What's behind the rise in non-hunted bird deaths? (2024)

FAQs

What's behind the rise in non-hunted bird deaths? ›

Although shooting injuries were initially what drove rehabilitators to reach out to WGF, most causes of bird deaths were by trauma from collisions with stationary or moving objects, poor nutrition, lead poisoning, West Nile Virus infection and getting tangled up in objects like fences or glue traps.

We estimate that from 500 million to possibly over 1 billion birds are killed annually in the United States due to anthropogenic sources including collisions with human-made structures such as vehicles, buildings and windows, power lines, communication towers, and wind turbines; electrocutions; oil spills and other con ...

Other common human-caused and natural threats to birds that are known, but not listed below include various entanglement and entrapment threats e.g., open pipes and nets); predation by other animals besides cats, including humans (e.g., poaching); weather events; starvation; and disease.

Collisions with vehicles are believed to be among the top five direct causes of bird mortality in the United States. A recent study estimated that between 89 million and 340 million birds die annually in vehicle collisions on U.S. roads.

Up to one billion birds die each year in the United States due to collisions with windows and research shows that 54-76 percent of window collisions are fatal.

They can make wonderful pets, but cats roaming outdoors kill approximately 2.4 billion birds every year in the U.S., making cat predation by far the largest human-caused source of bird mortality.

The cassowary has often been labelled "the world's most dangerous bird", although in terms of recorded statistics, it pales in comparison to the common ostrich that is recorded to kill two to three humans per year in South Africa.

North America alone has lost an astonishing 3 billion breeding birds in the last half-century, due to threats like climate change, predation by feral and pet cats, and the loss of grasslands and other habitats. This panzootic is only making an ongoing extinction crisis worse.

Loss, degradation and fragmentation of important migratory bird habitat have been identified as potentially the largest individual threat to migratory birds. Much of this is human caused by development.

The strain of bird flu coursing through North America ignited a season of plague for Atlantic seabirds when it first appeared in late 2021 at a Newfoundland farm. From April to September 2022, bird flu killed about 41,000 wild birds in Canada.

Why do birds hit glass windows? ›

The first step is to understand why birds fly into windows: It's usually because when they're looking at the window, they're seeing the reflection of sky or trees instead of a pane of glass. They think they're following a clear flight path.

“Birds see differently from humans,” Martyn says. “They don't perceive glass as a solid object. To them, it could look like you could fly straight through the glass to the other side. Or, the glass reflects the landscape, sky or water, and it looks like the landscape continues on, so they might fly straight into it.”

What happens to birds that hit windows? Sadly, the bird often dies, even when it is only temporarily stunned and manages to fly away. Many times these birds die later from internal bleeding or bruising, especially on the brain.

Kitties remain the number one killer: The group has found that free-ranging domestic cats kill anywhere from 1.3 to 4 billion birds per year, with feral felines mostly to blame.An additional 140,000 to 328,000 birds fall victim to wind turbines, the group estimates.

Other sources of electricity are also more lethal for birds than wind energy. A 2012 study found that wind projects kill 0.269 birds per gigawatt-hour of electricity produced, compared to 5.18 birds killed per gigawatt-hour of electricity from fossil fuel projects.

The general rule is that the smaller the bird, the shorter its lifespan. Garden or songbirds are usually quite small, giving them an average of around 2 to 5 years of mortality. Going up the size scale, we've found that the average age of hawks is 8 to 20 years, eagles 20 – 25 years, seabirds can be from 30 – 50 years.

Stress. Long-term stress in birds can cause them to pass away suddenly and seemingly for no reason. A bird's heart beats more quickly under stress, especially under extremely high levels of stress. This eventually overwhelms their system, which results in death.

Neonicotinoids, or neonics for short, are a category of insecticide that have been found to directly impact bird species. For migrating birds, opportunities to feed are crucial during their stop-overs.

The ongoing outbreak of avian flu has killed hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of wild birds, including endangered species like the California condor. It's one of the worst wildlife disease outbreaks in history.