How do you feel that stat is misleading? Is it too large, too small? Perhaps some articles are using is misleadingly, but it seems like it is a ballpark estimate made by an educated expert.
Do you have references for your bird assertions, this is an article from yesterday where dead birds are washing up on shore, with a quote from an expert:
"A lot of people are under the impression that birds can easily fly away from a fire, but that’s not true"
For a coarse wildlife estimate like this, the range of uncertainty is probably about two orders of magnitude. So from 500 million "affected", the true range is 5-500 million or 50 million-5 billion, depending on who decided to truncate the range of uncertainty.
The conversion factor for "affected" to "killed"... I have no idea what it is, and there is contradictory intuition for its magnitude, so I don't want to trust any number until I see someone actually doing studies of wildfire mortality.
This is my primary point. The margin of error is two orders of magnitude. It's a bit absurd to throw a statistic around when it's such a huge unknown. I guess I'd be happier if margins of error were included with statistics at all times. Otherwise people think they are all equally certain
Do you have references for your bird assertions, this is an article from yesterday where dead birds are washing up on shore, with a quote from an expert:
"A lot of people are under the impression that birds can easily fly away from a fire, but that’s not true"
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/it-s-a-sorry-sig...