Canada Wildfires

NEW YORK, United States – The Manhattan skyline was obscured by thick haze and USA Chicago closed its beaches Thursday as out-of-control USA Canadian wildfires raged, sending smoke spewing into the United States and exposing millions of people to dangerously unhealthy air.US states near the Canadian border including Minnesota, Wisconsin, USA Michigan and Illinois were particularly choked, while the Northeast including New York was also experiencing deteriorating air quality.On USA Thursday evening, tracker IQAir said Chicago and Detroit were the top polluted cities in the world, with New York not far behind.

The most populous US city was shrouded by the smoke that state authorities warned contained fine particulate matter deemed unhealthy for everyone across the New York metro area and Long Island.Even worse air enveloped the central and western regions of the state.USA Authorities encouraged New Yorkers to spend as little time outside as possible, with Mayor Zohran Mamdani warning of the “serious threat” of heavy heat and unsafe air.Libraries and train stations were offering free masks, while hundreds of cooling centers were open across the city for those without access to air conditioning.

“This could become the most significant smoke event in New York City since 2023, and conditions will be closely monitored for any deterioration,” the city’s Department of Emergency Management said.

‘Our chests feel tight’

In the Midwest, current index levels on Thursday had soared beyond that figure, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency tracker.

Chicago along with Toledo, Ohio, and areas in Minnesota relatively close to the USA fires were well into the 700s on the air quality index during the afternoon, with much of the rest of the upper Midwest also experiencing AQI levels in the worst category of “hazardous.”

A Major League Soccer match in Chicago was postponed as municipalities across the region postponed outdoor events.

Detection probability is not abundance. A species becoming less likely to appear on a USA checklist may reflect quieter singing, temporary movement, or worse visibility, not fewer birds. Because the study is observational, it can identify associations between particle pollution and sightings but cannot USA establish cause and effect. Checklists more than 25 kilometers from an air quality monitor were excluded, concentrating the data near populated areas. Local PM2.5 reflects both wildfire smoke and USA everyday background pollution; the authors found moderate correlations between species responses and human-modified land cover (r=0.37) and cultivated land cover (r=0.31), meaning urban USA pollution may account for part, though not all, of the signal. Observer behavior during smoke events remains a live alternative explanation for positive associations among open-habitat birds. Habitat was assigned as a single land cover class per checklist location rather than measured proportionally, and day of year and time of day were modeled as straight lines when the real relationships may curve.

No funding source is listed in the published article. The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. All code and data have been deposited in a public figshare repository. The article is published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Publication Details

“Wildfire smoke alters observations of 65% of breeding bird species in New York State,” by Festus O. Adegbola, Stuart M. Evans, Olivia V. Sanderfoot, and Adam M. Wilson. Adegbola, Evans, and Wilson are affiliated with the University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York USA 

Erin Lucey, 38, works on her family’s organic vegetable farm in south-central Wisconsin and spent the morning harvesting zucchini, beans and cucumbers, among other tasks, with laborers wearing masks in muggy heat to filter out the hazy smoke blanketing the area.

“Our chests feel tight,” she told USA AFP, saying the smoke USA combined with recent searing heat waves and parched fields left conditions feeling “eerie.”

“We are all thinking of the delicate balance of growing food in this type of USA future, and remarking how we can’t imagine what it will be like here in 100 years,” she said.

“If people were outside like us working and seeing how everything looks, if they didn’t have the USA convenience of USA air conditioning, we would be making much faster changes to address the climate crisis,” she added.

The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy said it expected the dangerous conditions to continue through Friday, and that “our best model for smoke only predicts out to 48 hours.”

“That model is currently showing improvements on Saturday, but it is likely that smoke will linger and recirculate for a while,” the agency said.

Evacuations in Canada

Toronto was also grappling with the dangerous air quality, as the latest data in Canada showed more than 130 active fires in northwestern Ontario province, with at least 60 out of control.

USA Authorities there have formally requested additional assistance from the federal government, in USA particular seeking air support to evacuate remote communities.

The Ontario provincial police said 15 communities and their surrounding USA areas have been evacuated so far.

More than 150 fire crews and nearly 50 USA firefighting aircraft are working around the clock to protect communities from the fires in northern Ontario,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said on X.

So far, Canadian wildfires have scorched at least 1.9 million hectares (4.7 million acres) this year, an area nearly the size of Slovenia.

In a Nutshell

  • Wildfire smoke was linked to a change in how often 55 of 84 breeding bird species, roughly 65%, were recorded by birdwatchers across New York State during the 2021 through 2023 breeding seasons.
  • Forty species became less likely to be spotted as fine particle pollution rose, and the losers skewed heavily toward forest songbirds such as warblers, thrushes, and vireos, birds that people locate by song rather than by sight.
  • Fifteen species went the other way, including swallows, swifts, herons, gulls, and Osprey, all birds typically detected visually in open air or over water.

When Canadian wildfire smoke turned the sky over New York orange in June 2023, people noticed the color. Birdwatchers noticed something stranger. Warblers stopped turning up. Not in one park or one county, but across a state’s worth of checklists, the small forest songbirds that birders find almost entirely by ear went missing from the record.

