How many birds are there in the world?
A 2021 analysis estimated roughly 50 billion individual wild birds across about 9,700 species. The distribution is startlingly uneven: four species — house sparrow, European starling, ring-billed gull and barn swallow — each number over a billion, while about 1,180 species have fewer than 5,000 individuals each. Most bird species are rare and a handful are astronomically common. The confidence interval on the global total is wide, roughly 40 to 60 billion.
How the figure is arrived at
Citizen-science sightings from eBird — over a billion records — were used to fit a relationship between how often a species is reported and how abundant it actually is, calibrated against the species where proper systematic surveys exist. The fitted relationship then predicts abundance for the species that have never been surveyed properly.
How confident it is
- Low estimate
- 40,000,000,000
- High estimate
- 60,000,000,000
- Spread
- 1.5× between the bounds
Other living things and the natural world counts
- How many people are there in the world? about 8.2 billion
- How many grains of sand are there on Earth? roughly 7.5 quintillion on the world's beaches
- How many ants are there in the world? about 20 quadrillion
- How many trees are there in the world? about 3 trillion
- How many insects are there? about 10 quintillion
- How many species are there? about 8.7 million
- How many people have ever lived? about 117 billion
- How many drops of water are there in the ocean? about 27 septillion
- How many fish are there in the sea? somewhere between 3 trillion and 100 trillion — nobody knows
- How many species are endangered? more than 45,000 assessed as threatened
- How many bees are there in the world? roughly 2 trillion managed honey bees
- How many bacteria are there on Earth? about 5 nonillion
- How many earthquakes are there each year? about 20,000 located a year — around 55 a day
- How many chickens are there in the world? about 26 billion alive at any moment
Common questions
- How many birds are there in the world?
- about 50 billion wild birds
- How is that estimated?
- Citizen-science sightings from eBird — over a billion records — were used to fit a relationship between how often a species is reported and how abundant it actually is, calibrated against the species where proper systematic surveys exist. The fitted relationship then predicts abundance for the species that have never been surveyed properly.
Related pages
- How many people are there in the world? about 8.2 billion
- How many grains of sand are there on Earth? roughly 7.5 quintillion on the world's beaches
- How many ants are there in the world? about 20 quadrillion
- How many trees are there in the world? about 3 trillion
- How many insects are there? about 10 quintillion
- How many species are there? about 8.7 million
- How many people have ever lived? about 117 billion
- How many drops of water are there in the ocean? about 27 septillion
- How many stars are there in the universe? Space and the universe
- How many countries are there in the world? Things people built
- How many bones are in the human body? The human body
- How many stars are there in the Milky Way? Space and the universe
- How many atoms are there in the universe? Space and the universe
- How many galaxies are there? Space and the universe
Sources
- Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place