There are a lot of only a few kinds of birds. Scientists want to describe this fact with the right statistical distribution. Most of the time, the lognormal distribution is used. A new study, however, finds that the number of bird species is best described by a log left-skewed distribution. For the same set of data, we examine the rank abundance distribution rather than the species abundance distribution. In this case, the number of birds in each rank is based on a power law distribution.