Birds are simply the most obvious and accessible type of animal.
No matter where you are on Earth, and no matter the time of year, there are always birds around. Most birds are fairly obvious and vocal, making them easy to observe and study, whether you be amateur or expert.
Birds are also fairly easy to identify, at least with a little practice. And with only about 11,000 species worldwide, diversity is high, but not so high that learning all or most of them seems insurmountable - especially if one is focused only on their specific region.
Mammals tend to be small and secretive, and are absent from many islands. Even when found, they are often very difficult to identify.
Herps are also small and secretive, and are absent for much of the year in many temperate regions.
Invertebrates are small and inconspicuous, and also largely absent from temperate regions for much of the year, and are WAY too diverse for most people to wrap their brains around.
Finally, birds are simply cool. They fly and they make fun noises. What’s not to love?
There are many reasons that I am interested, but a big one is diversity. Where I am near Traverse City, Michigan, almost any time of the year there is the possibility of all kinds of unusual birds. Going out in mid-May looking and listening for the migrating warblers can turn up many unusual species. One of my favorite things is finding a bird that I don’t know. I am at the stage where I can easily narrow it down to a family, but deciding which species is fun. You learn to be more overall observant and note all the details to identify them with the books at home. I’ve only seen just over 200 species in the state, but even with that amount, occasionally I will encounter this situation.
Learning the species of birds, plants, and other animals in my region makes me feel so much more connected to the environment. I can gather a lot of information about the history and current state of the different sections of land just by the birds that live there and the plants that grow on it. You begin to realize that these species are all around, and you start to become much more appreciative of the place that you live in. It feels like you aren’t just living around the nature, you are in it and a part of it. Each spring morning I notice the progression of the Black-capped Chickadees that are being raised in my yard. I know exactly where to find the Song Sparrow singing throughout the day. I quickly pick up on the morning and evening routines of the Northern Cardinals. When you go out into the woods alone, you don’t feel alone. You well know the individual tree species and birds, and feel just as comfortable if not more comfortable than in your house with your family. With time, they become your family.
They can fly, they can sing, they are dinosaurs! Everything I can’t and ain’t. I’m not a birder but I can name most of the birds in my everyday environment.
I like to think they warn each other “human coming your way, this one is friendly, but hide, or move quickly when their camera is ready”.
Birds have always fascinated humans. Doves, owls, eagles have always meant things to people spiritually, symbolically, and as omens. Their accessibility and obviousness definitly plays a part in their frequency on iNat (a flashy bird showing up outside someones window is more likely to be noticed than a more stigmatized but equally beautiful animal like a snake or a spider). But culturally, birds are a big deal for people, and for many reasons. Birds are obviously intelligent, amusing to watch, often striking both visually and audibly, easy to personify, and relatable. While I also love insects, it is much easier for a person to relate to the robin they see in their yard looking for worms to feed her babies, than the sand wasp mother carrying a paralyzed fly back to her burrow to feed hers. There is something about how birds behave that (for me at least) is oddly human, which is what makes it so enjoyable to watch the tired mothers, the scruffy and awkward fledglings, and the affectionate pairs.
Birds often evoke something in people (there’s a reason almost every country has a national bird). Early European writers often talk about the songs of the nightingale, the blackbird, and the lark. And stories often mention the wise owl, the majestic eagle, and the macabre corvid. And many people who have grown up in the treed suburbs of the eastern US and Canada will tell you about how nostalgic the call of the mourning dove is to them. Even when birds are gone, they still don’t leave the zeitgeist, just look at the dodo or the ivory-billed woodpecker.
I am aware that for people who aren’t crazy for birds (as I admit I am), all of this might come off as exaggerating just how important birds are to people, but I seriously encourage people to read this Wikipedia article on birds and humans. I know that not everyone is a fan of Wikipedia, but the article does a good job of covering all the different relationships between humans and birds.
I remember being in London when I was ten or eleven and seeing an exhibit at the Natural History Museum about finch beaks in the Galapagos which had a tool from a hardware box to illustrate how each beak worked and differed from the others.
I remember finding a little nest with the remnants of three light blue robin’s eggs, all hatched, and understanding why my parents corrected me when I said my room was sky blue and said, no, robin’s egg.
I remember watching seagulls hovering over fishermen’s boats.
I remember a stuffed snowy owl my father gave me that sat on my bed forever and ever until it disappeared into time and I don’t know when.
I think birds are popular because almost everyone has memories of them.
Not a birder. But my mother showed me - see the white eyebrow - on a Cape robin. The first time I learnt to observe, to notice what I was looking at. We have a resident or two in our garden.
