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Re:The Devil Bird' Lands in New York, with More Likely to Come by Swizec on Monday May 08, 2023 @10:36AM (#35861981)
> there are few enough [bird] species

For the record, there’s surprisingly many bird species. 10,000 bird species vs only 5,400 mammal species, 4,650 lizard species, 250 marsupial species.

Granted there’s 33,000 species of fish and over 900,000 species of insect. But those are way harder to observe.

Re:The Devil Bird' Lands in New York, with More Likely to Come by everforward on Monday May 08, 2023 @11:11AM (#35862467)
10,000 feels surprisingly small to me. Not that I'm arguing with your perception, I just find it interesting. There are 195 countries, so if those species were evenly distributed by country there would be 51.2 bird species per country.
Re:The Devil Bird' Lands in New York, with More Likely to Come by Swizec on Monday May 08, 2023 @11:29AM (#35862684)
Well they did go through a severe evolutionary bottleneck with that asteroid. We almost didn’t have birds at all.

I guess an interesting question is why are there so few mammalian and lizard species? Only 28 per country.

Re:The Devil Bird' Lands in New York, with More Likely to Come by ImaCake on Monday May 08, 2023 @07:25PM (#35868263)
I find birds both easier to find and identify than marsupials though! But I do appreciate that I am technically wrong here, next time I make this argument I can be more correct as to why birds are useful, thanks! :)