Birds are truly beautiful creatures, they are also fascinating and all around us, roosting and nesting on our buildings and feeding in our gardens and refuse dumps, they are easy to find and fun to observe.

Birds are probably the most beloved group of wild animals on the planet. Their ubiquitous presence, colourful form, intelligent actions and cheeky mannerisms endear them to us all.Birds are easy to love.

There are about 9 703 species of birds divided up into 23 orders, 142 families and 2 057 genera.

Birds can be found on all major land masses from the poles to the tropics as well as in or over all our seas and oceans and their accompanying islands.

In the last 280 years 42 species and 44 subspecies of birds are known to have become extinct. Subspecies are important because they are the root stock from which species evolve. They are quite probably the species of the future.

Birdlife International's (2000) Threatened Birds of the World lists 1186 species as Endangered, Threatened, or Vulnerable. These include several (like Guam Rail Gallirallus owstoni or Socorro Dove Zenaida graysoni) that are "extinct in the wild" but captive breeding populations exist and there is hope for eventual re-introductions into native habitat. Although a few birds are included that are almost surely extinct (e.g., Javanese Lapwing Vanellus macropterus, Imperial Woodpecker Campephilus imperialis, Ivory-billed Woodpecker C. principalis, Oahu 'Alauahio Paroreomyza maculata, Bachman's Warbler Vermivora bachmanii) this does mean that over 10% of the birds in the world are threatened with extinction in the near future, almost all of them due to the destruction of habitat by man. Another 747 are more briefly summarized in an appendix as Near-Threatened; yet 79 more are considered "data deficient" to permit evaluation. Together this means that almost 1 out of every 5 species is slipping away from us.