The Maths of Mozart and Birds
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Tim Harford and spring in my bit of the world has finally sprung. But oh no... There could be a dark side to this season. There I was in the kitchen with my family listening to a BBC radio quiz, The Unbelievable Truth. The aim of the game is to deliver a hilarious monologue on a given topic, almost all of which is false, and to smuggle five implausible truths cunningly concealed amidst the lies. And one of the unbelievable truths which made it past the panellists was this.
In America, each day over two million birds die crashing into window panes. And at the end of that round, Mark, you've managed to smuggle three truths past the rest of the panel. The second truth is that in America each day, over two million birds die crashing into window panes.
But I just found this unbelievable. Charlotte MacDonald, I said. This is one for a statistical sleuth like you.
Well, the story starts in 1990. That year I was dancing about to this kind of thing.
Is this relevant?
I'm just setting the scene for you.
Stop.
And out in the US, an ornithologist was writing an article called Collisions Between Birds and Windows. He reasoned that there are a lot of buildings in the US and that most buildings have windows. So he looked up the number of buildings in the whole country using US Bureau of Census data.
And how many were there?
About 100 million. He then thought, if we assume that over a year, between one and ten birds will hit windows on every building in the country and die, how many birds would that be?
So that's multiplication plus assumption. Very neat. And so the fact was born that between 100 million and a billion birds die in the US each year hitting windows.
Yes, it features on a bird guide website and that's where the Unbelievable Truth team found it.
How did a BBC quiz claim two million birds die hitting US windows each day?
They then took the highest number, a billion dead birds, divided it by 365 days and got their figure of more than two million a day. But I've spoken to leading bird window collision expert, Professor Daniel Clem, and he thinks people shouldn't quote this number as if it was some kind of solid fact.
He's just one expert and experts do disagree.
Yes, but Professor Daniel Clem is the ornithologist who came up with the number in the first place.
I don't believe that anyone should take those figures as facts. There was some quantitative basis behind it, but it wasn't to the level that one would consider those figures to be facts. It's probably likely, but I don't think any reasonable person should be using those figures as facts until we have more supportive evidence.
Frankly, I'm shocked. What is the point of having a panel game built on truth and lies if the truths aren't true? Yeah, I know. That's what the news is for. But the quiz master David Mitchell did have another bird window collision death statistic up his sleeve, one for the UK. He said 100 million birds crash into British windows each year, with a third dying as a result. Is there any more truth in that?
Possibly. It's a figure from the British Trust for Ornithology, and a few years ago they counted the number of ringed birds found dead from hitting windows and extrapolated up to get a national figure.
Hmm.
It's an initial estimate, they say, not robust enough to pass as a hard fact.
David Mitchell, I trusted you. And Charlotte, thank you, I still trust you. Mozart's final opera, The Magic Flute, premiered just ten weeks before the composer's death and was the biggest popular hit of his life. With its pantomime storyline and catchy tunes, it's said to be one of the most accessible operas for the uninitiated. But there's an awful lot going on beneath the jokes and the musical notes. Oxford professor Marcus de Sautoy recently spoke at London's Royal Opera House about what he finds in The Magic Flute as a mathematician. Charlotte MacDonald. Yes? You were in the audience.
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