Steve Brusatte

These were birds that weighed

many, many hundreds of kilos, maybe even approaching a ton, some of them.

So imagine a duck, a regular duck we're all familiar with and supersize it like a hundred times.

Now they lived for tens of millions of years and they were some of the biggest plant eaters in Australia.

And there are actually archeological sites in Australia where there are campfires made by humans

with charred demon duck eggs.

They were making demon duck omelets for breakfast.

And that is probably why the demon ducks didn't make it through.

Birds are certainly facing a crisis.

There's many hundreds of species of birds that have gone extinct only over the last few hundred years or so, as humans have been really moving around the world.

A lot of these birds have gone extinct on islands.

But what's even in many ways more worrying is just that the standing population of birds has crashed.

I mean, billions of individual birds have been lost.

in North America from the time that my parents were in high school until today.

Even over just the last five or six years alone in Britain, certain birds that live in hedgerows, they've lost like 50% of their standing diversity.

That's incredible.

We're changing the Earth so quickly.

Of course, it's climate change, but it's not just that.

It's how we slash and burn forests and turn forests into farmland.

It's pollution.