The Sweet Sounds of Endangered Birds

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

David Guttenfelder has spent much of his 17-year career at The Associated Press photographing armed conflict in Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan. His 2009 photo of a soldier fighting the Taliban while wearing pink boxer shorts after being awakened was one of the most discussed images from the Afghanistan war.

So the thought of Mr. Guttenfelder photographing songbirds for National Geographic magazine might seem odd at first glance. After all, their sweet sounds couldn't be more different than the cacophony of war.

Yet documenting the story about the survival of songbirds throughout the Mediterranean involved many skills that were familiar to him, including, he said, “the ability to befriend and travel with men with weapons, work in an embed style with rangers, and go to places that are potentially dangerous.”

But for Mr. Guttenfelder, it is too simplistic to see the songbird story as a conflict story just because of how he covered it. Rather, it is a conflict story because of the slaughter of innocents.

“I tried to cover this like any another conflict that I have in the past,” he said. “I tried to give a voice to those under attack. I've spent the past 20 years covering human cruelty and human suffering. This time I'm covering human cruelty, but it's the persecution and suffering of other animals. A lot of what I saw was very cruel. Cruel to species that I came to really cherish. Beautiful, fragile, wild, free birds.”

Billions of birds migrate across the Mediterranean Sea twice a year, and hundreds of millions of them are shot, snared, netted or stuck to lime sticks. Their habitats are being destroyed, and bird populations are declining rapidly. Much of the killing is indiscriminate.

In the article “Last Song for Migrating Birds” published in the July 2013 issue of National Geographic, Jonathan Franzen writes:

To a visitor from North America, where bird hunting is well regulated and only naughty farm boys shoot songbirds, the situation in the Mediterranean is appalling: Every year, from one end of it to the other, hundreds of millions of songbirds and larger migrants are killed for food, profit, sport, and general amusement. The killing is substantially indiscriminate, with heavy impact on species already battered by destruction or fragmentation of their breeding habitat. Mediterraneans shoot cranes, storks, and large raptors for which governments to the north have multimillion-euro conservation projects. All across Europe bird populations are in steep decline, and the slaughter in the Mediterranean is one of the causes.

Mr. Guttenfelder admires the serious conservation stories of wildlife photographers like Nick Nichols and Brent Stirton but says that most photojournalists tend to focus on human conflict stories. “I don't mean to diminish the importance of human suffering, human rights, war and its aftermath, but other species need a voice too,” he said.

“I was very moved as I learned more and more about the scale of the attack on birds and the viciousness of the methods. I think I've developed a thick skin over the years covering war. I was surprised to be so moved by the life and death of birds.”

Follow @dguttenfelder, @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.