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"Birds Folklore."
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Seven names for the bellbird
Offering intimate and unforgettable descriptions of the birds and people that inhabit Honduran landscapes, Seven Names for the Bellbird showcases the deep-rooted local traditions of bird appreciation and holds them up as a model for sound management of the environment. Through his appreciative recounting of local lore, author Mark Bonta makes the interaction between culture and avifauna in Latin America a key to better understanding the practice of biodiversity protection. He makes a significant contribution to the scarce anthropological and geographical literature on human-environment relationships in Central America and also provides wonderful stories of native birds and their human observers.
After a decade in the field in Honduras, Mark Bonta came to realize that, contrary to outsiders’ general beliefs, the society he observed was predisposed “to like birds, to observe birds, to weave them into folklore, and to protect them on private property.” Bonta argues that if North Americans and Europeans paid real attention to local knowledge and practice—instead of condemning them out-of-hand and imposing new beliefs and techniques—they would learn that rural cultures offer alternative ways of accommodating habitats and wildlife.
Bonta uses the concept of “conservation geography”—the study of human beings and their landscapes, with natural resource conservation in the forefront—to advance his argument. He describes many cases where local individuals and their traditional knowledge of birds contribute to a de facto variety of bird conservation that precedes or parallels “official” bird protection efforts.
This book is not offered as “proof” that all birds have happy futures in the Neotropics. Bonta recognizes the ravages of both human pressures and natural disasters on the birds and forests. But he shows that in many instances, birds are safe and even thrive in the presence of local people, who “celebrate them just as often as they persecute them.”
eBook
Harper and the night forest
Harper is on a mission! Rumor tells of the mysterious Ice Raven who lives among the ebony trees, singing a magical song that can melt even the hardest of hearts. Now the Wild Conductor wants to capture this mythical bird and create the greatest orchestra ever known. So Harper and her friends set off to find the mythical bird. Their journey takes them from the mysterious Night Forest where fairy tales are more than they seem to the City of Singing Clocks. But soon Harper realizes she faces a terrible dilemma. Should a wild, free creature like the Ice Raven ever be tied down?
Book
Raven: A Legendary 'Trickster'
\"The reasoning mind of the raven is legendary. It can remove lids from garbage cans, or trick other animals into forfeiting their food. It is common for one raven to goad a dog into chasing it, while another steals the dog's bone.\" (BEAUTIFUL BRITISH COLUMBIA) Learn about this songbird's eating habits, habitat, physical characteristics and mating habits. The raven's role in folklore and tradition is described.
Magazine Article
The Raven: Sky Prophet
Ravens, belonging to the crow family, are one of the most intelligent species of bird. From Poe's raven claiming \"Nevermore,\" to the raven Noah sent from the ark in the Bible, these birds are often referred to and used in literature, especially myth and folklore. The Raven's characteristics are presented and its use in literature is explored.
Magazine Article
American crows that excel at tool use activate neural circuits distinct from less talented individuals
Tools enable animals to exploit and command new resources. However, the neural circuits underpinning tool use and how neural activity varies with an animal’s tool proficiency, are only known for humans and some other primates. We use 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography to image the brain activity of naïve vs trained American crows (
Corvus brachyrhynchos
) when presented with a task requiring the use of stone tools. As in humans, talent affects the neural circuits activated by crows as they prepare to execute the task. Naïve and less proficient crows use neural circuits associated with sensory- and higher-order processing centers (the mesopallium and nidopallium), while highly proficient individuals increase activity in circuits associated with motor learning and tactile control (hippocampus, tegmentum, nucleus basorostralis, and cerebellum). Greater proficiency is found primarily in adult female crows and may reflect their need to use more cognitively complex strategies, like tool use, to obtain food.
What’s happening inside a crow’s brain when it thinks about using a tool? Here the authors show that it depends on experience. Naïve crows activate sensory and higher-order processing centers, but experienced crows instead use motor learning and tactile control circuits.
