Mr. Speaker, the third report on “The State of Canada's Birds” was released today by Birds Canada and Environment Canada.
Birds are literally the canaries in the coal mine for our environmental health, and previous reports from 2012 and 2019 raised some serious red flags. Today's report shows that some of those concerns are getting worse. For instance, grassland birds have declined by two-thirds since 1970, so something is clearly going wrong in our grasslands.
However, these reports also show that, when we know what is going wrong and have the political will to fix it, we can see dramatically positive results. Hawks, eagles and falcons have increased by a third since 1970 because we banned DDT. Waterfowl have also increased because we started conserving their habitats.
We know all this about bird populations because of the thousands of talented volunteers who go out every day to count birds. These citizen scientists have given us an incredibly powerful measure of the health of our forests, grasslands and waters.