Bird signs can be important for ecocultural conservation by highlighting key information networks in people–bird communities

Abstract

The ways people think, feel, speak about, and act in and with environments are inextricably intertwined with the well-being of other living things, including birds. We report on the kinds of messages contained in 598 examples of locally-defined signs from 498 bird taxa from 169 sources and 123 ethnolinguistic groups. Using Peirce’s three sign forms: symbolic, iconic, and indexical, we analyze one aspect of human–bird interactions: that of reading bird sign for ecological and social interpretations. Understanding ecological semiotic nuance is important for translating between local, regional, and global science, and for respecting autonomous processes of local people attributing value or lack thereof to birds and their habitats. Over one-third of the signs in our sample (216; 36%) were specifically described as omens of some kind, commonly of death, illness, or something “bad”. Three modes of message delivery account for the majority of the data: predicting (60%), bringing (15%; including news, rain, luck), and indicating (15%; including seasonal change, fruit ripening, animals). Reading birds to predict weather (especially rain) was common, as was listening to and interpreting birds’ alarm calls warning of snakes or predators, and knowing that a certain bird indicates the presence of certain other animals, or of a water source. We collected 51 examples of warblish, the imitation or translation of bird sounds into non-onomatopoeic words. We argue for the amplification of ecocultural conservation (attending to histories of human–nonhuman relationships in place) to channel resources and land control to local and Indigenous managers who are immersed in relevant bird–people information networks. We discuss the importance of (1) reduction of uncertainty in local and hyper-local environments, (2) biocultural provocations in which birds fulfill important roles in human society, and (3) informational connectivity and locally-defined interspecies ethical relationships as key elements for inclusive and effective ecocultural bird conservation.

Resumen

Las formas en que las personas piensan, sienten, hablan y actúan en y con los entornos son inextricablemente entrelazadas con el bienestar de otros seres vivos, incluyendo las aves. Informamos sobre los tipos de mensajes contenidos en 598 ejemplos de signos definidos localmente de 498 taxones de aves de 169 fuentes y 123 grupos etnolingüísticos. Usando las tres formas de signos de Peirce: simbólica, icónica e indexical, analizamos un aspecto de las interacciones entre humanos y aves: la lectura de signos de aves para interpretaciones ecológicas y sociales. Comprender los matices semióticos ecológicos es importante para traducir entre la ciencia local, regional y global, y para respetar los procesos autónomos de las personas locales que atribuyen valor o falta del mismo a las aves y sus hábitats. Más de un tercio de los signos de nuestra muestra (216; 36%) se describieron específicamente como presagios de algún tipo, comúnmente de muerte, enfermedad o algo “malo”. Tres modos de entrega de los mensajes representan la mayoría de los datos: predecir (60%), traer (15%; incluye noticias, lluvia, suerte) e indicar (15%; incluye cambio estacional, maduración de frutas, animales). Leer las aves para predecir el clima (especialmente la lluvia) fue común, al igual que escuchar e interpretar los llamados de alarma de las aves advirtiendo sobre serpientes o depredadores, y saber que cierta ave indica la presencia de ciertos otros animales o de una fuente de agua. Recolectamos 51 ejemplos de “warblish”, la imitación o traducción de sonidos de aves en palabras no onomatopéyicas. Abogamos por la amplificación de la conservación ecocultural (atendiendo a las historias de las relaciones entre humanos y no humanos en el lugar) para canalizar los recursos y el control de la tierra hacia los administradores locales e indígenas que están inmersos en las redes de información relevantes entre personas y aves. Discutimos la importancia de (1) la reducción de la incertidumbre en los ambientes locales e hiper-locales, (2) las provocaciones bioculturales en las que las aves cumplen funciones importantes en la sociedad humana, y (3) la conectividad informativa y las relaciones éticas entre especies definidas localmente como elementos clave para la conservación ecocultural inclusiva y efectiva.