Journal Article
Multi-Ethnic Bird Guide of the Subantarctic Forests of South America
The subantarctic forests of South America are the world’s southernmost forested ecosystems. The birds have sung in these austral forests for millions of years; the Yahgan and Mapuche peoples have handed down their bird stories from generation to generation for hundreds of years. In Multi-ethnic Bird Guide of the Subantarctic Forests of South America, Ricardo Rozzi and his collaborators present a unique combination of bird guide and cultural ethnography. The book includes entries on fifty bird species of southern Chile and Argentina, among them the Magellanic Woodpecker, Rufous-Legged Owl, Ringed Kingfisher, Buff-Necked Ibis, Giant Hummingbird, and Andean Condor. Each bird is named in Yahgan, Mapudungun, Spanish, English, and scientific nomenclature, followed by a description, full color photographs, the bird’s distribution map, habitat and lifestyle, and its history in the region. Each entry is augmented further with indigenous accounts of the bird in history and folklore. “Highly original in its approach of combining information on natural history and biodiversity with information on the region’s human cultural and linguistic diversity.”—Chris Elphick, coauthor of The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior
eBook
Medicinal waterbirds in the traditional healthcare system: an assessment of biodiversity–cultural linkages in Eastern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan
Background
Eastern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is home to a vast range of medicinal and edible waterbird species due to its diverse geographical environment. Waterbird species have been used for various ailments and cultural practices since ancient times, while ethno-pharmacological applications and cultural uses of waterbird species in this area have seldom been documented. This study is the first ethnomedicinal and cultural assessment of waterbird species, and the first compilation and listing of all known data on these species in Eastern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan.
Methods
Interviews and questionnaires were used to collect data from native respondents (
N
= 100). To analyze the data, principal component analysis (PCA), relative frequency of citation (RFC), fidelity level (FL%), relative popularity level (RPL), rank order priority, and similarity index were used.
Results
In total, 64 waterbird species were utilized in cultural practices, of which 40 species are used to cure different infectious and chronic diseases such as cold, cough, flu, fever, respiratory disorders, asthma, TB, gastric ulcers, kidney stones, male impotency, obesity, paralysis, piles, cancer, arthritis, body pain, and weakness. PCA showed significant differences in the use of waterbird species among the local inhabitants of the study area, separated along the axis-2 (
p
< 0.05). The FL% of waterbird species varied from 12 to 100%. 100% FL was analyzed for four waterbird species, i.e.,
Charadrius mongolus
(cold),
Gallicrex cinerea
(asthma),
Anas platyrhynchos
(cancer), and
Esacus recurvirostris
(body weakness). In this study, Mallard (
Anas platyrhynchos
) was the most popular species used in the healthcare system of Eastern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with high RFC (4.06), FL% (100), and RPL (1.0) values.
Conclusion
We concluded that waterbird species are more used for medicine and food purposes in the study area. However, in vitro/in vivo assessment of biochemical activities of waterbird species with a maximum FL% might be significant to produce novel drugs. Recent research shows important ethno-ornithological information about native people and their links with waterbird species, which might be helpful for the sustainable use of waterbird diversity in the research area.
Journal Article
Opportunistic Tool Use by Two Unexpected Corvid Species
This Nature note reports the first documented instance of tool use in Sunda crows (Corvus enca) and provides additional evidence of this ability in house crows (Corvus splendens). At Singapore Zoo (December 2023), individuals from both species spontaneously manipulated a hooked stick to extract food rewards from enclosed containers. This observation extends the catalogue of tool‐using corvids. We briefly review tool use across the corvid family and examine competing hypotheses regarding its evolution, including inherited predisposition from a tool‐using ancestor and the development of general physical intelligence with food caching as a potential precursor. Our findings suggest that the cognitive foundation for tool use may be conserved across the corvid family, with expression contingent upon environmental demands rather than species‐specific adaptations. This work contributes to ongoing discussions regarding the evolutionary origins of complex problem‐solving in birds and the potential role of general physical intelligence in corvid cognition. Picture exemplifying the crow tool use.
Journal Article
Modifications to the Aesop's Fable Paradigm Change New Caledonian Crow Performances
While humans are able to understand much about causality, it is unclear to what extent non-human animals can do the same. The Aesop's Fable paradigm requires an animal to drop stones into a water-filled tube to bring a floating food reward within reach. Rook, Eurasian jay, and New Caledonian crow performances are similar to those of children under seven years of age when solving this task. However, we know very little about the cognition underpinning these birds' performances. Here, we address several limitations of previous Aesop's Fable studies to gain insight into the causal cognition of New Caledonian crows. Our results provide the first evidence that any non-human animal can solve the U-tube task and can discriminate between water-filled tubes of different volumes. However, our results do not provide support for the hypothesis that these crows can infer the presence of a hidden causal mechanism. They also call into question previous object-discrimination performances. The methodologies outlined here should allow for more powerful comparisons between humans and other animal species and thus help us to determine which aspects of causal cognition are distinct to humans.
Journal Article