House Finches (the kind that blessed Bernard that evening) are in some cases known to live over 11 years in the wild, so she still might be out there flapping around :bird-guerrila:

Even as grizzled and doomer as I am now, the symbolism and hope of that moment still gets to me. :bawllin-sad:

Small birds probably don't have a long life span. My wild guess is 2, 3 years.

Look to large bodies to understand long life spans | Popular Science

Generally speaking large animals like whales and elephants live a great deal longer than smaller ones like mice.

But how do they do it?

“My guess is there’s not going to be one answer,” Kaeberlein says. There seem to be a wide range of strategies that animals use to protect their DNA and tissues from the ravages of aging and outlive their peers. Scientists are determined to discover what they are in order to stave off age-related maladies like cancer, dementia, and heart disease in people.

The good news is we already have a pretty good idea why large animals often live longer than small ones. It has to do with the fact that tiny animals are more likely to be gobbled up by predators. These animals tend to have babies early and age quickly. “If you’re a mouse, there’s no selection pressure really there to solve problems relating to cancer or older age, because in all probability you’re dead by then, you never get to that stage,” says Kevin Healy, a macroecologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Bulky animals can afford to take a long time to grow up and reproduce. “If you’re an elephant, you’re not going to get eaten by a hyena, for instance, so being big has intrinsic advantages,” says João Pedro de Magalhães, a biologist who studies aging at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. So when an animal has a low risk of being killed by outside circumstances like food shortages or predators, it has a chance to evolve a longer life span.