That seems really low. There has to be massive areas of the world with no birds at all. I mean there is, like the sea, but then there are 20 sparrows in my garden.
This contributes to a thought I had years ago. We used to smoke in the parking lot; a co-worker would feed the birds that came daily - contrary to fight club, feeding birds around a parking lot of cars does not cause the birds to poop on the cars lol<p>Anyway - I always wondered - how many birds are in the world? Then walk down the street, around town, where ever - how many dead birds do you see on the side of the road? 1 every once in a great while maybe?<p>Where do birds go to die? Or are they just eaten right away by their prey? Stray cats? Hawks?
Two points, from the study itself, 50B is their median estimate but their mean estimate is 428 billion [1]:<p>> We calculate that there are likely to be ∼50 billion individual birds in the world at present: about six birds for every human on the planet. This represents the midpoint of our estimates (i.e., the median), albeit with considerable uncertainty (Fig. 2). Compared with the median estimate, the mean estimate of the aggregated distribution for all birds in the world was ∼428 billion individual birds (Fig. 2). While we provide an estimate with a wide highest-density interval, our estimate corresponds well with a previous estimate of the number of individual birds in the world by Gaston and Blackburn (37), who estimated that there were between 200 and 400 billion individual birds in the world. Notably, Gaston and Blackburn (37) did not estimate species separately but rather extrapolated from small-scale density estimates in which all bird species were considered equal. We, however, provide data for nearly all the world’s bird species.<p>This is a massive disparity in their own estimates, and they acknowledge the uncertainty.<p>As others have noted, they are also not including farmed birds, so this is an estimate of birds in nature.<p>1. <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2023170118" rel="nofollow">https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2023170118</a>
Interestingly that number is of wild birds. Domesticated chickens are an additional 25 billion birds <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/263962/number-of-chickens-worldwide-since-1990/#:~:text=How%20many%20chickens%20are%20in,14.38%20billion%20chickens%20in%202000.&text=There%20are%20two%20major%20types,laying%20hens%2C%20and%20broiler%20chickens" rel="nofollow">https://www.statista.com/statistics/263962/number-of-chicken...</a>.
This study does not seem to consider or count farmed birds, such as chickens (and others). Yet it mentions impact on ecology, as if farmed animals don’t count. Just the farmed birds on earth would add up to 25 billion or more.
For context, the bird population in North America has declined by around 3 billion since the 70s: a 30% decrease. <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silent-skies-billions-of-north-american-birds-have-vanished/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silent-skies-bill...</a>
Which makes the fact that the passenger pigeon once number 3-5 billion individuals in North America all the more staggering. Assuming the 50b number has not gone down significantly, it may have been that 1 out of every 10 birds <i>on the planet</i> was a passenger pigeon.<p>They say the flocks would black out the sky passing over.
Kinda sounds like a question in a FAANG interview.<p>The referenced study is here: <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2023170118" rel="nofollow">https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2023170118</a>
Wired had an article last week on "interspecies money" to identify and attach monetary value to everything on the planet - including birds and trees - to give agency to these actors.<p>Sounds like this mission will be more difficult :)<p>Thanks for sharing the article though
I am not sure what to think of this. Just a quick back of the napkin basic math implies that there are about 18,000-22,000 square feet for every single bird.
Imagine the suffering that exists in nature at any given moment. Billions and trillions of creatures in various states of pain, fear, and want. Then multiply all those experiences for every time frame back to the first organisms.<p>I don't think people think about the implications of a billion years of natural selection.