View From Sapsucker Woods: Our Shared Birds

From the Spring 2026 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.

Spring is here! And with it, the return of old friends: a familiar song at dawn, or a flash of color in a tree. The details vary according to where we live, but the birds that return in spring are inspiring, enigmatic, and—unfortunately—disproportionately likely to be declining. For me, living in the woods outside of Ithaca in Upstate New York, the moment I treasure is when I hear the first Wood Thrush, the dancing flute of the Eastern forests.

All the recent studies of bird population trends point to the acute pressures faced by long-distance migrants like the Wood Thrush. A key challenge is how to target species with life histories that include such a complex mixture of breeding, wintering, and stopover sites.

A study recently published in the journal Biological Conservation—led by Anna Lello-Smith and other scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society, in partnership with scientists from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology—tackles that challenge, using eBird to map the movements of over 300 North American migratory bird species. The results are startling, with the regions in Central and South America known as the Five Great Forests of Mesoamerica appearing as glowing hotspots of wintering and stopover sites. These forests are the Selva Maya of Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize; the Moskitia of Nicaragua and Honduras; the Indio Maiz–Tortuguero of Nicaragua and Costa Rica; La Amistad of Costa Rica and Panama; and the Darien of Panama and Colombia.

For species like Kentucky, Cerulean, and Golden-winged Warblers, Broad-winged Hawk, and Acadian Flycatcher, 20% to 45% of their global populations are wintering or stopping over in these forests. The reciprocal breeding areas in North America are the Appalachians, the Mississippi Delta, the Texas Hill Country, and the densely forested parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin, Ontario, and Quebec—a vast interconnected tapestry of birds and forests across the American continent.

Because of these findings, the Cornell Lab and WCS have begun a new initiative combining the Lab’s unique depth in conservation technology with WCS’s on-the-ground conservation footprint to make a real impact for these species. Deforestation is the key threat to these species and their habitats, caused by a combination of narco-trafficking, illegal cattle ranching, and fires. WCS and their partners are already combating these activities, working with federal authorities, the national parks services, local communities, and nonprofits to remove illegal activities and begin to regenerate the forests. The results are extremely encouraging, with local communities leading huge reforestation efforts. The newly planted trees grow taller than a human in just four years. Now, we’re using a combination of eBird and bioacoustics technologies to monitor the detailed movement of migratory bird species, identify the forest regeneration techniques that are most effective in habitat restoration, and track the impact on long-term population trends for these bird species.

Mobilizing cutting-edge technology and conservation action across these remote landscapes is unprecedented at this scale. As one of our WCS collaborators said to me on a recent visit to the Selva Maya in Guatemala: “Ian, you have seen how extraordinary the species are in these forests, and the extraordinary threats they face. Now we need to bring together an equally extraordinary coalition to reverse those threats. 

“Help us build that coalition.”