I remember when my mom would tell my skinny brother as he sat at the dinner table pushing food around his plate, “Son, you eat like a bird.” Actually, it was I, wolfing down my second helping of spaghetti, who actually ate like an avian species.
Scientists with nothing better to do have determined that the world’s birds eat up to 550 million tons of insects each year. That adds up to around 20 quadrillion bugs. That’s 20,000,000,000,000,000. Say, “beat that, Orkin man!”
While some may worry bugs are on the fast track to extinction, worry not. They seem to have a very effective procreation plan going on and will probably be the last critters to walk the earth when we’re all baked, or frozen, by Global Warming.
The study points out the important role birds play in keeping plant-eating insect populations under control, say researchers.
The study’s lead author Martin Nyffeler, a zoologist at Switzerland’s University of Basel, said birds, along with other natural enemies such as spiders and ants (wait a minute, you mean those little bastards get a free pass!?) contribute greatly to natural pest suppression.
“Our motivation to publish this paper,” said Nyffeler, “was to raise awareness and increase the level of appreciation for birds – a class of highly beneficial, endangered animals.”
Side note: There are nearly 10,000 known bird species around the globe. Only 4% are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2016. That’s still too many, but they’re a long way from Dodo heaven.
Other predators such as bats, primates, shrews, hedgehogs, frogs, salamanders and lizards also seem to be valuable bug eaters but are less focused on the plant-eating varieties.
Nyffeler went on to say the global population of birds annually consumes as much energy as a megacity the size of New York. “They get this energy by capturing billions of harmful herbivorous insects and other arthropods,” he said. And lest we forget those birds are producing a lot of valuable fertilizer!
Some of the most popular items on birds’ menus are beetles, flies, moths, aphids, grasshoppers and crickets.
The amount of food consumed by birds is similar to that of the human world population, which, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, consumes about 450 million tons of meat and fish per year.
Side note: October 14th is National Chocolate-Covered Insects Day, so let’s all pitch in. Even with chocolate, my brother still won’t eat one.