A00005 - El Dia de Los Muertos por Los Pajaros

On Thanksgiving Day, I wrote the following:

*Today, it is estimated that some 25 million turkeys will be consumed in the United States.  This is a large number but it pales in comparison to the total consumption of birds (especially chickens) that occurs on a daily basis throughout the world.  As was noted in Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, 

"The most numerous wild bird on the planet is the African red-billed Q Quelea, with an estimated population of 1.5 billion.  At any given moment, something in the range of twenty-three billion chickens are alive, and human beings consume more than sixty billion chickens each year.  (The second number is so much larger because chickens are slaughtered for meat after only a few months of life.}  There are now more chickens on earth than all other species of birds combined. The rate of population growth of chickens far exceeds that of humans over the past century.  But, of course, the two growth rates are fundamentally linked: we can support seven billion people on the planet now in part because they have 60 billion chickens to eat each year.

"The chicken population on earth is so immense, in fact, that scholars now believe that when future archaeologists thousands of years from now dig through the ruins of what some all the Anthropocene age -- the age where humans began transforming the planet -- they will use the remains of all that poultry as a key marker for the period.  No doubt they will encounter other evidence of human culture: nonbiodegradable plastics, buried cities.  But the remaining traces of Homo sapiens skeletons will be an afterthought to those future archaeologists.  The defining biological signature of the period, mummified in landfills all around the world, will be chicken bones."  Pages 210-211. 

***

Sonething to ponder on more than just Thanksgiving Day.

Peace,

Everett "Skip" Jenkins

Fairfield, California

December 1, 2021