Just in case you were curious: Scientists have determined that the world's birds eat 450 to 550 million tons of insects each year.
That's as many as 20 quadrillion individual bugs munched by birds annually, a scientific study reports.
The study highlights the important role birds play in keeping plant-eating insect populations under control, researchers say.
Study lead author Martin Nyffeler, a zoologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, said that birds – along with other natural enemies such as spiders and ants – contribute greatly to natural insect pest suppression.
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"Our motivation to publish this paper was to raise public awareness and increase the level of appreciation for birds – a class of highly beneficial, endangered animals," he said.
Other predator groups such as bats, primates, shrews, hedgehogs, frogs, salamanders and lizards also seem to be valuable bug eaters but are less effective natural enemies of plant-eating insects.
Put another way, Nyffleler said "the global population of birds annually consumes as much energy as a megacity the size of New York. They get this energy by capturing billions of potentially harmful herbivorous insects and other arthropods."
Some of the most popular items on birds' menus include beetles, flies, ants, moths, aphids, grasshoppers and crickets.
And when compared to our diets, the amount of food consumed by birds is similar to that of the human world population, which, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, consumes about 450 million tons of meat and fish per year.
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Most, but not all, birds eat insects.
“Birds are an endangered class of animals because they are heavily threatened by factors such as afforestation, intensification of agriculture, spread of systemic pesticides, predation by domestic cats, collisions with man-made structures, light pollution and climate change," Nyffeler said.
"If these global threats cannot soon be resolved, we must fear that the vital ecosystem services that birds provide – such as the suppression of insect pests – will be lost."
The study was published in the journal The Science of Nature.
