About half of migratory birds are declining: what the World Bird Report says

According to news from Doğa Derneği, BirdLife International published the World Bird Report at the Global Migration Pathways Summit in Kenya. Released every four years, this report focuses for the first time on migratory birds and their flyways. As a birdwatcher, this topic concerns me directly, so I noted the key points.

The main finding is sobering: about half of migratory bird species, 45% according to Doğa Derneği's headline, are declining, and one in nine species is threatened with extinction. The last record of the slender-billed curlew (Numenius tenuirostris) was from a lagoon in Morocco in February 1995; the species was declared extinct in 2025, the first global bird extinction in Eurasia and Africa in recent centuries. Seabirds and shorebirds are most at risk.

Still, the news has a hopeful side. When threats such as invasive species, agricultural intensification, climate change and hunting are addressed, results follow; when threats are tackled along the whole migration route, populations can recover. International work on the Egyptian vulture has halted the decline of its breeding population in the Balkans.

The report's editor, Dr Stuart Butchart, calls migratory birds the "sentinels" of ecosystems and says conservation must happen at the scale of the migration route. The Nairobi Migration Pathways Declaration was also signed at the summit. Doğa Derneği's General Coordinator Serdar Özuslu stresses that Turkey hosts three biodiversity hotspots and is a critical ecological bridge for migration between Europe and Africa.

To me, the message of this report is simple: protecting a bird only where it lives is not enough; we also need to think about every stop it makes along the way. Details are on sowb.birdlife.org.

Source: Doğa Derneği