Birds can be a farmer’s best friend.
Birds make you happier and they eat the insects that eat your crops! Fun facts about birds:
Watching birds is good for your mental health.
Cox et al. 2017 reported that lower levels of stress, depression, and anxiety were associated with the number of birds that people spotted in the afternoon.
In the same study, higher levels of vegetation were also correlated with better mental health.
Many birds are insectivores, they eat insects all or part of the time.
As a group, birds consume 400 to 500 million tons of insects a year around the world (Nyffeler et al. 2018).
Birds consume about the same tonnage of insects per year as spiders. Spiders eat 400-800 million tons of insects per year (Nyffeler and Birkhofer 2017)
Insects are estimated to have a mass of over 700 million tons globally (Sanderson 1996). Imagine if there were no birds to help keep this population in check.
There are around 10,700 species of birds.
Sadly, humans have been the cause of mass bird extinctions. Between 10-20% of all birds are extinct due to human predation. Most of these were large flightless and likely tasty birds living on islands (Fromm and Meiri 2021). In all 68% of flightless birds are now extinct.
Current extinction of birds is mainly driven by habitat destruction, not predation.
Neonicotinoids, which are nicotine-based pesticides, negatively affect insects and birds (Li et al. 2020).
References:
Daniel TC Cox, Danielle F Shanahan, Hannah L Hudson, Kate E Plummer, Gavin M Siriwardena, Richard A Fuller, Karen Anderson, Steven Hancock, Kevin J Gaston, Doses of Neighborhood Nature: The Benefits for Mental Health of Living with Nature, BioScience, Volume 67, Issue 2, February 2017, Pages 147–155, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biw173
Fromm, A, Meiri, S. Big, flightless, insular and dead: Characterising the extinct birds of the Quaternary. Journal of Biogeography, 2021; 48: 2350-2359. https://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.14206
Li, Y., Miao, R. & Khanna, M. Neonicotinoids and decline in bird biodiversity in the United States. Nat Sustain 3, 1027–1035 (2020).https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0582-x!
Nyffeler M, Birkhofer K. An estimated 400–800 million tons of prey are annually killed by the global spider community. Sci Nat 104, 30 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-017-1440-1
Nyffeler M, Şekercioğlu ÇH, Whelan CJ. Insectivorous birds consume an estimated 400–500 million tons of prey annually. Sci Nat 105, 47 (2018). Paper here.
Sanderson MG (1996) Biomass of termites and their emissions of methane and carbon dioxide: a global database. Global Biogeochem Cy 10:543–557 PDF here.