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Just how many birds are there?

To: birding-aus <>
Subject: Just how many birds are there?
From: david taylor <>
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:53:41 +1000
Fisher (1951), a British ornithologist, estimated there are more than 100
billion individual wild birds in the world.  The Wilson's Storm-petrel,
Oceanites oceanicus, a seabird, is probably the most numerous wild bird in the world, and the starling and the house sparrow may by the most abundant
wild land birds (Fisher, 1951).  Obviously, this is an estimate, but an
educated one.



David Taylor



On 11/10/2007, at 8:26 AM, Dave Torr wrote:

Actually I find the estimates on the high side - Short-tailed
shearwaters are one of the more numerous birds (I think Macaroni
Penguin has similar numbers) yet even if all species had that number
of individuals you would end with 230 billion. And since most species
are very restricted in range and numbers I would assume that 100
billion is a more likely figure? Although of course if you count
captive birds the number would increase.

On 11/10/2007, L&L Knight <> wrote:
Yes, there may be hundreds of billions of birds on the planet compared
to 7 billion people.  However, I think there are about 10,000 species
of birds compared to 1 taxa of us.  Given the population size of many
particular species, I suspect that the number of humans is probably
equal to the number of individuals in the "bottom" 7,000 bird species.
That is a scary thought.

I wonder if the estimates of the number of birds includes the billions of chooks and budgies etc that we keep in cages. How does the combined
wild population compare to the combined captive population?

Regards, Laurie.

On Wednesday, October 10, 2007, at 10:38  PM, david taylor wrote:

I'm reading an interesting book at the moment and it prompted a
question.

i  wondered just how many birds there are in say Australia or on
planet earth. I'm talking total numbers rather than species. i googled and read a couple of interesting pieces on the subject including some
research from Gaston and Blackburn which suggests there are between
200 and 400 billion birds on earth! Wow! Another study estimated 100
billion plus birds on earth. In comparison there are around 6.6
billion people on earth, so our avian friends well and truly outnumber
us.


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