INTRODUCTION

The ways people think, feel, speak about, and act in and with their environments are inextricably intertwined with the well-being of other living things, including birds. As global conservation bodies increasingly recognize the importance of local and Indigenous leadership and control over traditional territories for biodiversity conservation, it is helpful to initiate cross-disciplinary and inter-science dialogue about the complex information interactions involved in local environmental expertise. These include local traditional and innovative knowledge of, among other things, history, politics, environmental change, mythological and spiritual relationships, ontology, and the nature of and responsibilities to life, death, and time. Here we highlight the role of one thread among these thought lineages, which is knowledge about how bird sign can be read and interpreted. Having found that it is exceedingly common for local language communities to have an established repertoire for interpreting bird signs for both ecological (material world) and socio-spiritual (supernatural world) predictions of the near future, we consider the importance of these for what we call ecocultural conservation. We use the term “ecocultural conservation” to describe an interconnected perspective that foregrounds local information interactions and amplifies local practices, ethics, and institutions in meaningful ways. This term builds on the longstanding notion of biocultural diversity and its conservation, which emerged from the collective recognition that biodiversity and cultural diversity are inextricably linked, as stated in the Declaration of Belém during the first International Society of Ethnobiology Congress (ISE 1988). We follow Franco’s suggestion (2022:6) that an expansion of the term to “ecocultural” conservation could usefully distinguish this work from the pre-existing biophysical anthropologists’ use of the term biocultural and also recognize the importance of non-living things such as water, air, and soil in the “reciprocal and inseparable link[s] between ecology and culture”.

Local communities, national planners, and international conservation policy makers all strive to reduce uncertainty in our environments and establish ways of anticipating the imminent future so as to better plan for or mitigate extraordinary change. Here we explore how these ecological skills and processes of linguistic and sociocultural interpretation link people and birds in ways that nurture the environmental connections and responsiveness that are key to local conservation processes and crucial for outsider conservationists to recognize and engage respectfully.

In many local and Indigenous communities, particular ways of knowing have informed practices that have sustained and nurtured healthy ecosystems for millennia (Armstrong et al. 2021; IPBES 2019, Schuster et al. 2019). A great deal of mainstream ecological knowledge has its roots in traditional local innovation, including any number of domesticated foods, medicines, and material goods used by people around the world today. However, translating meaning or forms of knowing between local, regional, and international contexts can be complicated and often involves violent colonial histories and power imbalances. Local views and beliefs have often been disregarded as unscientific or irrelevant (Delgado and Silvestre 2021:20) and land dispossessions have disrupted myriad local ecological practices over past centuries. A central challenge for professional conservationists working in a western scientific tradition (referred to in this article simply as conservationists) is to become more responsive to local peoples’ needs and priorities so that effective systems of local stewardship already in place may be upheld and amplified through increased autochthony over territories. Though many have called for this shift as an imperative (IPBES 2019; Beltrán 2000), the specific details of how to integrate local meaning within global conservation awareness, priorities, and exchanges are harder to manifest. How can local (shareable) cultural values, meaning, and significance be articulated with regional and global policy and action processes in ways that are accessible to people from diverse training lineages, yet respect the informational and cultural protocols of the communities of knowledge origin?

While ethno-ornithology as a field explores a multiplicity of ways that people draw meaning from interactions with birds, here we examine one facet of meaningful local ecological dialogue that in the first author’s ethnographic experience is often considered knowledge that can, at least superficially, be shared with outsiders. We identified patterns in the ways people “read” bird behavior and vocalizations as one example of human–bird connection that illustrates how informationally and ecologically interconnected we are, and how much perceived human communication with birds matters. For example, if conservation projects in a particular region became more informed about local knowledge of arrival times of migrating birds that signal seasonal shifts, these patterns could be integrated into monitoring schedules, potentially adding new dimensions to tracking and analysis of change, as long as local communities felt their concerns and priorities are also addressed. Equally, conservationists hold a lot of data that can be of use and interest to local experts in their own work. Engaging in wider inter-science dialogue with local people who feel that they, their land rights and responsibilities, and their expertise are recognized can inject vitality at the local, regional, and perhaps even global level (Delgado Burgoa and Silvestre Rojas 2021).

