Roughly how many species of birds are known to science today?
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Answer
About 11,000 species
About one bird species in eight is threatened with extinction according to BirdLife International.
How to estimate it
A species count comes from catalogues, not calculation, and it shifts as experts split or merge species. You can bracket it. A field guide to Europe lists about 500 breeding birds, while Colombia alone, the richest country, has about 1,900. With six inhabited continents and thousands of islands full of unique species, around 10,000 is a reasonable guess. Current checklists recognise about 11,000 species.
Source: IOC World Bird List; BirdLife International
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