Heliolisk is a large bipedal reptilian PokÃ©mon that resembles a frilled neck lizard. Its slender body is mainly bright yellow, with black patches on the top of its head, its frilled neck, its claws, its feet, and the tip of its tail. The tips of its neck frills are triangular and orange in color, and it has orange stripes around its legs. When emitting electricity, it extends the frills on its neck, which flare up, resembling a sun-like shape.
Still: how many damn birds are there in the United States? John Trapp rounds up the literature here and figures the best guess is around 10 billion birds in spring and 20 billion in the fall. Meanwhile, the aptly named book, How Many Birds Are There? estimates 200-400 billion birds for the entire world, which is pretty consistent with 10-20 billion in the U.S.
However, this is but one component of biodiversity, and others, such as numbers of individuals or biomass, are at least as poorly known and just as important to quantify. Here, we use a variety of methods to estimate the global number of individuals for a single taxon, birds. The different methods yield surprisingly consistent estimates of a global bird population of between 200 billion and 400 billion individuals (1 billion=109). We discuss some of the implications of this figure.