In this analysis of birds as signifiers, we report on the kinds of messages conveyed in 598 examples of culturally or locally-defined signs from 498 bird taxa across 123 ethnolinguistic groups and 56 countries (Figure 1). Our data were drawn from a literature review of 169 sources spanning ~150 years from 1864 to 2015. This dataset was previously analyzed from the perspective of which birds figure as important sign-bearers, published in the Journal of Ethnobiology (Wyndham and Park 2018). Here we focus on the content and messages in bird sign communications.

We used Peirce’s notion of the three overlapping modes or sign forms in play: (1) symbolic, (2) iconic, and (3) indexical (1955:104). For example, in the southern U.S., seeing a Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) can be interpreted as a sign of a visit from a spirit of a deceased relative (F. Wyndham personal observation). This is symbolic because it is arbitrary and learned. Tukano people in northern Amazonia consider the call of the large nightjar tu’ío (Caprimulgidae) to presage death, an iconic (and ideophonic) sign, as it “make[s] a noise like that of a coffin being tied” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971:213). When people in Australia know that the rock figs are ripe by the activity of Western Bowerbirds (Chlamydera guttata), the sign is indexical in that there is a “dynamical connection” (Peirce 1955:114) or non-arbitrary link between the two entities—the birds are there to feast on figs. Dewey (1933) framed the relation between the world and our minds as based in and reflecting on signification. Signifiers, which include symbolic, iconic, and indexical signs, are the “ground of belief” (1933:11)—the basic elements with which people can think in the sense of considering the extent to which one thing can be regarded as warranting belief in another. In this frame, indexical signs are epistemically the most straightforward, while symbolic signs rely more on learned interpretations and encultured worldviews and become more contested in environments of multi-cultural contact. Thus, outsiders to a language community tend to engage most readily with indexical signs as a potential lingua franca for ecological knowledge as they often draw on similar principles of observation, testing, hypothesis building, and ecological interpretation outsiders are familiar with. Symbolic and iconic signs are frequently stereotyped or misinterpreted by outsiders, which can harm local education systems and seed mistrust. For example, due to their own biases, some Christian missionaries in Indigenous Ayoreo territories of Paraguay in the 20th century misinterpreted the complex local mytho-ecological relationship with asonjá, the Little Nightjar (Setopagis parvula) as a supplicant-deity relation like that of their own religious practice and violently condemned and forbade traditional annual rituals between people and nightjar as being analogous to devil- or idol-worship. These ritual practices, however, were not only about people’s relation to the bird and her cultural history as a powerful, formerly human sorceress (e.g., the ritual lifted taboos protecting her nesting and fledging period), but also triggered important social calendrics including seasonal changes from itinerant trekking to more settled agricultural planting and concomitant shifts in political organization within communities (Fischermann 2005). A more nuanced understanding of the role of symbolic and iconic thinking in biology, including in western training lineages, could help all of us grasp the multiple dimensions of cultural interaction with other living things.

