Nerve Endings Firing Away

Number of birds killed by the BP oil spill: at least 2,188 and counting.

Number of birds killed by wind farms: 10,000-40,000 annually.

Number of birds killed by cars: 80 million annually.

Number of birds killed by cats: Hundreds of millions to 1 billion annually.

Don’t worry there is some good news.  

Number of birds killed by fisheries: tens to hundreds of thousands annually

[Source: Marginal Revolution] Putting things in perspective doesn’t hurt, right? But as rightly noted in the comments on Marginal Revolution, concentration of deaths especially of endangered species due to an avoidable human-created environmental disaster is much different from scattered deaths of rest of the birds.

Just so as to put things into perspective, nearly 45,000 people die every year in road accidents in the United States but only 3,000 have died in terrorism-related incidents in the past ten years. Care to guess where most of our attention (and funds) is focused on?