Responses are still trickling in to. my very unorthodox post about whether kids are paying attention to nature in the right way. There is a veritable cannon that all conservationists are supposed to believe In this matter, and it starts with Richard Louv and the Last Child in the Wilderness and ends with requesting paper straws. And I, apparently am the odd man out.

Because every KNOWS kids spend too much time on their screens to care about the natural world, Right?

I still say blaming screen time for kids knowing less about nature is like blaming plastic straws for global warming. You’re blaming a massive problem on a very small thing instead thinking about how we all are and have been to blame for centuries.

There are 3 billion fewer birds in North America than there were in 1970

North America has lost nearly 3 billion birds since 1970, a study said Thursday, which also found significant population declines among hundreds of bird species, including those once considered plentiful.

Overall, bird populations in the United States and Canada have declined by 29% in the past 50 years, according to the study, which authors say is a sign of a widespread ecological crisis.

“Multiple, independent lines of evidence show a massive reduction in the abundance of birds,” said study lead author Ken Rosenberg, a senior scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and American Bird Conservancy, in a statement. “We expected to see continuing declines of threatened species. But for the first time, the results also showed pervasive losses among common birds across all habitats, including backyard birds.”

What if kids were observing less about nature because there was in fact less nature for them to observe? What if our factories, cars, pollution, development and climate change had so disrupted the natural world that there was precious little of it left to see?

The findings showed that of the nearly 3 billion birds lost, most belonged to 12 bird families, including sparrows, warblers, finches and swallows. Overall, the drop was from about 10 billion birds in 1970 to about 7 billion now.

The cause is primarily habitat loss, as birds are losing the places they need to live, find food, rest and raise their young.

Other threats to birds include deaths because of free-roaming cats, collisions with glass, toxic pesticides and insect decline. Climate change compounds all of these problems and also accelerates the loss of the habitats that birds need, experts say.

But we played outside every day when I was a kid, they say.. The kids are spending too much time on their phones. That’s the real problem with them not knowing enough about the environment. It’s that these lazy, spoiled dam
kids just won’t put down their phones and go outside.