Most western scientists, conservationists, and epistemic pragmatists consider birds to be discrete, non-person beings wherein meaningful communication between “us” and “them” is specialized or indirect, such as that of domesticated birds, putative mutualisms as with Greater Honeyguides (Indicator indicator; Spottiswoode et al. 2016) that lead people to bees’ nests, or predator alarm calls. The notion of birds as interlocutors with a spirit world has often been unacknowledged or rejected by scientists as superstition (e.g., the ornithologist Wilson’s derision of Native American avian lore [1808–1814, quoted in Krech 2009:25]). If conservationists become more aware of the interplay of local thought and local biota, and integrate this awareness into their priorities and practice, then they will also need a basic understanding of the complexity involved in the ways people make meaning. Bird signs are rarely placed into clearly separated natural/supernatural categories in local common parlance though these categories are used here for purposes of analysis. Rather, local descriptions often reflect multiplicity, intertwining, and layering of world realities and epistemic forms between which people can move easily without much cognitive dissonance. This is especially so in the domain of omens, which, while significative, often lack clear agency, instead tapping the human faculty Beerden (2013:23) calls omen-mindedness. Omen-mindedness refers to the human propensity for seeking and finding guidance in the world around us. The selection of which things are signs has been called “the economy of signification” (Smith 1982:56 cf. p.127). We analyzed this informational economy of bird signs in terms of which signs are reported with which birds. We asked: which topics, domains, and forms are most commonly found in the signs themselves? Why might patterns emerge as they do?

Along an epistemic spectrum—from “messenger” birds thought to be sent by a supernatural being as interlocutors between worlds, through the less agent-driven perception of signs in a generally communicative universe, to naturalist observations or indicators—the task of the human reader is to evoke or just notice, then interpret the sign. Interpretation of bird sign is common—perhaps ubiquitous—among world societies. Here we describe patterns found in bird signage in a comparative sample, and discuss the implications for human cognition, ecocultural conservation, and for understanding human environments as information interactions more generally.

METHODS

Our purposive sample of published data was compiled by starting with several literature searches on “ethno-ornithology” or “ethnoornithology” using the Web of Science database, then reviewing and selecting all those that contained specific reference to birds as signifiers, which we defined as including birds perceived as harbingers, omens, teachers, indicators, or purveyors of messages. After initial analysis (Wyndham et al. 2015) we decided to increase our sample size by adding examples from the electronic Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF) World Cultures database (https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/). The eHRAF is a searchable database of ethnographic works from around the world whose mission is to promote understanding of cultural diversity and commonality in the past and present (https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/). We searched eHRAF using the terms “all cultures”; “ethnozoology”; and “bird” and extracted all texts that specifically identified birds as signs. In total we reviewed 169 sources and compiled details about 598 culturally-defined signs across 498 different taxa of birds from 123 ethnolinguistic groups (a list of groups and countries represented may be found in Table 1 in Wyndham and Park (2018 and Online Supplementary Materials; note that much of the descriptive text on our methods is reproduced from that publication, pp. 536–540). While most of the data are from ethnographic research, a few instances were reports of signs extracted from literary texts. In terms of modes of production as categorized by the eHRAF, our sample of ethnolinguistic groups was roughly equally representative of hunter-gatherers/primarily hunter-gatherers (36%); horticulturalists/other subsistence combinations (33%); and intensive agriculturalists/agro-pastoralists/ pastoralists (31%). The publication year for materials in our sample ranges from 1864 to 2015; note that publication dates are often much later than fieldwork dates. Our full dataset and source references are available at Wyndham and Park (2018)Online Supplementary Material (including links through to the full original literature sources from eHRAF).

Our sample was not representative in that we did not randomly select from all literature available to us or use HRAF’s Probability Sample Files (Ember and Ember 2016), but searched the entire eHRAF World Cultures database, supplemented with additional focused literature. Given the specialized and relatively rare nature of our subject matter, and the varied thoroughness, foci, and idiosyncrasies of diverse researchers, we wanted a purposive rather than random sample. It is by no means comprehensive of the entire corpus of published material on this topic, however. Due to the breadth of our comparative study, we were not able to provide as much ethnographic or linguistic context as we would normally require to understand particular local significances of bird communications. For example, prospective signs in any language tradition will vary in perceived reliability and seriousness but this diversity is not teased out here. The brief excerpts of defined bird signs in our sample should be understood as concise teachings that were shared with, translated, and written down by ethnographers or other interested parties but represent only a simplified glimpse of a complex and changing knowledge lineage in each language group. Each original publication may be consulted for more about the people with whom work was done, their sociohistorical contexts, and particular methods used by the knowledge recorder. Because the material we compare—bird signs—are relatively discrete cultural facts that are likely to have been faithfully recorded by ethnographers of the last 150 years, and because our sample size is large, we feel that a comparative approach is methodologically robust.

