The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

by Jennifer Ackerman

Birds have taught us that classifying behavior into binary opposites—much as we like to do so—is often a futile exercise. Birds live and act on a spectrum, just as we do, and they prove the power of exceptions, both in defining rules and in breaking them.

Birds have also shown us that we’re not unique in the ways we once thought. The teasing and clowning play in kea tells us that neither the capacity to be aware of other minds nor the wish to play with them belongs to humans alone. Nor are we alone in using aspects of language or tools, or in building complex structures, or in understanding, manipulating, and deceiving other animals. We may, however, be alone in devising reasons why we’re special.

We understand now that birds are not just biologically distinct but culturally distinct—and that this is true even within a species. Birds learn styles of singing, bower building, playing that vary from one place, one population, to another.

Clearly there is no one way to be a bird, just as there is no one way to be a human. We have our different cultural ideals and shared practices across cultures, dynamic and changing; they have their individual identities and distinct behavioral and cultural practices, also dynamic—which they may share through social learning. But birds are all connected through the common thread of “birdness” just as we are all connected through our humanity.

The word auspicious, meaning “favorable or promising success,” comes from the Latin, auspex, or “observer of birds.” In ancient Rome, bird-seers were priests, or augurs, who founded their divinations on the flight patterns of birds. The sixteenth-century English noun auspice originally referred to the practice of observing birds to find omens. There’s a deep hunch here. We would do well to watch birds more, tune in to their usual and unusual behaviors, learn while we can from their marvelous—and still often mysterious—ways of being.