I rarely read comments from other readers on articles, but for some reason I did on this one; they are almost as interesting as the article itself:

For Migrating Birds, It’s the Flight of Their Lives

America’s birds are in trouble. Since 1970, nearly 3 billion birds have vanished from the skies over North America.

Most of those losses have been in migratory species, which may breed in the United States or Canada in the summer before heading elsewhere for the winter. Many spend more time living on Caribbean beaches or in Costa Rican forests than they do in American backyards. “They’re really visitors to North America,” said Viviana Ruiz-Gutierrez, co-director of the Center for Avian Population Studies at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Protecting these birds will require working across international borders and safeguarding all of their habitats, many of which are under threat. If migrating birds lose their winter refuges, the consequences will ripple across the hemisphere.

“If we lose Central America’s forests, we can lose North America’s birds,” said Jeremy Radachowsky, the director for Mesoamerica and the western Caribbean at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

To illuminate these connections, scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology developed “shared stewardship” maps in collaboration with Partners in Flight, an international bird conservation network. Each map displays the key wintering grounds for the migratory species that have a significant summer presence in a particular U.S. state or region. The maps are based on data from eBird, a database of observations from bird watchers around the world.

Here are some of those connections…