Imagine living in a world without bees. A world without flowers, fruit, even a cup of coffee. A world, even, without chocolate!

Thanks to the wonderful work of bees, butterflies, birds, and other pollinating animals, the world's flowering plants are able to reproduce and bear fruit, providing many of the foods we eat, the plants we and other animals use, and the beauty we see around us. Yet today, there is an alarming decline in pollinator populations worldwide.

Domesticated honeybees are not the only pollinators in trouble these days. Many species of butterflies, moths, birds, bats and other mammals are also in retreat, threatening not only commercial crops but a wide range of flowering plants.

"Action must be taken to reverse these trends," says Stephen Buchmann, an entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson, Arizona. According to Buchmann, only a few of these pollinators (mainly Hawaiian bird species) are protected by the federal Endangered Species Act. "This is simply because the world is focused on the charismatic megafauna--the lions and tigers and bears," he says. "The little things that run the world, including bees, butterflies, bats and hummingbirds, go unnoticed and unprotected until it is sometimes too late."

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Migratory Pollinators
A collaborative consortium among the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, Bat Conservation International, the Center for Plant Conservation, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the Native Plant Conservation Initiative, the Turner Endangered Species Fund, and the Xerces Society, the Migratory Pollinators project is a five-year effort to monitor four migratory pollinator species along the nectar corridor of western Mexico and the southwestern United States. The project combines research and educational outreach to encourage stewardship among local communities.