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To be a birdologist, she said, “you just have to appreciate birds and be intentional about appreciating birds in some way.” We could all be birdologists, she said—and we should be. For watching birds, she told us, “strengthens our souls.” A birdologist, she explained, “experiences the divinity of creation revealed in the birds.” That pretty much describes what I have always felt when I see a bird—any bird. The ancients believed that birds could bring us messages from the gods: whether a battle would be won or lost, or if plenty or famine would befall the city. Birds do bring us messages from
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To be a birdologist, she said, “you just have to appreciate birds and be intentional about appreciating birds in some way.” We could all be birdologists, she said—and we should be. For watching birds, she told us, “strengthens our souls.” A birdologist, she explained, “experiences the divinity of creation revealed in the birds.” That pretty much describes what I have always felt when I see a bird—any bird. The ancients believed that birds could bring us messages from the gods: whether a battle would be won or lost, or if plenty or famine would befall the city. Birds do bring us messages from
...more
The ancients knew better. The word “augury” comes from the Greek word meaning “bird talk,” for to understand the language of birds was to understand the gods.
The ancients knew better. The word “augury” comes from the Greek word meaning “bird talk,” for to understand the language of birds was to understand the gods.
Does this sound like anthropomorphism? Am I projecting onto chickens traits that belong to humans alone? How can it be that birds—a lineage that separated from that of the mammals more than 300 million years ago—are as individual as people? How can these birds share with us intelligence, reasoning, foresight, memory—and in other ways slavishly obey blind instinct? Can creatures more closely related to lizards and crocodiles than to people actually have culture?
Most paleontologists today agree that the dinosaurs did not go extinct, as we were taught in grade school. Instead, they became the most diverse group of land vertebrates on the earth—the world’s ten thousand species of birds.
The timid titmouse and fluffy chickadee, it turns out, are close relatives of the largest, most powerful carnivores that ever lived.
Today few serious paleontologists question that birds arose from dinosaurs. Increasingly they agree on an even more surprising conclusion: that birds, rather than meriting a separate class, Aves, in the scientific organization of life, should be classed in Reptilia, within the Dinosauria, as the very successful surviving dromaeosaurs.
Birds are made of air.
For all birds, but especially these, seeing is not merely believing; seeing is knowing.
Seeing is being.
Instinct gets short shrift among most humans. We value thinking instead and dismiss instinct as the machinery of an automaton. But instinct is what lets us love life’s juicy essence: instinct is why we enjoy food and drink and sex.
For a human to love without expecting love in return is hugely liberating. To leave the self out of love is like escaping the grip of gravity. It is to grow wings. It opens up the sky.
“Hunt hard. Kill swiftly. Waste nothing. Offer no apologies.”
though I longed for one, I never had a sense of home. Even now, settled into a house and community where I’ll live for the rest of my life, being lost still evokes a kind of panic in me—a panic linked to not being able to find home.
The tales, in infinite variation, arose around the world, across ages, across cultures. Yet they all seem to make the same claim: birds, so many human traditions hold, taught people to talk, to sing, to dance.
James Fassett has written a Symphony of Birds—consisting entirely of songs and calls of real birds.
Like human language, birdsong changes over time and space. Local song traditions change, as human language does. Largely for this reason, birdsong, like language, shows geographical variations or dialects.
“These birds aren’t a gang of nasty villains. These birds are just birds. American crows are among the most family-oriented birds in the world!”
In medieval times, biblical scholars imagined that Hell was a place with no birds. Today, at times, our kind seems determined to bring that Hell to earth. In their variety and sheer numbers, birds are among the most successful forms life has ever produced—yet today, one in eight bird species faces extinction because of human interference.
Today we need birds’ blessings more than ever; more than ever we need to heed their message.
Birds are as ordinary as they are mysterious, as powerful as they are fragile, so like us and so beguilingly Other. Birds bring us the gifts of Thought and Memory, guided as they are both by intellect and instinct. These winged creatures, made of air, have outlived their kin, the dinosaurs. It is our duty and privilege to protect them.
“you’re not just watching a bird. You’re watching life.”
