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Which makes the fact that the passenger pigeon once number 3-5 billion individuals in North America all the more staggering. Assuming the 50b number has not gone down significantly, it may have been that 1 out of every 10 birds on the planet was a passenger pigeon.

They say the flocks would black out the sky passing over.

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I have read similar accounts of the passenger pigeon and trust them to be mostly truthful, at least relative to what we can hope to see in the present day. However, as you suggest, the 50b number represents bird populations under crisis and does not represent their pre-Industrial levels, or even last Century’s.

I was also thinking of passenger pigeons, but I suspect that - rather than any special prevalence of passenger pigeons specifically - the actual conclusion to draw from that is that 50B globally is a tiny number compared to what biomes there were previously.

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