conservation Act. And again in this 2025 report, duck populations are up 24% over the long term since 1970. But the eBird Trends map for dabbling and diving ducks depicts a more ominous recent trend—duck populations in the Prairie Pothole Region over the past decade have declined to a point that’s 10% below the long-term average.

“Obviously not a good thing. That’s North America’s duck factory,” says Orin Robinson, a Cornell Lab research associate who specializes in eBird data analysis. “That’s where the majority of our ducks breed.”

Robinson is also a duck hunter, with almost 30 years of experience hunting the fall duck migration through the Lower Mississippi River Valley in Arkansas. The ducks that he hunts in fall “start as eggs” up in the Prairie Pothole Region, he says. As a scientist, Robinson says his peers who work on waterfowl surveys in the Dakotas and Montana confirm what he sees on the eBird Trends maps.

“The people I talk to, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service folks and Joint Venture folks, it seems to match what they’re seeing,” he says.

Mike Brasher, the senior waterfowl scientist at Ducks Unlimited and science team co-chair on the State of the Birds report, says that recent drought has revealed the extent of wetlands loss in recent decades.

“It allows us to see reduced capacity,” says Brasher, referring to the capacity of the Prairie Pothole landscape to produce ducks. Brasher says that a weakening of wetland protections and intensified rowcrop production in the region have contributed to wetland loss rates that have accelerated by 50% within the past decade, according to a recent U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report.

“Those conversions are driven by market forces. This is not farmers that set out to convert habitat. These are producers that seek to make a living and produce the food, fiber, and fuel that each of our countries needs,” says Brasher, referring to farmers in the U.S. and Canadian portions of the Prairie Pothole Region. “Market forces are driving them. The best alternative for their land use right now [from an economic perspective] is to convert it to agricultural production or intensify agricultural production. So [conservationists] need to give them attractive, competitive alternatives.”

Brasher says that in the U.S., those cost-competitive alternatives for farmer land use come primarily from conservation programs in the Farm Bill and from investments in easements from nonprofit groups like Ducks Unlimited. And sometimes, he says, it means incentivizing beef production instead of planting corn or soybeans.

“That’s one of the reasons we are big advocates for cattle ranching,” Brasher says. “Ducks and cattle both need grass and they both need wetlands. So those two things work in combination, and it’s why we invest in a fair bit of programs to support ranchers in both the U.S. and Canada.”