Cape Talk, Sunday night

Waiting for you to walk through the door and throw it a treat. I don't think it's like I wish you'd come with the lead and take me around the block. Weekend breakfast with Sarah Jane McQuile King Saturday and Sunday, 7 to 10 a.m. Only on Cape Talk. Join the conversation. Bird Life International published the State of the World's Birds Report. This was at a summit in Nairobi. And the.

State of the World's Birds report is released every four years, and this was the first devoted to migratory birds and the flyaways that they depend on. We are joined now via Zoom by Dr. Stuart Butcher, who is a chief scientist with Bird Life International and senior editor of the report. Not a great state. I mean, that's a very, very short summary of a fairly lengthy and very, very thorough report. But I suppose one statistic that one

Immediately jumps out is that 45%, so nearly half of migratory bird species are in decline. That's right, yes. And worse than that, 200 species are classified as threatened with extinction because of those declines and 32 are critically endangered right on the brink of extinction. And it's worth reflecting for a moment that migration, so this is the seasonal movement of

Birds across continents and oceans. It's one of nature's most amazing natural phenomena. Twice a year, billions of individual birds undertake these extraordinary journeys with phenomenal feats of endurance as they travel from their breeding areas in one part of the world to non-breeding areas in another. So, for example, the Arctic tern can breed within a few hundred kilometers of the North Pole. They'll then fly all the way down.

Across the equator down to Antarctica during the austral summer, so the northern winter, they can circumnavigate the entire Antarctic continent before flying all the way back north again. So, during their lifetime, they can travel the equivalent of a distance to the moon and back four times, and yet they weigh little more than about half the weight of my iPhone. So, I mean, migration is amazing, connecting different parts of the world, countries, continents, people, and ecosystems. So, we're really