Most abundant wild bird

The most abundant extant bird is the red-billed quelea (Quelea quelea), a seed-eating weaver of the drier parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, which has an estimated adult breeding population of between 1 and 2 billion, with greatest numbers following successful breeding seasons.

Some 200 million of these "feathered locusts" are slaughtered annually to try and protect mass destruction of crops, without having much impact on this number.

This pales by comparison to the most abundant bird ever: the extinct passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) of North America probably numbered at least 5 billion, andno bird species today comes close to these astonishing numbers. In 1810, Alexander Wilson, the early pioneer of scientific ornithology in the USA, described a single flock that he estimated to contain at least 2 billion birds. It's thought to have been hunted to extinction by the early 20th century; the last known living specimen, Martha, passed away at Cincinnati Zoological Gardens on 1 September 1914.