If you’ve felt shattered after a hard day’s commute, spare a thought for the Arctic tern. This 33cm polar seafarer, weighing between 86g and 127g, undertakes the longest known migration of any animal, travelling up to 96,000km a year from the Arctic to Antarctica.
Then there’s the great snipe, which flies at almost the altitude of Mount Everest across the Sahara, and the tiny ruby-throated hummingbird, which, weighing all of 3g, crosses the Gulf of Mexico nonstop to its breeding grounds in the northern US.
Unfortunately, these glorious little voyagers are among the 45% of migratory bird species that are considered in decline, as per the latest report on the state of migratory birds from BirdLife International. Worse, of the world’s 11,185 bird species, a clear 11% of migratory birds are now threatened with extinction.
“Certainly the situation is worsening,” lead author Lucy Haskell tells the FM. Using the red list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which details the species moved to higher or lower categories of extinction risk, “we can look at overall trends over time and unfortunately the index is showing a steady deterioration”, she says. “The survival prospects of not just migratory birds but all birds are declining.”
Flying into turbulence
Like the Arctic tern, most birds move predictably, along defined routes that BirdLife describes as flyways, “a bit like natural super-highways”.
The problem is that the networks of habitats on which migratory birds depend are becoming increasingly “degraded and fragmented”, overwhelmingly thanks to human actions. Invasive alien species and diseases, agricultural expansion and intensification, climate change and pollution are all to blame.
Then there are particular threats during migration, such as collision with power lines, which kills hundreds of thousands of birds every year.
But the solutions are well known too — BirdLife says they include controlling or eradicating invasive alien species; managing agriculture and forestry more sustainably; minimising harmful impacts of energy and other infrastructure; ending overexploitation and illegal killing; and preventing fisheries bycatch.
That’s not to say any of them are easy.
“The issue with migratory birds is that they undertake these remarkable journeys, over vast geographic ranges, so conserving them in a single country or site is just not enough — we have to conserve them along their entire flyways,” says Haskell.
It means that to do anything, conservationists need to corral country leaders and communities along birds’ routes to translate international commitments into national policies and legislation. Imagine trying to rope the whole of Eurasia, the Americas and Africa into one agreement.
A major problem is funding, Haskell says.
“The money is by no means easy, unfortunately. People don’t value nature; they don’t realise that nature underpins all of human society — our economy, our health and our livelihoods. You would have thought that there’d be plenty of people willing to invest in nature but that’s just not the case. That is a massive challenge,” she says.
The global biodiversity funding gap is colossal: an estimated $900bn a year. BirdLife itself is working with three different development banks to implement its regional flyways initiative.
“Migratory birds are particularly sensitive indicators because they are susceptible to a huge range of different threats,” says Haskell.
Losing the bird-watcher bonanza
In other words, their health and success is actually a marker for the health and success of the natural world. “Healthy ecosystems are not a nice to have — we absolutely depend on them. If they’re not thriving, humanity won’t thrive either.”
It’s hard to put a number on the myriad benefits that healthy bird populations bring, be it pest control, seed dispersal or pollination. But just one aspect is valuable enough: migratory bird-based tourism. This was valued at $14.7bn in 2025 and is set to grow to almost $30bn by 2035.
Still, the odds of there being fewer birds to admire are getting worse. In 2024, the slender-billed curlew was declared extinct — the first bird species on mainland Africa to die out in recent centuries.
Says Haskell: “These extinctions are symptomatic of a much wider issue; they’re a warning that if we don’t undertake some pretty transformative changes fairly soon, things are going to get significantly worse.”
