There are around 50 billion birds living in the world, which is 6 times more than the world’s population.
New research by scientists at the University of New South Wales (Australia) shows that there are currently 9,700 species of birds living in the world with 50 billion individuals, according to The Guardian. This number is 6 times higher than the current world population of almost 8 billion people.
Of these, four bird species are classified by researchers as the “billion bird club”, meaning that each species has more than one billion individuals. These include sparrows, European starlings, ring-billed gulls and swallows.
Research also shows that there are more rare bird species than common birds. “They can be rare for natural reasons such as being able to live only on certain islands or on certain mountain peaks, or sometimes they become rare because of human influences”, according to one of the authors of the study, the ecologist Will Cornwell.
The study used observational data from eBird, one of the world’s largest public science projects.
According to the authors, this study could help map bird species to track and understand which species are in decline and need to be conserved.