We extracted and transcribed each description of perceived bird signage into a spreadsheet for comparative analysis, leaving out unclear or uncertain data. For cases of the same bird sign found in different publications about the same culture group, we counted a single instance. The first criterion for inclusion was that signs needed to be generalized rather than one-off accounts; though there were many myths and stories that included a case of a bird talking to a person, it was included only if it represented a more general and ongoing sign relationship. We did not include avian cultural symbolism, totems, power or dream-animals, or descriptions of how people use bird calls to communicate with other people, as noted in many accounts of hunting and warfare. These are important ethnoecologically: myths, stories, sayings, and songs often encode significant ecological information about a bird’s life history, appearance, behavior, or relationships (Ibarra et al. 2013; Garteizgogeascoa et al. 2020) but are beyond the scope of the present study. Nevertheless, we recognize that cultural context is important in making particular birds more conspicuous and significant to people (Agnihotri and Si 2012:209) and there are likely to be entangled relations between broader cultural contexts and the sign aspects of birds.

When comparing sociolinguistic traditions, taxonomic identifications are often not one-to-one (e.g., a local name for a bird may correspond to several Linnaean species or vice versa), which in itself is an important framework for conservationists to learn and accommodate in database design and in the way they work with bird names and knowledge in different languages. Taxonomies that differ from Linnaean systems are not deficient or less developed. Rather, they are valuable in themselves and can be windows to understand local priorities or varying ways of interacting with environments. For many signs in our sample, the bird associated with it was undifferentiated below order or genus (e.g., “owl” instead of “Saw-whet Owl,” or “hawks” rather than “Red-tailed Hawks”). When possible, we identified each bird mentioned to its closest identifiable Linnaean taxon. We followed authors’ identifications but where possible, updated the scientific names as well as IUCN conservation status first following the BirdLife Checklist (2015; some figures may reflect this taxonomy) and subsequently HBW and BirdLife International’s Checklist (2022). In some cases, a sign was attributed to any bird whatsoever (class Aves). English common name bird groups, such as “jay” or “egret”, which are usually below the family taxonomic level but do not always map directly onto bird subfamilies, genera, or species, were particularly useful for comparing birds as this was a common level of vernacular identification. When using bird group names, results emerged at a useful level of granularity that is easily grasped in a single table or word cloud, convenient for distinguishing broad patterns and communicating results to the general public (see Table 1 for a detailed breakdown of how English Common Name bird groups arising in our analysis correspond to recognized scientific categories). We made two taxonomically awkward decisions about representing our results. Though bird groups emerged as the taxonomic clusters most congruent with vernacular uses, in the case of owls, a majority of the ethnographic reports (67%) did not differentiate which of the two owl families (typical owls or barn owls) the bird in question belonged to, much less subfamily or genus. Conversely, most of the reported signs from the bird group pheasants concerned chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus), so we identified them as such.

We coded all data as to its core sign or communication, the means of delivery (voice, behavior, physical presence, or extispicy), and whether we thought, judging from the context of the recorded meaning, the communication was emically “supernatural”, defined as explicitly stated agency from “other worlds” or supernatural beings, “ecological” (decipherable, non-arbitrary, ecosystemic knowledge such as meteorology, biogeography, ethology), both, or “other/ don’t know.” We analyzed these data in terms of kinds of birds (see Wyndham and Park 2018) and kinds of messages. Here we share the results of our analysis of the latter, on the range of topics communicated in messages recognized by local people about the birds in their environments, and more generally, the emergent themes and patterns in the cultural expressions of birds as signs.

