50 billion birds occupy planet earth, Researchers reveal

By Bisola Adeyemo

New research estimates that there are 50 billion birds that live on the planet Earth.

The research also stated that there are about six times as many birds as humans on the planet.

This was revealed according to an extrapolation by Australian scientists published in the journal Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences on Tuesday.

“There are a considerable number of individual birds in the world of 50 billion, but fully understanding why and how they all arrived at their current population sizes will be paramount to the future study of evolution, ecology, and conservation,’’ the researchers said in a statement.

A team led by William Cornwell from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney worked with data on 9,700 known bird species from around the world, which they said represented 92 per cent of all extant species.

The researchers combined scientific surveys of individual species in certain distribution areas with the almost one billion entries in the online ornithological database.

Among the top 10, the most abundant birds in the world are the house sparrow (1.6 billion), the European starling (1.3 billion), the ring-billed gull (1.2 billion) and the barn swallow (1.1 billion).

The researchers found that the least abundant orders of birds in the world were flightless kiwis from New Zealand (3,000) and mesites (154,000), scrubland birds endemic to Madagascar.