Search results
Nov 2, 2017 · Initially, studies indicated that there were an estimated 9,000 to 10,000 bird species on the planet. However, recent revelations doubled this number to an estimated 18,000 species, with a possibility of more species being discovered in the future. Birds are generally very mobile, migratory, and live in many regions including under explored.
- Mark Owuor Otieno
Jun 15, 2024 · As of 2023, there are around 11,032 bird species recognized in the world. This number can fluctuate slightly due to changes in taxonomic classification and the ongoing discovery of new species. However, it is generally accepted that the total number of extant bird species falls within the range of 10,800 to 11,032.
May 19, 2021 · Out of all 9,700 species analyzed, four birds reached what the researchers call the "billion club," or species with an estimated global population of over a billion. These included the house ...
- Overview
- Many sparrows, few rarities
- Nature’s fragility
New research estimates there are between 50 billion and 430 billion birds on Earth.
A rooftop flock of pigeons flying over Bushwick, Brooklyn. But how many pigeons are there? For that matter, how many birds are there? A new study attempts to answer.
Standing in a northern Everglades marsh in 2015, biologist Corey Callaghan watched as an enormous flock of tree swallows wheeled in the morning sun. As the mass of birds passed overhead, Callaghan and his partner stood in astonishment. Just how many tree swallows were in the flock, he wondered—for that matter, how many birds are in the entire world?
“It was an awesome experience,” Callaghan says. Inspired, he began by counting the birds in the flock he had just witnessed: more than half a million. He came up with that number by taking photographs, counting birds in different segments of the image, and scaling up.
Counting all the world’s birds would be much trickier, for obvious reasons, but years later Callaghan nevertheless set out to be the first to come up with a hard number—or at least a plausible range. In a new paper, he and two other researchers at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, estimate there are likely between 50 billion and 428 billion birds on Earth.
This range is so broad due to various uncertainties—among them, the difficulty of counting billions of small animals that can fly, the wide and often unclear ranges over which birds roam, and a lack of scientific data in many areas of the world.
According to the paper, the world’s most abundant bird is the familiar house sparrow, with a population of 1.6 billion. Coming in second is the European starling (1.3 billion), followed by ring-billed gulls (1.2 billion), barn swallows (1.1 billion), glaucous gulls (949 million), and alder flycatchers (896 million).
The scientists weren’t surprised to find only a few super-abundant species, and many more rare ones, as is the common pattern in ecology. Overall, the scientists estimate that 1,180 bird species—12 percent of the world’s total—each have a total population below 5,000.
If a species has a total population under 2,500, the International Union for Conservation of Nature would label it an endangered species.
These rarities include everything from the great spotted kiwi (estimated population: 377 individuals) to the Javan hawk eagle (630) and the Seychelles kestrel (under 100). As for the tree swallows that helped pique Callaghan’s curiosity, there are around 24 million of them, as he learned in doing the study.
For comparison, the estimated world population of domestic chickens is somewhere around 25 billion, making them the most abundant bird by far. But this study only looked at wild birds.
It’s unclear how many birds the world has lost in the past few decades, but this study helps provide an estimate to establish a baseline. One 2019 paper calculated that the total population of breeding adult birds in North American has declined by 3 billion since 1970.
The researchers used estimates from three datasets produced by experts around the world for the scientific organizations Partners in Flight, the British Trust for Ornithology, and BirdLife International. They combined those data with observations from eBird, the world’s largest database collected by citizen scientists—in this case, amateur birdwatchers.
The scientists found that in many cases, the density and population estimates gleaned by the professionals and the citizen scientists were relatively similar. They then estimated population sizes for other species, some of which lacked wide-ranging professional data, by inputting information from eBird into their computer model.
The researchers are the first to admit there is a lot of uncertainty inherent in their estimates. But part of the study’s strength is that it quantifies this uncertainty, and provides wide ranges of possible populations for thousands of birds, says Thomas Brooks, chief scientist with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, who wasn’t involved in the paper.
Ken Rosenberg, a conservation scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, thought the study was “a bold attempt.” But he urges caution in interpreting the data, because there is so much variability and uncertainty in the estimates.
“It's hard to put any stock in the individual numbers for each species,” Rosenberg says, let alone the global estimates: “They sort of threw down the gauntlet [to other researchers]—if you don’t like this number, come up with a better one.”
For Brooks, the paper illustrates just how precious many bird species are, and how close to the brink they could come to the brink if new threats emerge.
In total there are about 10,000 species of birds described worldwide, though one estimate of the real number places it at almost twice that. [1] The order passerines (perching birds) alone accounts for well over 5,000 species.
Key takeaways. Global Bird Species Diversity: The Clements Checklist of Birds of the World identifies approximately 10,906 bird species globally, distributed across various habitats and regions. The highest diversity is found in tropical regions of South America, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Continental Bird Diversity: North America is home to ...
People also ask
How many species of birds are there in the world?
What is the most common bird in the world?
What is birds of the world?
How many bird species are there in North America?
Do birds outnumber humans?
Are there more bird species to be discovered?
Birds of the World is a powerful resource that brings deep, scholarly content from four celebrated works of ornithology into a single platform where biologists and birders can find comprehensive life history information on birds. Every bird has a story. Discover them all with Birds of the World. About Birds of the World.
