Quantifying the Decline in Avian Biodiversity: A Global Crisis and its Implications for Environmental Education

People care about what they love—and it’s easy to love--and fall in love, with birds. The opportunities to promote bird diversity are legion, and applicable throughout K-12 education. For example, the Eastern Bluebird needs to nest in the cavities of dead trees, a habitat drastically denuded by large scale farming—or in specialized nesting boxes. A nationwide effort to build and install these boxes has brought the population back to healthy numbers since its 1970 low point. (Once one knows what they look like, one cannot miss these roadside homes—Western Bluebirds also benefit.) Students can also engineer bird houses and deters, design and create window decals to avoid fatal collisions, and participate in local and nationwide counts contributing invaluable information to ornithologists and other scientists.