RESULTS

Kinds of Birds

The copious results of our overall study were divided into two sections for ease of publication. The first part, a full analysis of which birds were seen as sign-bearers is available in Wyndham and Park (2018). Figure 2 provides a brief visual summary of the key results of that publication, so as to contextualize the results of the present study.

We found that overall the most reported sign-bearers were owls, crows, cuckoos, woodpeckers, herons, eagles, nightjars, and chickens (see Table 1 for scientific categories corresponding to these bird groups). 92% of the 247 birds identified to species level were reported as Least Concern by the IUCN with respect to conservation priority (Wyndham and Park 2018:542).

Kinds of Signs

The ways researchers wrote about the cultures of bird communication in English tended to a predictable range of descriptors including birds as omens, harbingers, forecasters, signs, mediumistic messengers, teachers, and bringers of things (such as rain). Almost all of our sources were written by outsider researchers in the communities studied who described signs and their meanings in English and thus in culturally altered terms. Because of this we often missed the nuance and conceptual diversity attending these descriptors that we would otherwise have from deep- or auto-ethnographies using original languages.

Worldwide, omens are reported as the most common category of sign people perceive in birds. Of 598 sign descriptions we collected, over a third (216; 36%) were specifically described as omens of some kind, most commonly of death, illness, or just something “bad” (Figure 3).

In our analysis we identified and named 3 main groupings for modes of signification that account for the majority of the data: predicting (60%), bringing (15%), and indicating (15%). Many instances do not fall neatly into these categories but we tried to follow the context and vocabulary of the original source so as to tease out the nuance in how people think about the future with bird sign. Other less common modes (10% combined) include birds communicating with other animals, guiding people in the landscape (commonly to find honey), functioning as a medium for supernatural entities, teaching, inspiring, chattering, mocking, and protecting (Figure 3). “Predicting” (any prospection about the near or far future, both evoked and received) was by far the most common and includes all anticipation through omens, luck signs, weather prognostications, warnings, and augury/divination. “Bringing” includes birds carrying information about something that has already occurred elsewhere in space, mainly news (news of visitors on their way, bad news, news of a death, other) and bringing or causing events such as rain, sickness, or death. This latter sense of “bringing” overlaps with “predicting” but differs subtly in that the bird is almost always identified as having agency, rather than merely being an object co-incidentally linked to the predicted event. “Indicating” is used here as pointing out something that is already present or is currently happening, such as seasonal change, the presence of other animals, water, sorcerers/ghosts/evil beings, time of day, and food-related information (e.g., when certain foods are ready to eat). It is the simplest indexical sign, and the one that most closely maps onto western ecological understandings. All these birds’ messages are primarily related to the immediate or near future (i.e. most of the prognostications should come to pass within a few days or weeks).

Content of messages.

The most common type of content in bird messages was “something bad”, followed by social information and the weather (Figure 4A).

In analyzing these data, we categorized the attributed origins or agents of signs as “supernatural” (21%; Table 2), “ecological” (27%; Table 3), or, in the absence of explicit attribution, as “other” (53%) (Figure 4B). A little under half (46%) of all the bird signs had a “bad” or “warning” message for the recipient; 23% brought an explicitly good auspice, and 35% were not specified or of neutral valence (Figure 4C). Vocalization (Figure 4D) was the most common sign vehicle, followed by bird behavior, and bodily presence. Finding a nest as a sign was a minority report (1%), as was divining with bird innards (extispicy) or eggs (ooscopy) (2% combined).

Supernaturals (Table 2) include named deities, demiurges, or spirits sending messages via birds, as well as any explicit reference to extra-phenomenal agency, such as Congolese Spotted Eagle-owls (Bubo africanus) serving Tembo sorcerers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a form of telephone with which to communicate with each other over long distances (Kizungu et al. 1998:113). Because we excluded many forms of spiritual or non-ecological person–bird relationships that were not strictly sign-related, our supernatural category under-represents the numerous reports of people’s communications with birds in spirit worlds, dreams, healing, and sorcery. It is a conservative estimate of bird-sign with explicitly supernatural agency.

