Where are all the dead birds?
How long do songbirds live? Maybe 10 years? That would mean in a stable population, about 10 percent of all the birds die each year. According to my painstaking ten-second research on google, there are on average about 15 billion (15,000,000,000) birds in the U.S. If 10% of them die each year, that’s one and a half billion (1,500,000,000) dead birds every year! Where are they?
Sure, some are inside the bellies of cats and other predators, or scavengers, but that’s an awful lot of predating and scavenging to get rid of that many carcasses in the United States alone. I’ve heard windmills and windows kill a lot of birds. It’s easy to get to windmill farms here in Texas. I’ve gone to them and walked around under individual windmills looking for dead birds, just as an anecdotal test, and have yet to find a dead bird. We’ve got a hundred birds flying around the bird feeder in our yard every day. Not only that, we’ve got windows. Yet I don’t see any dead birds under the feeder or below our windows.
Is there a bird graveyard, like elephants are supposed to have an elephant graveyard, because you don’t find a lot of elephant bones lying around Africa?
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