Kathi Borgmann reports on declining birds in tropical forests of the Americas in a recent article in Living Bird.  She highlights our work in Ecuador, as well as long-term studies in Panama and Brazil.  The story is also enriched by reports by Geovanny Rivadeneyra, a naturalist and guide from the Indigenous Kichwa com­munity of Añangu who has been noting declines of birds for nearly 15 years along the Napo River.  These alarming declines of birds have sparked the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macauley Library, led by Glenn Seeholzer, to begin an effort of training local scientists to record birds in the Amazonia Ecuador and build up a song database.  This database will be the foundation to improve our abilities to monitor birds using automatic recorders, as well as improve accuracy of identifying the great diversity of birds found in the region.  To do that you need a large reference archive of songs and calls of the bird species at a site.  Meanwhile, we continue our efforts in Ecuador and collaborate with other scientists with long-term data to help reveal underlying drivers of change.  We also are collaborating with USFQ scientists at Tiputini Biodiversity Station and Cornell’s Macauley Lab to advance tools for monitoring bird populations in highly diverse Amazonian forests.  Link to Living Bird article here.