[birds chirping] [gentle music] - Having the patience to get out in a strange place and listen and look and try to find evidence that they actually are breeding there, carrying food, building a nest, aha.

Can't talk right now, I got a orchard oriole [laughing] right over here somewhere.

- [Narrator] Erla Beegle is a birder.

She says awareness is what it's all about.

- You talk and you're not hearing the birds.

Me, I'm hearing a great crested flycatcher, a mockingbird, and we had the osprey a few minutes ago.

- [Narrator] Beegle is what you might call a professional volunteer.

When she's not teaching computer science at her day job, she was birding, and that's a verb, up in rural North Carolina but drove down just outside Raleigh-Durham Airport to show that there's more to birding than just taking a picture.

- I mean, a great day, I get like 40, 45 birds.

If I can confirm three or more, that's great.

It takes time to Atlas.

- [Narrator] She means the Bird Atlas.

It's a five-year project started in 2021 and sponsored by the Cornell Ornithology Lab.

The goal of the Atlas is to identify and catalog all the birds in the state, including those just passing through, but also help make decisions on how to preserve species.

The lab reports the bird population in the US and Canada has declined by a whopping three billion since 1970.

And every time she goes out to bird, Beegle says her own observations lead her to believe it's an emergency hidden in plain sight.

- Where are the meadowlarks?

What happened to the horned larks?

Why aren't there more screech owls, eastern screech owls?

They used to be a typical thing you'd hear at night whistling in your neighborhood.

Not anymore.

What's happened to them?

So yeah, we wanna get this data while there's still data to get.

- But the ocean used to stretch all the way out here.

- [Narrator] Some scientists like avian ecologist Lauren Pfarr spend her days thinking about birds and the reasons for the decline.

She says human contributions to climate change are well known and result in habitat loss, which affects bird health.

- [Lauren] Not only do we have the migrants coming in, we have migrants leaving.

[dramatic music] - [Narrator] But she also looks at migratory patterns and how humans can actually change them.

- The biggest thing that I think about is light pollution.

- [Narrator] Pfarr says one little-mentioned factor is that birds migrate at night.

She says since they use the stars in the night sky to know where to go, lights below confuse them and disrupt their direction.

- [Lauren] It's becoming a huge major problem in places where we have things like lighted billboards, illuminated buildings that stay on all night.

- [Narrator] Pfarr says that, coupled with warming temperatures, can also affect when they arrive.

She says data show the birds are even beginning to migrate earlier.

- They may be nesting earlier.

These resources that they, you know, seek out, so like insects, their food resources, they might not be readily available at that time that they migrated.

[birds chirping] - It's exceedingly difficult and expensive and not desirable to list species as endangered.

We're trying to keep common species common.

- [Narrator] So without comprehensive data, recommendations are hard to make.

CC King is with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.

They're using a grid built in a series of blocks, each representing three square miles of area.

King says in the past two years, data has been steadily coming in thanks to the growing number of volunteers, but says more are needed in rural parts of the state.

- [CC] 2023, we really started to get in there.

And you can see the blocks really showing up.

These are the priority blocks where we ask people to focus, 'cause we can then, you know, use that as a geological point and then interpolate from there what the other birds in the region are doing.

- That indigo bunting is somewhere.

[bird chirping] You write down the birds as you go.

It's the best way.

Now, we just got a great blue heron.

All he's doing is habitat.

Well, you know, carrying food.

No, that's not gonna help either.

But in the springtime, if that thing was carrying a branch, that's confirming it's gonna bring a branch to a nest, called carrying nesting material.

- [Narrator] And the repository for all this data is eBird.org, where volunteers record and submit what they've seen, but do it in a very granular way.

King says it's like telling a story of each bird: where they are, what they do, if they have kids.

You get the picture.

- So it's multiple maps within one map is what I'm trying to say.

That's why it's an Atlas.

- [Narrator] King says the purpose of the Bird Atlas is twofold: one, to collect data on what birds are here and where they are, but also to help officials guide growth and development.

One resource to help those learn how to do it is the "Green Growth Toolbox."

- We work really hard with private landowners to not be a regulatory stop.

So once we have all the data, we're gonna make conservation decisions about where we're gonna develop and where we're gonna encourage people not to.

Right here, for example, this is a riparian corridor.

This is like the highway for the critters.

If we could just leave that, then they can connect from one population of species to another.

That's if they're crawling on the ground, but the birds have the same thing.

They need a way to get through.

Likewise here, if you're gonna develop 1,000 acres of houses, the encouragement is plan the green before the gray.

Make sure you have the special places set aside, and then put the houses in instead of putting the houses all over everywhere and saying, "Gosh, it used to be so pretty here."

[laughing] You could keep it and everybody can win.

Here too, you can see this is a corridor.

You keep a couple of these special places, and then you keep some land in between so the critters have a place to move.

And they have a home and you have a home, and we all live here together.

That's the point.

[dramatic music continues] - Okay, gotta stop birding at some point, but you can't stop birding.

You start Atlas birding, you see baby birds everywhere.

[birds chirping] Cheek chuck, cheek chuck.

Cheek chuck.