Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gruez 1832 days ago
>Birds flying into windows kills up to 1,000,000,000 birds per year

>[2] https://audubonportland.org/our-work/rehabilitate-wildlife/b....

That seems like a very high bound. Another source says there are 7.2B birds in US and canada[1], so 1B birds would be 14% of all birds, which is really high. I also feel like 7.2B dead birds would be very noticeable in the form of dead birds on sidewalks, which I'm not seeing.

[1] https://www.denverpost.com/2019/09/20/bird-population-decrea...

1 comments

It might surprise you, but buildings in places other than the US and Canada now have windows too. By some estimates 95% of the world's windows are outside of US/CA!

(Not that it matters, birds are a pretext, nobody really cares about birds, otherwise outdoor cats as pets would not be a thing.)

The source linked in the parent post says the 1 billion figure is for US only. Maybe the number is more plausible if it's applied worldwide, but the source should be considered as unreliable.