Birdsong

One day in May, I decided to visit the Pine Hollow Arboretum, a small but well curated collection of trees in the suburbs of Albany, NY. What stuck out to me about the arboretum that day was the deafening noise—not the hum of car engines and lawnmowers ubiquitous in the nearby towns, but the boisterous chatter of songbirds. I was awestruck by the sound, having never heard so many birds tweeting at once before. The thing is, what I experienced shouldn't have been such a rare delight. Spring was breeding season, so every acre should have been teeming with birdsong. Sadly, that's no longer the case. Decades of suburban land development have squeezed songbird habitats into the few protected patches of woods that are left. Today, we have to go to special parks and forests just to hear birdsong—something that used to be commonplace. I'm grateful for conservation efforts like the Pine Hollow Arboretum that provide a home for birds and other displaced animals, but these are far from permanent solutions. They merely buy us some more time to come up with a plan before songbirds disappear for good.