This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Birds play an outsized, underappreciated role in shaping Earth's chemistry, distributing nutrients across oceans, forests and coral reefs and sustaining life far beyond the nest. Researchers from Cornell and five other institutions reviewed nearly 400 scientific papers to show how birds transport nutrients from land, lake and sea through their waste and bodies.
This influences everything from soil and water chemistry to plant and animal growth. The work was published Oct. 19 in Current Biology. "You can think of animals—and especially birds—as highly efficient and important nutrient transporters or nutrient processing machines, concentrating nutrients in their waste and then depositing them into ecosystems that become valuable resources for all sorts of plants and living organisms," said lead author Ethan Duvall, Ph.D. '26, who earned his doctorate in the graduate field of ecology and evolutionary biology.
That's because flight allows birds to traverse vast distances and barriers such as oceans and mountains. Birds are also extremely efficient at processing and recycling nutrients. Their food consumption rates, according to Duvall, are about 30% higher than those of similarly sized mammals.
As a result, birds are constantly eating—feeding on seeds, insects, invertebrates and fruits that are rich in nitrogen and phosphorus—and releasing nutrients at elevated rates. Birds that congregate at nesting or roosting sites, such as seabirds, deposit high concentrations of nutrients in small areas, providing plants and other organisms with important resources. "It can drive higher amounts of plant and algae growth, but it can also help consumers of those plants, like insects and other vertebrates, maintain a more nutrient-rich diet.
So these islands of fertility can have cascading effects," Duvall said. Nutrients from birds, and in particular seabirds, also wash into nearby coastal waters, acting as nutrient lifelines for coral reefs and the fish communities that depend on these habitats, according to the studies surveyed. Where seabird colonies have disappeared, nutrient levels decline, resulting in reduced plant and algae productivity, reef fish biomass and coral reefs' resilience to environmental stress.
Conversely, bird waste can help restore plant communities. "We see a lot of potential for harnessing birds' capacity to transport recycled nutrients to aid restoration," said Duvall. One study found that installing seabird perches within seagrass restoration sites attracted birds that deposited large amounts of phosphorus, helping the seagrass recover.
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