Birds Aren’t Real: The Latest Evidence

When Peter McIndoe, founder of the Birds Aren’t Real movement, publicly broke character for the first time, in 2021, to reveal the impetus for the long-running hoax, few people could have been surprised. It turns out, birds are real—not “drone replicas installed by the U.S. government to spy on Americans” [1]. Even in today’s post-truth media landscape, this doesn’t require any great leap of faith.

And yet.

If all the “birds” are real, how do we account for there being more dead birds than live ones in the U.S.? And why isn’t anybody talking about that?

Based on the best available evidence, researchers estimate there about 7 billion birds in North America during the pre-breeding season (i.e., adults), with roughly 5.7 billion (excluding coastal and wetland species) found in the Lower 48 [2]. It’s quite difficult to reconcile such a figure with the “conservative” estimate, made six years earlier, that “free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds” year in and year out in the contiguous U.S. [3].1 That’s in addition to the mortalities attributable to building collisions (365–988 million birds [4]), collisions with vehicles (89–340 million birds [5]), power lines (8.9­–68.6 million birds [6]), and wind turbines (140,000–328,000 birds [7]). And if we take into account the research suggesting that wind turbine estimates might be four times greater than previously suggested [8], total U.S. bird mortalities from collisions with buildings, vehicles, power lines, and wind turbines could be as high as 1.4 billion annually.2

But that doesn’t account for a study published last year that adjusted upward—and considerably—the number of bird deaths caused by building collisions: “minimally” 1.3–3.5 billion, but perhaps as many as 5.2 billion annually [9].

For those keeping track at home, these sources of bird mortality (including the inflated, agenda-driven “estimate” for free-roaming cats) total at least 2.8 billion—and up to 9.6 billion on the high end.3 Not all of these birds are adults, of course. Still, reconciling these figures with an adult population estimated to be just 5.7 billion requires the kind of creative accounting that would put Lehman Brothers to shame.

You know who’s not keeping track at home? The usual suspects eager to see more cats killed—the American Bird Conservancy, Audubon Society, The Wildlife Society, and Smithsonian Institution among them. When the “estimates” for free-roaming cats were published, in 2013, these organizations went out of their way to ensure that the media lost their collective minds.4 So where were they last April, when the estimated bird deaths attributed to building collisions surpassed those attributed to cats?

[Cue the chirping crickets…]

Literature cited

  1. Lorenz, T. Birds Aren’t Real, or Are They? Inside a Gen Z Conspiracy Theory. The New York Times 2021.
  2. Rosenberg, K.V.; Dokter, A.M.; Blancher, P.J.; Sauer, J.R.; Smith, A.C.; Smith, P.A.; Stanton, J.C.; Panjabi, A.; Helft, L.; Parr, M.; et al. Decline of the North American Avifauna. Science 2019, eaaw1313, doi:10.1126/science.aaw1313.
  3. Loss, S.R.; Will, T.; Marra, P.P. The Impact of Free-Ranging Domestic Cats on Wildlife of the United States. Nature Communications 2013, 4.
  4. Loss, S.R.; Will, T.; Loss, S.S.; Marra, P.P. Bird-Building Collisions in the United States: Estimates of Annual Mortality and Species Vulnerability. The Condor 2014, 116, 8–23, doi:10.1650/CONDOR-13-090.1.
  5. Loss, S.; Will, T.; Marra, P. Estimation of Bird-Vehicle Collision Mortality on U.S. Roads. The Journal of Wildlife Management 2014, 78, 763–771, doi:10.1002/jwmg.721.
  6. Loss, S.R.; Will, T.; Marra, P.P. Refining Estimates of Bird Collision and Electrocution Mortality at Power Lines in the United States. PLOS ONE 2014, 9, e101565, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0101565.
  7. Loss, S.R.; Will, T.; Marra, P.P. Estimates of Bird Collision Mortality at Wind Facilities in the Contiguous United States. Biological Conservation 2013, 168, 201–209, doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2013.10.007.
  8. Smallwood, K.S.; Bell, D.A.; Standish, S. Dogs Detect Larger Wind Energy Effects on Bats and Birds. The Journal of Wildlife Management 2020, 84, 852–864, doi:10.1002/jwmg.21863.
  9. Klem, D., Jr.; Saenger, P.G.; Brogle, B.P. Evidence, Consequences, and Angle of Strike of Bird–Window Collisions. The Wilson Journal of Ornithology 2024, 136, 113–119, doi:10.1676/23-00045.
  10. NABCI The State of the Birds, United States of America, 2022; North American Bird Conservation Initiative., 2022.

  1. The studies used to derive these mortality estimates suggest that roughly 25% of mortalities are nestlings or juveniles; even so, an estimate of 3 billion mortalities is still nearly impossible to reconcile with bird population estimates. ↩︎
  2. It’s worth noting that the mortality estimates attributable to collisions with buildings, vehicles, and power lines seem to include all 50 states and are therefore not directly comparable. ↩︎
  3. Of course, this accounting still does not include other well-known sources of mortality, such as pesticides or habitat loss [10]. ↩︎
  4. So eager to jump on the story that reporters couldn’t be bothered to ask even the most obvious question: How many birds are there? ↩︎

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