Can Saving Birds Save the Planet? Scott Weidensaul’s Case for Hope and Resilience Amid a Dire Era of Bird Loss

“A place that is good for birds is good for everyone,” writes naturalist and author Scott Weidensaul in The Return of the Oystercatcher: Saving Birds to Save the Planet. While many of his previous books on natural history highlight the threats facing birds across their ranges (including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds), his latest offering strikes a more hopeful tone, regaling readers with stories of bird populations bouncing back.  

Some readers might be skeptical of the optimism: North America has lost an estimated three billion birds since 1970, and the 2025 State of the Birds report revealed that species across all habitats have declined. Grassland birds have been hit the hardest—their population has dropped 40 percent in the past few decades—and even common birds like Mallards are doing poorly. Weidensaul says he is by no means “a Pollyanna,” but he wants people to understand that “little advances can make a huge difference.” And he has found plenty of success stories. 

Covering far more than the titular oystercatchers, each chapter in Weidensaul’s new book features a different bird species or family that has rebounded, along with the people and laws responsible for these conservation wins over the past century. From duck victories in the prairie pothole region and work in Hawaiʻi to protect albatross and shearwaters from feral cats, to Bulgarian vulture conservation and rewilding efforts across Europe, Weidensaul read extensively (you can download a full bibliography from his website) and traveled the globe to track down tales of recovery. The result is more than 300 pages of information-dense but conversational storytelling—and the book likely could have been much longer. “Over the course of a number of years, I was a packrat collecting ideas,” Weidensaul says. 

Beautifully descriptive writing brings all that research to life: You can almost hear the cacophonous, now-thriving puffin and tern colony Weidensaul visits on Eastern Egg Rock in Maine, and his vivid account of a Greater Sage-Grouse lek in the western United States transports readers to the courtship dance-offs, even if they have never personally witnessed the males’ elaborate displays of booming air sacs and tail fanning.  

The last portion of the book, which Weidensaul says was the most moving section to report and write, focuses on Indigenous-led conservation in the boreal forest. “The scale of conservation that they’re doing up there, it is staggering.” Led by the Dene people in northwestern Canada, the Thaidene Nëné Indigenous Protected Area safeguards 6.5 million acres of critical boreal forest habitat used by over 300 species during the breeding season. The Dene “were just literally ripped off the land and shoved into the most god-awful conditions imaginable for a generation, and then you know, they said, ‘screw this, we’re going back to the land,’ and they’ve rebuilt their lives and their community and their culture,” Weidensaul says. 

The book arrives in a dire and fast-changing moment of slashed environmental laws, gutted federal agencies, and government shutdowns that upend critical bird monitoring and conservation. And yet, inspired by the flourishing of state, private, and Tribal-led efforts to protect people and places around the world, Weidensaul still finds hope for birds.

After all, when Weidensaul graduated high school in the bicentennial year of 1976, there were only around 1,000 Bald Eagles in the contiguous United States. “If you had told me that on the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding that there would be 400,000 Bald Eagles in the Lower 48, I would have thought you were delusional,” he says. “We can change things for birds when we put our minds to it.”

Weidensaul is also a contributing writer for Audubon magazine; his latest feature explored the expansion of limpkins across the southeastern U.S. 

The Return of the Oystercatcher, by Scott Weidensaul. 368 pages, $32.99, W. W. Norton & Company. Available here from W. W. Norton.