Red List status

The birds that need us most

Most of the birds I photograph are still common. A few carry a higher threat category on the IUCN Red List, and those are the ones I most want people to meet. Each of them lives in a named place, and each of those places has people working to keep it. When a traveler comes to see one of these birds, that bird becomes a reason to protect the land around it.

Endangered

Vulnerable

Near Threatened

Notes from the field

Most threatened birds

Population trend: decreasing

Common birds are declining too

A Least Concern listing can sound like good news, but it doesn’t always mean a bird is doing well. Of all 454 species in my stories, 226 carry the IUCN Red List population trend: decreasing. Most of them are still listed as Least Concern: 216 of the 442 Least Concern species I’ve photographed are decreasing (IUCN, checked 18 Oct 2026). Their numbers are falling while they are still a common sight.

I want people to meet these birds while they are still common. Conservation works best when it starts before a species becomes threatened, while there is still habitat to protect and a population worth protecting it for. Each bird below has a decreasing population trend and a named place where you can still see it.

Counts from the IUCN Red List population trend quoted on each of my published stories, updated live. The Least Concern figures were checked on the IUCN Red List on 18 Oct 2026.

Browse the stories

Conservation breeding

A second chance, with safeguards

Sometimes a species needs more than protected land. Under the IUCN’s guidelines, breeding birds under human care can serve as an insurance population, a way to rebuild numbers or a source of birds to return to places they’ve vanished from. Before any bird is released, the IUCN also requires that the original threats be removed, with disease checks, careful genetic choices and monitoring afterwards. Some of the birds I photograph came back this way, and others recovered with almost no breeding at all. What made the difference every time was habitat.

Recovery

Proof that protection works

In the Andes above Roncesvalles, Tolima, I photographed a Yellow-eared Parrot perched beside a pale trunk at the Mirador de Las Palmas lookout. The parrot depends on the Quindío wax palm and nests in the hollow trunks of dead palms. Hunting and the cutting of wax palms for Palm Sunday drove its decline.

Fundación ProAves led a national Palm Sunday campaign to protect the wax palm, and in 2004 Colombia’s Catholic Church ended the use of wax palm fronds in Palm Sunday processions. The IUCN Red List now classifies the bird as Vulnerable with an increasing population trend. BirdLife reports that intensive conservation work, led by Fundación ProAves, brought it from 81 birds in 1999 to about 2,600 in 2019. ProAves’s Roncesvalles reserve, about 4,000 hectares, protects the palm forest the parrot needs.

The Red-crowned Crane in Japan shows that recovery can happen. The species is listed as Vulnerable with a decreasing population trend, yet BirdLife notes that its island population in Japan has grown. I photographed my cranes at Zhangye National Wetland Park in Gansu, China. When people decide a bird is worth the effort, it can come back, and that is the story I want every visitor to carry home.

Read the parrot’s story

Habitat

Places under pressure

A bird is only as safe as the place where it lives. These are some of the places in my stories where the land and water are under pressure. In each of them, people are already working to keep the place wild. Seeing them in a photograph is the first step, and going to see them is the next.

Zhangye wetlands

Gansu, China

Zhangye, where I photographed Red-crowned Cranes at the national wetland park, is also home to the Zhangye Heihe Wetland National Nature Reserve. The reserve covers 41,164 hectares and is listed as a Wetland of International Importance.

Isla Terrón de Azúcar

Capurganá, Chocó, Colombia

I photographed two Brown Boobies resting on sunlit black rock from a fishing boat in rough water off Capurganá. The Brown Booby is listed as Least Concern with a decreasing population trend, and researchers have found marine debris, much of it plastic, in its nests across the tropics, as plastic in the ocean keeps increasing. A small island like this one shows how what we throw away on land reaches the birds at sea.

Celaque

Lempira, Honduras

Celaque protects Cerro Las Minas, at 2,849 meters the highest point in Honduras. Its watersheds supply water to more than 53,000 people in 108 communities, including Gracias, where I photographed the Honduran Emerald. Keeping this forest wild matters for the birds and for every town downstream.

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Partners

Local partners in conservation

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Travel

See these places for yourself

You don’t need a camera to be part of this. Every story on this site names its place: the lodges, reserves, wetlands, towns and community sites where I made the photographs, and where you can go. Wherever I can, I link the story to its eBird hotspot, so my photograph sits next to the public bird list for that place. So far, 189 stories are linked to 34 hotspots.

When you go, travel with a local guide, stay with the people who live there and visit responsibly, so the money and attention you bring stay in the valley. If a story moves you, send it to someone who would love that place, because that’s how a quiet wetland finds its next visitor.

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