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Nathaniel Wheelwright teaches ecology at Bowdoin C Sunday, June 24, 2007

I knew what to expect because each of my four older brothers had undergone the same rite of passage. The climax of the weekend would be the ceremonial presentation of a double-barreled shotgun, followed by sober instruction on firearm safety and general manliness, capped by an excursion into the woods to fire off a few rounds.

But when my turn came the ritual had changed.

Instead of a gun, I was given a double-barreled pair of binoculars and my grandfather took me into the woods for a bird walk.

Within an hour my disappointment was forgotten, shoved aside by sheer awe at the sight of a sallying redstart, the sound of a wood thrush's flute music, the chattering convoy of chimney swifts overhead. My grandfather lifted the veil to a world that had not existed for me before. I didn't want the weekend to end because I would have to go back to my family's farm where, to the best of my knowledge, there were no birds.

Of course, back home I found all the birds I'd been introduced to in Connecticut and many more, ambassadors of every color imaginable: electric blue indigo buntings, blood red scarlet tanagers, earth-toned flanks of eastern towhees. I still remember the first blackburnian warbler I ever saw, his throat and cheeks so orange, he looked like he might burst into flames.

Spring and summer mornings thereafter, I'd wake up and listen to the birds singing in my backyard. If there was one I couldn't recognize, I'd throw on a shirt and pair of pants, grab my binoculars and track it down, something I still do today.

In his later years my grandfather used to grumble that birds were becoming scarcer and scarcer. It was tempting to write off his gloom as the natural tendency of the elderly to romanticize the past, or maybe as an old man's deteriorating hearing and eyesight. But it was true that the whip-poor-will that kept me awake nights when I visited him as a boy had gone quiet.

Last week the National Audubon Society released its latest study of population trends of North American birds based on continent-wide Christmas Bird Counts and Breeding Bird Surveys.

The study confirms what my grandfather feared and what most of us knew already: Birds that I used to see every day growing up in New England -- field sparrows, eastern meadowlarks, northern bobwhites -- are in a free fall. The losses are staggering. Since my grandfather introduced me to birds 43 years ago, dozens of species have declined by 50 to 80 percent. The songs of tens of millions of birds have been silenced.

In one sense, extinction is hugely overrated. The vast majority of animals and plants that disappear hardly leave a ripple in the pool of life. Species become rare, they disappear, yet ecosystems persist. In rare cases ecosystems are fundamentally altered because of the missing pieces, but most of the time the ecological effects of extinction are hardly measurable.

The true loss is spiritual and aesthetic, not functional or economic. Life would go on if every Shakespeare play and Beethoven sonata were destroyed but, to echo the Audubon report, our skies would be "a little quieter and the landscape a little drabber." Of course, we'll always have CDs of bird song and DVDs of bird behavior to fall back on -- a digital memory -- but will that be enough?

I can see now that my grandfather's rite of passage was about connecting with the land, about learning how to become intimate with its signs, smells, sounds, textures, and rhythms as a way of knowing where we are, and who we are. How wonderful it would be to be able to pass that gift on to my own grandchildren.

Nathaniel Wheelwright teaches ecology at Bowdoin College and studies tropical trees and the behavior of island birds.

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