Missing is the deaths due to coal and deforestation.
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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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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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.
I think it's to show that bird deaths from turbines is insignificant
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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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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
I'm a soil scientist. Want some talking points lol.
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I misread as "Cars (domestic and feral)" and was very concerned about the idea of feral cars XD
feral cars
Self driving Teslas?
Waymos probably do kill a ton of urban wildlife.
Ask any groundskeeper for a glass building. You find dead birds every day.
Wait, is hunting no longer considered a "human-caused death"? Or were windmills really a bigger killer?
But yea, outdoor domestic cats are fucking menace to birds and plenty of other small animals.
I hope it's not included in 'Other collisions '.
"This bird died from colliding with a bullet"
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.
Trump's giant skyscrapers covered in windows probably kill way more birds than windmills.
Should we break all Trump's windows to save the birds. Inquiring minds want to know!
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Even the low estimate for birds killed by collisions with cars seems high to me. Iβve been driving for over 25 years and think in that time Iβve only hit birds maybe twice, certainly fewer than 5 times. Birds just donβt seem to fly at car height very often or for very long, and they typically get out of the way quickly when on the ground (George Costanza notwithstanding).
Iβm assuming my experience is pretty typical, and the majority of my driving has been in environments where birds were pretty typically abundant. If we say Iβve hit 5 birds in 25 years (again, a number that seems high), maybe we can extrapolate that 20% of drivers would hit a bird in a year. With 242 million drivers in the US, that would be 48.4 million birds killed, and again, thatβs using a number that seems high in my experience.
I would be curious to see the source on those estimates and how they reached their numbers.
Per driver is an incorrect assumption. It's would need to be per mile driven.
It would then need to be broken down by vehicle type by size and mass. For example I would not be surprised if semis aren't the majority of vehicle bird deaths.
Like these people even care about wildlife. They would rather pump oil and leak in to the ocean if it meant they get to still drive gas guzzling cars polluting the Earth
679,089 seems oddly specific for an estimate
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