this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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Even the low estimate for birds killed by collisions with cars seems high to me. I’ve been driving for over 25 years and think in that time I’ve only hit birds maybe twice, certainly fewer than 5 times. Birds just don’t 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).
I’m 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 I’ve 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, that’s 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.