Indigenous Peoples and locals report a drastic decline in bird size across three continents

• Birds currently inhabiting many territories across Africa, Latin America and Asia are, on average, considerably smaller than those that predominated in 1940. • This is the conclusion of an international study led by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), which documents-drawing on the collective ecological memory of 10 Indigenous Peoples and local communities-a reduction of up to 72% in the mean body mass of the bird species present in their territories between 1940 and 2020.

Sources:

• https://phys.org/news/2026-02-indigenous-peoples-locals-drastic-decline.html