I just heard, or actually overheard, a brief squib on NPR this morning
that a 41-year old osprey had just returned to a nest site in Scotland.
This and the story that the 60-year old Laysan albatross and her egg had
been spared in the tsunami led me to search the topic "longevity of
birds," where there is some interesting information. Some of the hard
data on lifespans of wild birds, obviously enough, come from a few
individuals like the aforementioned that return year after year to a
location like a nest and are recognizable (usually by a band or other
marker), but most come from banding recaptures. One can imagine that
relying only on the minuscule number of individual birds who happen to
come into the hands of bird banders at least twice in their lifetimes
tells us only a tiny bit. Some advocates of living forever--let us hope
they also advocate sterility at the same time--point to birds as
creatures who live unusually long despite their high metabolisms, also
in defiance of theories about tissue oxidation and accumulation of
metabolic by-products as causes of death. Probably 99+% of birds die by
misadventure. One shocking statement in a discussion of the relatively
long average life-spans of larger birds noted that "game birds are
shorter-lived than their sizes would predict."
Bill Whan
Columbus

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