Alva Review-Courier -

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — It used to be that taking a walk in the spring or summer in western Minnesota meant seeing — or more often, hearing — a western meadowlark, a medium-sized bird with a cheery, lilting song that's synonymous with the open spaces in the American West.

That's less the case than it used to be. Last month, a report published in Science put a number on the declining size of the United States' bird population.

It was big: down nearly 3 billion birds, or roughly a third of the birds present in the 1970s. The report, by researchers at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and several...