1in1t

Live a life as a wild bird

EpicOdds: 1 in 36.2 billion

About 50 billion wild birds share the planet. About 48.4 billion wild birds are alive right now.

Sources: Callaghan et al. 2021, “Global abundance estimates for 9,700 bird species”, PNAS 118 (about 50 billion wild birds, sparrows counted separately).

Your life

  1. Day 1 · You are an egg in a mud nest under a roof in a hedge in England.
  2. Day 15 · You hatch naked and blind, and your parents bring insects all day.
  3. Day 35 · You leave the nest. Most young songbirds do not survive their first year.
  4. Autumn · The days shorten.
  5. Spring · You are back, or still here, and the days are long again.
  6. Year 2 · You raise your own brood.
  7. Year 4 · You have flown tens of thousands of kilometres in your life.

Get rebornEvery number and its source

Questions

What are the odds of being reborn as a wild bird?

Odds: 1 in 36.2 billion. About 50 billion wild birds share the planet. (Callaghan et al. 2021, “Global abundance estimates for 9,700 bird species”, PNAS 118 (about 50 billion wild birds, sparrows counted separately).)

What are my odds of being reborn as a human?

About 1 in 210 billion if any animal can be drawn. There are roughly 8.2 billion people, but around 1.3 sextillion copepods, 440 quintillion soil nematodes and 10 quintillion insects. Among mammals and birds only, the odds improve to about 1 in 21.

What is the most common animal on Earth?

By head count, tiny crustaceans called copepods (about 1.3 × 10²¹, an order-of-magnitude estimate), then soil nematodes (about 4.4 × 10²⁰, van den Hoogen et al. 2019). That is why the true-odds draw almost always makes you something small.

The odds, animal by animal

Copepod Soil nematode Insect Ant Antarctic krill Honey bee Fish Bat Chicken Wild rodent Human House sparrow Cow Dog Elephant Blue whale Giant panda