Abstract
Human beings have for a long time been interested in and perhaps somewhat in awe of birds. In this first chapter, I present a selective account of how we have demonstrated our interest in the world’s avifauna. The accounts I present are both personal and of a more general nature and both historical and contemporary. I start by addressing the development of my interest in birds and how this interest has changed over the years. I then continue to consider time-based changes in bird watching and the different ways that bird behaviour may be understood through different approaches. I first present such variations in relation to the study of bird song and then move on to note how identification of birds uses different criteria when undertaken through binoculars versus when the bird is in the hand of someone who is ringing the bird. As the chapter is in essence an exposition of how humans have thought about and attempted to understand birds, I then present how birds have been classified through the development of taxonomic systems. I commence this consideration of taxonomy with that developed by Aristotle followed by Pliny the Elder, Linnaeus and more contemporary accounts. My aim in this chapter is to introduce the reader to the breadth of ways in which we interact with birds, and I close by stressing this notion and by presenting a novel way in which birds and their behaviour may be studied and understood. The new approach I am suggesting is that of the mapping sentence and the declarative mapping sentence couched within the facet theory approach to research, which are briefly considered prior to deeper evaluation in the next chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
Details of the research and the findings of the research that was undertaken during these round-ups of mute swans and other research conducted by the group were published by the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust, in several publications. See, for example, Bacon (1980), Brown and Brown (2002), Coleman (1979), Coleman and Minton (1979, 1980), Coleman et al. (1991), Delany et al. (1992) and Kirby et al. (1994).
- 2.
It is difficult to establish an exact date for the start of bird ringing (UK) which is called bird banding in the USA. Perhaps the earliest example of bird ringing is by Danish teacher Hans Christian Cornelius Mortensen in the 1890s. He used first zinc and later aluminium rings on starlings (Sturnus vulgaris). Ringing involves attaching small metal or plastic rings to a bird’s leg. The ring is numbered and associated with individual characteristics (measurements) of the bird which is uniquely identified. The measurements include the following: age, gender, feather condition, feather moult and the bird’s fat deposits. By identifying the individual bird subsequent recovery of the bird provides information about many aspects of the bird’s life including its age, migration and many other aspects of its life.
- 3.
The spectrogram is also known as the spectrograph, the spectrometer or the sonogram. Whatever name is used, the spectrogram displays sounds changes over time where amplitude is shown in terms of monochromatic brightness or colour and the frequency of an utterance is shown on the vertical axis against time on the horizontal axis.
- 4.
In a general sense, taxonomy involves classifying and naming living things. An avian taxonomy is a linear, sequenced and systematic list of birds, species ordered according to when the species is believed to have evolved. The oldest species are placed at the start of the list, and taxa that are related to each other are located together in the list. The different taxa (components of a taxonomy) include kingdoms, families, genera, species and subspecies. The relationship between taxa changes as scientific knowledge grows and changes and as new species are discovered. Thus, taxonomies are not fixed and unchangeable and need careful interpretation (BTO 2018).
- 5.
An overview of the many ways in which humans have exploited birds for many centuries is provided by Michael Shrubb (2013). He considers birds, as well as being a source of food, they have been used for their feathers, skins, eggs, as specimens, kept in birds, and used in hunting.
- 6.
- 7.
For an extremely comprehensive textbook on all aspects of avian research design, see Morrison et al. (2008).
- 8.
This is also true in human research.
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Hackett, P.M.W. (2020). Studying Birds. In: The Complexity of Bird Behaviour. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12192-1_1
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