679,089 seems oddly specific for an estimate
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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I am pretty sure all of those pale in comparison to environmental pollution and destruction of nature reserves.
Now compare migratory birds vs nesting. The error bar on these numbers is massive.
Missing is the deaths due to coal and deforestation.
I guess this is direct deaths.
The low and high estimate for cats are so far apart they may as well just shrug.
that is cats for you, they kill when they feel like it
Yeah that's exactly what I thought.
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"Other collision's" kinda takes blame away from what's happening, its glass windows. This from wiki: "a 2024 study on the survival rate of bird-building collision victims indicates that previous research was vastly underestimating the number of deaths caused by collisions, and in actuality well over 1 billion birds die from collisions in the United States every year."
Fun fact, there's a layer they can put in glass that makes it visible to birds but not us, but its more expensive, so it isn't used most places!
Do you have a link to more info about the layer product? My google fu is failing me.
Not affiliated but this website is a perfect example: https://www.birdshades.com/
There's a couple of other websites selling similar things, you can also buy UV film yourself to apply to your own windows. I first learned about it on Grand Designs!
Link to the grand designs build where they call it ornilux glass.
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Fun fact: windmills have a speaker on then that emits a high pitched chirp. Humans cant hear it, and birds avoid it.
They also stop or reduce turbine speed during peak migration season, and scientists have found that painting one of the blades a dark color prompts the birds to fly further away from the turbine.
They do kill a lot of birds though, and bats. An absolute fuckton of bats. My partner did turbine strike studies in college, and said that the number of bat deaths is really disheartening. Bats in my area like to find the tallest "snag" to roost in... Guess what a wind turbine looks like to them...
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Oh god, another time I see that cat killing birds statistics.
- Cats prefer to kill rodents and are more equipped to it. And the same study Loss et al estimates cat killing rodents to be 4 times more than birds.
- Rodents (e.g. rats) eats bird eggs. Same researcher fails to calculate how much...
- All studies (well, 1 study in Australia) that compared bird population with cats in rodent areas confirm that removal of cats hastened decrease of bird population 2 times.
- Loss at all is a metastudy. Some of the data sources on cat predation and other collisions are 70-100 years old. Some are more recent, but overall data quality on bird death is local, from small sample, and estimated. My favourite was a study on 10 cats in 3 villages estimated over a whole damn country.
- The graph seems to be missing all other non-collision sources of bird population death, e.g. rodents eating birds, pesticide related deaths, electrocutions form powerlines, etc. etc.
Yes, simplified thinking here led to Mao killing off sparrow to protect crops only for those crops to be eaten by insects that otherwise would have been managed by said sparrowsβ¦
There's no denying that outdoor cats kill birds but you're right that those numbers are inflated. Plus, the problem with looking back 70-100 years back isn't just methodology but it's the fact that stray and feral cats are much better maintained in the last few decades. It's a problem many counties actually bothered to tackle with high profile neutering campaigns and such. So, I bet the numbers are probably lower than collisions at this point.
Context also matters a lot-- cats are, like us, an invasive species. The most evidence of it being a problem are in places where there were no major predators for birds (mostly thinking of islands like New Zealand). But that's less a matter of bird deaths so much as a matter of man made ecological changes leading to endangerment.
It's also weird how much easier it should be to just not have clear glass skyscrapers murdering thousands of birds vs what, killing off cats? What even is the end game to that statistic, lol.
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My somehow-now-conservative mom lives in the midwest and will rant long and hard about how windmills make the soil under them "dirty" because they "leak oil from the blades" and "all the farmers know it's true"
I once considered this lady smart, smh
One of her friends probably listened to a talk show where two people bitched about it for 3 minutes and played some devil's advocate. I swear they use the conservative talk shows to train to become horrible people.
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I misread as "Cars (domestic and feral)" and was very concerned about the idea of feral cars XD
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Ask any groundskeeper for a glass building. You find dead birds every day.
Are windows other collisions? I think we had 3-6 birds die hitting windows just this last year. Put up some window stickers hoping for a better result, but I have to think windows kill more than all others combined.
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