Birds and ecosystem services

Abstract

What do birds do for us? Some may find this an inappropriate or perhaps distasteful question, suggesting as it might that the importance or value of birds lies principally in the ways that they benefit people, and with perhaps an unspoken implication that if they do not do enough then we should not be too concerned as to what befalls them. Nonetheless, it seems vital to understand the benefits or enhancements to human wellbeing, commonly known as ecosystem services, that birds provide for two main reasons. First, birds are under high and increasing threat, and thus these ecosystem services are also under pressure; around 4% of the known bird species of the Late Pleistocene is estimated to have become extinct, a much higher percentage of local populations has been lost or seriously eroded, and around 13% of current extant bird species is considered globally threatened with extinction. Second, and arguably more importantly, our ability to answer the question of what birds do for us is in some sense a measure of how well we understand, and place adequate 'value' (in the broadest, and not simply an economic, sense) on, the interaction between people and birds, and more generally that between people and nature. Indeed, birds provide a particularly valuable test of such understanding because they have been subject to a long and rich history of human interest and study.