A research team at the British Center for Environment and Hydrology concluded that over the past 130,000 years, human life has directly or indirectly caused the extinction of about 1,430 bird species. Many bird species have disappeared from the face of the Earth as a result of habitat destruction and overhunting. Robert Cook, a researcher at the British Center for Environment and Hydrology, explained that rats, dogs and pigs destroyed bird nests. Scientists were interested in how human activity affects the diversity and number of birds that have settled on Earth in the last 130,000 years since humanity’s exodus from Africa and the beginning of its settlement of the planet.
To obtain this data, scientists analyzed available historical and fossil information about how humans interacted with different birds during the process of colonizing the Earth.
About 1,430 bird species have disappeared, 225 have disappeared in the modern era, and the remains of 417 other species have been preserved in the fossil record, and scientists have not yet found traces of the remaining 788. Most bird extinctions occurred in three eras: the ninth century BC, the fourteenth century AD, and the last three centuries. The first period is associated with the settlement of the islands in the western part of the Pacific Ocean by early humans, and the second is associated with the colonization of the archipelagoes in the eastern Pacific Ocean, during which about 570 bird species disappeared at one time. Bird deaths occurred about a hundred times what occurred from natural causes before man spread throughout the planet.
Similar rates of bird extinction have been observed over the past three centuries
In which global warming has played a major role, as it poses risks to habitats in different environments