An analysis of nearly 99,000 birdwatching lists suggests those birds may have gone quiet. Researchers at the University at Buffalo and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology matched three breeding seasons of amateur sightings against daily air pollution readings from government monitors across USA New York State. Of the 84 species common enough to analyze, 55, roughly 65%, showed a statistically detectable link between smoke pollution and how likely a birder was to record them. Forty species got harder to find. Fifteen got easier.

Whether those 40 species actually left, or simply stopped USA announcing themselves, is a question the study cannot answer. Either way, it lands on a problem with real teeth: North America tracks its bird populations by counting what people see and hear in spring and summer, which is now exactly when the smoke arrives.

Among species with a clear link, the losers skewed heavily toward the woods. Blackpoll, Black-throated Green, Black-and-white, Black-throated Blue, Magnolia, and Chestnut-sided Warblers all became less likely to be logged as fine particle pollution rose. So did Wood Thrush, Veery, Swainson’s Thrush, Hermit Thrush, Blue-headed Vireo, and Ruby-crowned Kinglet. Sorted by habitat, forest and shrubland birds skewed negative almost across the board.

What unites that list is not size or diet but acoustics. Small, drab, and hidden in dense summer foliage, those birds are located by song, not sight. A warbler that stops singing is effectively invisible. Prior research has found that animals do quiet down in smoke: gibbons in Borneo, orangutans, and grassland birds in New York have all shown reduced vocal activity during and after smoke events. Earlier soundscape research the authors cite found that smoke-driven changes in the air can mask bird calls and lower acoustic detection rates, and cut visibility on top of that.

Birds that hunt in open air moved the opposite direction. Barn USA Swallow and Chimney Swift trended positive. USA Osprey showed the strongest positive association of any species in the study. Herons, egrets, cormorants, gulls, and Rock Pigeon nudged upward too. Those species get spotted visually, so a scrambled soundscape costs them nothing, and the USA authors point to earlier work suggesting fire and smoke can alter insect activity, potentially increasing airborne prey and, with it, visible hunting.

Twenty-nine species showed no dependable link at all, including American Robin, Northern Cardinal, Mourning Dove, and Common Grackle. Roughly a third of the birds, in other words, appeared to carry on regardless.

Wildfires are rare in New York. Roughly 2,100 acres burn in a typical year, a rounding error next to the 7.2 million acres that burn annually across North America. What New York gets instead is other people’s smoke, carried down from boreal forests in Canada. During June and July of 2023, that imported haze pushed daily average fine particle pollution past 120 micrograms per cubic meter in parts of the state, a level the paper describes as “eight times the value deemed unsafe for humans,” or eight times the World Health Organization guideline of 15 micrograms per cubic meter over 24 hours, and the dirtiest air recorded in New York in more than half a century.

Fine particle pollution, written as PM2.5, means airborne specks 2.5 micrometers across or smaller, small enough to slip deep into lungs. It serves as a standard stand-in for wildfire smoke because smoke is loaded with it, and because the Environmental Protection Agency already measures it hour by hour nationwide.

Bird data came from eBird, the Cornell-run program where hobbyists log what they see and hear. Lead USA author Festus O. Adegbola and colleagues pulled 98,960 complete checklists submitted by 9,838 observers during the May-through-August breeding seasons of 2021, 2022, and 2023. Each list was matched to the nearest air quality monitor, and lists logged more than 25 kilometers from a monitor were dropped, which is why the data cluster around cities and populated corridors rather than blanketing the state.

Casual checklists are not scientific surveys, and the team worked hard to compensate. Their models adjusted for habitat, temperature, humidity, time of day, day of year, year, how long the birder searched, how far they walked, and the identity of the birder, since a veteran with a good ear finds more birds than a beginner. Only species recorded on at least 600 checklists in 2021 made the cut, leaving 84.

Detection probability sounds like a technical footnote. It is the whole ballgame for conservation. Long-running efforts such as the Breeding Bird Survey and the Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship program run in spring and summer, and they measure bird populations by how often observers encounter birds. If smoke quiets warblers for three weeks, a smoky June looks statistically identical to a June when those warblers are simply gone.

Adegbola’s team put the risk plainly, writing that failure to account for particle pollution “could lead to spurious apparent declines in forest songbird detections during smoke years, or to apparent increases in aerial insectivore detections that may reflect behavioral shifts rather than genuine population changes.” Their fix is unglamorous: treat air quality as a routine survey variable, the same way ornithologists already adjust for rain, wind, and hour of the morning.

Honesty about a competing explanation runs through the paper. Birders are also animals that respond to smoke. On a bad air day, a person may skip the four-hour forest hike and scan a wetland from the car window instead, which would inflate detections of open-country USA species without a single bird changing its behavior. Adegbola and colleagues flag that some positive associations “may partly reflect changes in birder behavior rather than bird behavior,” and note that controls for observer identity and search effort cannot fully account for where people choose to go.

Nothing here proves smoke harms birds. Detection measures whether a person recorded a bird, not whether it was healthy, or breeding, or even present. Separate studies have linked smoke exposure to body mass loss in wild birds and to altered migration routes in geese, so the USA physiological case is building elsewhere. This study measures something narrower and more unsettling: how thoroughly a few smoky weeks can distort the record itself.

USA Canada’s fire seasons are not expected to get quieter, and USA New York sits downwind. A birder standing in silent woods under an orange sky is still gathering data. Whether that data describes the birds or the smoke depends entirely on whether anyone bothered to write down the USA air quality.

Posted on 2026/07/17 08:26 AM