An Appreciation of Birds

Joe Meche is a member of the board of directors of the North Cascades Audubon Society and is in his ninth year as editor of the chapter newsletter. Joe is also a member of the board of directors of the Washington Brant Foundation. He has been photographing birds and landscapes for over 30 years and has been watching birds for more than 50 years.

No other member of the animal kingdom, with the possible exception of domestic cats and dogs, has had a closer relationship with Homo sapiens than birds. If you leave the house, you will more than likely encounter a bird of some sort. If you look out the window, especially if you have bird feeders, you will see birds. Birds are truly everywhere.

During the entire time he was in Iraq, one soldier/birder kept an updated Web site of the birds he was seeing in that occupied land. To say that birds are ubiquitous would be a major understatement.

From the Arctic to the Antarctic and across the most barren landscapes on Earth, birds have carved a niche for themselves. Through evolution, birds have adapted to the harshest of landscapes and even adapted to the veritable havoc created by humans in the inner cities of the world. Their resilience has been tested by the forces of nature and the harsh hand of man, but they continue to thrive—for the most part.

Birds have been studied extensively; they have served as symbols of war and peace; and they have been the subject of artistic expression—in paintings and in literature—from earliest man to the present. We have resident birds to admire and we stand in awe of the migrants that follow traditional flyways to procreate and then return to warmer climes to winter. We earthbound humans have gazed in wonder and longed to emulate the seemingly effortless flight of birds and the freedom that comes with their ability to escape, albeit temporarily, the requisite influence of gravity.

In religion and mythology, birds have been used as symbols of everything from power to bad omens. The dove was seen as a symbol of peace and associated with Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. The symbolic olive branch is always carried by a dove. The eagle has been a symbol of power, as far back as 3,000 BC, and in Greek mythology was considered to be the messenger of Zeus. In the time of the ancient Roman Empire, the golden eagle expanded the symbol of strength and power to one of war. The fledgling United States adopted the bald eagle as its national symbol in 1782.

Another common bird—the raven—also dates back in mythology as a messenger of Apollo. Of course, when Noah sent a dove and a raven to see if the waters of the Great Flood had receded, it was the dove that returned and the raven that Noah cursed and changed its color to black. Eskimos believed that the snowy owl poured sooty lamp oil over the raven to make it black. Ravens are seen in a kinder light in the folklore of North American native tribes. Stories abound of ravens that figured prominently in the narratives of sailors and explorers, including Alexander the Great, who used the birds as guides in their travels.

Our interest in birds is as wide-ranging as the birds themselves. Birds have been hunted for food, some to the point of extinction. Such was the case of the great auk and the passenger pigeon. Pigeons have served humans as food and as messengers. Pigeons played the role of messenger until the invention of radios, telephones and the telegraph. Some species, like chickens and turkeys, have been domesticated for centuries. The Romans raised and bred poultry on a large scale but the practice died with the fall of the Roman Empire, and didn’t return to Europe on that scale until the nineteenth century.

Falconry has been considered a sport for as long as 4,000 years. As a sport, falconry flourished in the Middle Ages and was refined by the Crusaders who returned to Europe and introduced Islamic techniques they had learned while abroad. Breeding and release programs were introduced in the 1960s in an attempt to curb the decline of birds of prey due to the use of the pesticide DDT. The success of these programs has helped to curtail the decline and revive falconry, as well as the study and protection of all birds of prey.

The use of feathers as adornments has been widespread from the earliest times and throughout the world. From feather mosaics as art objects to down clothing for protection from the elements, we have, at times, utilized that part of birds to extremes. The use of feathers to adorn ladies’ hats at the turn of the century practically wiped out several species of large wading birds. On the other hand, protests against this type of exploitation led to the founding of what is now the National Audubon Society.

In literature and in the arts, the use of birds as imagery and metaphor are frequent. In Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, an aria was written about several species of birds, including owls and ravens. Madame Butterfly sings of a robin, and the opening line of Bizet’s Habenera speaks of love as a “rebel bird that no one is able to tame.” One of the all-time jazz greats, Charlie Parker, was known as “Bird.” Innumerable examples of our attraction to birds are evident in practically every medium, ranging from poetry to music, as well as painting and even the movies. In 1963, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic, “The Birds,” had the same impact on walking in the park that “Jaws” would have 12 years later on taking a swim in the ocean. And don’t forget E.A. Poe’s “The Raven.”

In the fifteenth century, long before the advent of cameras, bird illustrations appeared and the interest continued to increase into the time of bird illustrators Mark Catesby and Thomas Bewick in the eighteenth century; John James Audubon in the nineteenth century; and Louis Agassiz Fuertes, in the twentieth century. These illustrators brought the beauty of birds into parlors and created an interest in birds that eventually evolved into today’s field guides. The most notable connection between the two is the work of Roger Tory Peterson. His field guides, combining illustrations with species accounts, were instrumental in opening the avian world to generations of birdwatchers.

Along with the overwhelming appreciation of birds came the desire to study them more closely and learn about their behavior and their physiology and all the things that made them go. The modern science of ornithology evolved from that need. Observations and studies of birds date back to the time of Aristotle in the fourth century BC, and continued with contributions from several Greek and Roman writers. The works of those writers were the sum of our knowledge about birds until the time of the Renaissance. The origin of ornithology as we know it had its roots in the increase of systematic field observations in the eighteenth century.

Field observations and collected data from years of research have served well to understand birds and the connection between healthy bird populations and a healthy planet. Birds are sensitive to changes in their environment and provide us with the best indicator of problems—whatever the cause. The canary in the coal mine was proof enough of the increased sensitivity of birds to deleterious changes in their surroundings. The extinction of certain species has occurred, due either to changes in essential habitat or pressures from man; but through documentation of the causes, we still have time to right the wrongs that we inflict on nature and the natural order of things.

Man’s fascination with birds will never end and, according to statistics, is flourishing beyond comprehension. There has never been a time when humans have been as interested in birds as they are now. Birding festivals are occurring throughout the world, increasing people’s awareness of birds and the need to conserve and restore habitat that is essential for their survival. A world without birds would be a mostly sad place to live. We need more doves and many more olive branches . §