Reading and writing fill in the blanks
Climate change is not only the extinction of many bird species, but it may also mean that the birds that survive will have less diverse physical features. In the last 50 years, the US and Canada have lost more than one-quarter of their birds – an estimated 3 billion animals – due to human activity. A study released last year found that there are now 600 million fewer birds in Europe than there were in 1980. Extinctions are to continue according to the latest State of the World’s Birds report, which found that 48 per cent of birds worldwide are known or suspected to be population declines. “We know we’re going to lose species, but we don’t know much about other aspects of diversity that are also super important,” says Emma Hughes at the University of Sheffield in the UK. As extinctions of some of the rarest and most birds continue, Hughes wanted to know if surviving species will become more alike over time – a process called “homogenisation”.