Way, way back in post 561, link here ... 561-that-all-important-day-count.html I used some self-generated data and a rather dubious bit of pseudo-maths to work out how many individual birds there were in this wonderful world of ours. It came to a remarkably respectable 4.8 billion. In this much more sensible post I'm going to have a more rational approach ... Here we go ..... I had another think about that 984 day count .... and I've thought up a better (?) way to try to use it to get a reasonable answer to the big question ... how many individual birds are there in the world ? Well, I reckon that 984 day count took place in an area ± 2 square kilometres. I didn't cover every inch of it, but then again, I was a bit jammy with that huge gull flock. Swings and roundabouts. And that's 492 per square km. It doesn't sound much, but if I'm going to use it to represent the world, you've got to remember that there are vast deserts with hardly any birds at all, and at the opposite end of the scale, habitats where there are maybe 1000's per sq km. And according to Mickeypedia, the area of the UK is 245,532 square km. ... and that's 122761½ lots of 2 km² So ..we multiply my 984 by 122761½ and we get ..... 120,797,316 birds in the UK. That's about 2 birds for every one of us in the UK. It doesn't seem very many. If we look at the land area of the whole planet.... 148,940,000 km² That gives us 492 x 148 940 000 = 73,278,480,000 land birds Which is ± 73 billion individual landbirds. That's US billions. But ... what to do about the sea ? The Sea area ( world) = 335,268,000 km² I doubt if there's right at this moment more than 10 birds/km² at sea. And that would give us 33,526,800 birds at sea. So that's ...... 73,278,480,000 land birds plus 335,285,000 sea birds TOTAL 73,613,765 ,000 world bird total !! = ± 73.6 billion Looking at it, I've no idea whether that's utter tosh or bang on ! It doesn't look too bad though ... considering ! Pretty reasonable really. I wonder if a Nobel Prize might be a possibility . I have to admit though, that those "magic numbers" can only be regarded as a "shot in the dark" . I have a horrible suspicion that I used that " joke" before .....
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
|