On average, Northern Cardinals live for 3 years in the wild but they can grow as old as 15 years. The average lifespan in captivity is longer with the record set at over 28 years.
The average lifespan for wild passerine birds is probably a lot longer than 3 yrs.
In general, birds live a weirdly long time. Banding studies show us song birds that have lived up to 15yrs or so. Assuming they make it to adulthood, a cardinal can probably expect to live 6-8 yrs but that is a wild guess since it’s almost impossible for us to really measure that.
Anyway, that’s enough zoology time, back to the memes!
Being able to fly greatly reduces the amount of predators that can eat you (as does being big, like elephants or whales, being generally out of sight and looking inedible, like naked mole rats, or being a walking extinction event that eradicates any predator stupid enough to mess with them, like humans, as long as we aren’t alone).
Most animals, especially small ones, generally will get eaten long before senescence becomes a problem, so they have no evolutionary pressure to select longer lived individuals.
Flying small animals, however, can escape predation often enough that that enough individuals die of natural causes that longer lived ones might have a sufficiently better chance of passing on their genes to be significant from an evolutionary standpoint.
So that’s probably why larger animals tend to live longer, and birds and bats (and naked mole rats and humans) live much longer than other animals of the same size. (Bats have similar lifespans to birds, some reaching 30 years.)
Pretty much this. The average gets dragged down by a HIGH infant mortality rate - nest predators from snakes to raccoons to hawks and vultures kill a lot of hatchlings, as well as things like simple accidents (falling out of a tree, for instance).
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