How many birds are there in Poland?

Nearly half a thousand birds!

Each of us, no matter to what extent, if any, is he or she interested in nature, notices the birds living around us. Everyone can most likely also name at least a dozen species. And how many of them live in Poland? There is a very specific answer to this question. At the moment, i.e., until December 31, 2018, 460 species of birds have been found in Poland.

Sparrow, junco and Pallas’s fish eagle

We have this data thanks to the Avifaunistic Commission of the Polish Zoological Society. Avifaunistic commissions operate in most European countries. These are teams of experts – ornithologists, whose main task is to verify the observations of rare and difficult to quantify birds so that, after approval, they can be treated as a scientific fact. Therefore, the above number of 460 species found in Poland includes the house sparrow, the great tit and the lark, as well as the rufous-tailed robin, junco and Pallas’s fish eagle. The last three species are birds that have been seen in Poland only once. They belong to the so-called species that rarely visit the country.

Only some of the birds nest here

And how many of these 460 species nest in our country? We also know this thanks to the Avifaunistic Commission. So far 258 species of birds have been found nesting, including 232 after 1950. Therefore, the last question is what is the total number of birds nesting in Poland? And we will find an answer to this question. In 2015, the Ornis Polonica quarterly published an article: “Assessment of the number of birds nesting in Poland in 2008–2012”. It shows that at that time, a total of about 84 to 106 million pairs of birds were nesting in Poland, and the most numerous species is the lark whose population is estimated at about 11.1 to 13.6 million pairs.