Also because birds are mostly (not all) active during the day.
And you don’t need glasses or magnifying glass to see them (though you might need binoculars for those far away).
I always envied the ornithologists when they were surveying. They’d carry a pair of binoculars and a notebook. I’d be doing small mammal surveys and I had boxes of live traps, bait bags, a shoulder bag for carrying animals that were in traps, etc. Herp surveys were not quite as bad but you still needed gear to find them like snake hooks, turtle traps, and collecting bags. Generally for those species you needed them in hand to ID them and they weren’t cooperative about showing themselves. Meanwhile the bird person was strolling around just looking at their subjects (or listening) as they perched, sang, or flew by.
The older I get the more I appreciate the relatively low amount of effort to find and photo birds.
Coming from insect-observation, I kind of disagree with that. Getting good photos of birds is still very difficult (or rather expensive), even if it may be easier than mammals or herps. For insect photography, on the other hand, all you really need to get some good shots is your phone and a magnifying glass.
That being said, I love birds and try to get a good photo or at least audio recording. If I had the money, I’d definitely invest in some good gear to properly take photos of them.
Yes, you do need the camera gear if you want to photo birds. I’ve invested in that as I enjoy photography. But if you’re not into photoing you can still easily enjoy bird observation with minimal equipment.
Yes two birds guard me always. One in my DP, other with my profile name.
A ‘photographer’ thinks that taking a ‘picture’ is the most difficult task. An artist thinks that taking a picture is the easiest task. A click only.
I have traveled over 1500 km (each time) for ten or twelve times but couldn’t even spot the desired birds concerned (say Bengal Florican, Mangrove Pitta…many many others) and in many many occasion just managed to see them for a sec or two. That’s all. Taking a photo? Only one click? Failed always.
I made no attempt to bring them down from the tree or from the water or elsewhere. Of course, these are not possible also.
Talking about popularity of Birds? I don’t think birds are popular at all. May be 1 or 2% (or may be far less below 1%) of us like/love the birds (that too depending upon how they look, how they sing etc).
If the birds were really so popular then they would not have disappeared from all the localities. In most area they’re hated instead (hv several documentations on that).
The screenshot shared by @AdamWargon proves nothing as these are logos of same app/Site having same pic in most just as a representational pic of the Site/app.
Let’s count unique logos, leaving out duplicates. There are 16 unique logos.
You are correct that birds are much less prevalent: only four unique bird logos, four mammal logos, three plant logos, and one each of reptile, amphibian, fish, insect, text, and whatever that is for Natusfera.
We could look at it another way: 11 vertebrates, 1 invertebrate, 3 plants. This is still very unrepresentative of the actual situation in nature.
One of the reasons birds are so popular is that they are vertebrates. On the whole, humans relate best to vertebrates because we see ourselves reflected in them more than in other taxa. There are many fantasy stories where vertebrates can speak with humans; not so many with talking sea anemones or grass.
It should be noted, too, that the one insect logo is a butterfly – the insect group that probably bears the closest visual resemblance to birds in being colorful, flighty, and conspicuously active during the daytime. This may be why butterflies are less likely to be thought of as “creepy” than other insects.
I think birds can make an area feel less empty, even if you can’t see them. I don’t have much wildlife out here, and what there is is pretty much silent. Rabbits everywhere, insects, frogs, turtles, coyotes. None of them make much noise. Mostly just the frogs and crickets at night, and I rarely hear the coyotes, never seen one. The birds, however, make tons of noise wvery morning. Often the birds and rabbits are the only things that remind me wildlife exists. Oh, and flies, flies everywhere.
Thinking about my own experience, now that it’s summer the cicadas and grasshoppers are extremely loud but I rarely hear any birds when I’m out walking around my neighborhood or traveling to work. I suppose an interesting contrast due to geography …
Much can be written about what birds do, what they can do, why they are important etc. Also learned how easy it is to photograph them. But the question is whether they are Popular?
When I walk along the streets of my city, I hear the calls of crows, Starlings and and…
Our National Bird is Peacock and our State Bird is White-throated Kingfisher(although very few personss of my state know that). Peacocks- No, I rarely see Kinfishers (the white-throated only) in my locality.
Are the birds really Popular?
Yes, may be in a dinner table, may be for some decorative purposes. But in nature?
I repeat I don’t think they’re popular.
PS: a thread was created by me https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/affectionate-and-protective-nature-mothers-of-the-wild/51423/2
Closed with zero response.
see image below 
how your answers are going in unexpected directions!
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