Ecological signs or indicators include the description of interactions between birds and other animals, plants, seasons, and other environmental knowledge (Table 3). They often point to subtle or indirect ecological relationships (Wyndham 2009). This kind of sophisticated knowledge comes from sustained empirical observation (often hypothesizing and testing, Liebenberg 1990:29), phenomenological connectedness and openness, and local institutions of trans-generational education in which young people are encouraged to cultivate honed awareness in their environments (Wyndham 2010).

An example of the level of detailed understanding that underlies many ecological indicators can be found in the Muyuw language of Papua New Guinea, for whom the Rainbow Bee-eater’s (Merops ornatus) onomatopoeic local name, kelkil, and call, kilkilkil, indicate the approaching harvest season. The bird’s call approximates the Muyuw word -kil which can be both a verb meaning “to dig up yams” and a noun “the stick used to dig up yams”. Reduplicated as it is in the bird’s call, it implies the continuous action of digging up yams, which is done within a month of first hearing the bird’s song (Damon 1990:1). This attention to detailed ethology and environmental patterns is characteristic of the kind of ecological readings of birds’ behavior and vocalization recorded in our study. Reading birds to predict the weather was common in our sample; other subject matter included listening to and interpreting birds’ alarm calls warning of the presence of snakes or predators; knowing that seeing or hearing a certain bird indicates the presence of certain other animals, or of a water source. We note that though we distinguished agency (i.e. where the information is originating, for example from a deity or the bird itself) many if not most cultural descriptions do not separate supernatural from natural—these categories are somewhat artificial in many cases. For example, a person might be instructed in a dream to look for certain ecological details. The third, largest origin/ agency of signs category consists of those that are neither explicitly natural nor supernatural. Over half of all sign instances, these were composed mainly of the omen- and luck-signs.

While compiling our database we encountered 51 examples of warblish, defined by Sarvasy (2016:766) as the “vocal imitation of avian vocalizations by humans, using existing non-onomatopoeic word(s).” Because our search prioritized instances in which the bird was clearly thought to be a sign, this 8% of all bird messages we transcribed is a low estimate of how common warblish may be in societies worldwide. Note that this percentage is based on a larger dataset of 616 instances of bird “messaging”, which includes all the warblish excerpts we encountered. As not all warblish was considered a “sign” as we defined it, all but 18 were culled from our final “bird sign” dataset. Table 4 provides several representative examples of warblish, and Figure 5 shows which bird groups showed up as sources of warblish.

As most warblish comes from interactions with bird vocalizations rather than other sounds birds make, we hypothesized that a majority would be sourced from passerines. However, we found that only (37%) of our transcribed instances of warblish were linked to passerines and 63% to non- and near-passerines (Figure 5; see Table 1 for a list of scientific categories corresponding to these bird groups).

DISCUSSION

We found that in the recent past bird sign interpretation was a widely distributed practice by which people gained information about and interpreted their personal and family prospects in local environments. Within a broad range of kinds of messages and signs, surprisingly clear patterns emerged across ethno-linguistic traditions and through time. Overarchingly, it was most common for people to look to birds for signs of something bad about to occur, particularly notices of death in one’s close network or one’s own impending demise. Reading birds’ signs for cues about one’s good or bad luck were also common, leading us to speculate about a human propensity for checking in with one’s environment for psychological and ecological reassurance. Another major category of birds as indicators involves reading bird activity and vocalizations to know more about weather systems, season changes, food availability, and the location of potentially dangerous animals, prey, and the presence of ghosts and sorcerers in one’s ambit.

Though in this article we differentiated between supernatural and ecological indicators or messages, in their cultural instantiations bird signs are rarely placed into such clearly separate categories. Rather, we can imagine a continuum along which we arrange the diverse recorded explanations, from cues clearly marked as worldly knowledge of ecological relationships, through messages that are conveyed by natural means but ultimately originate from supernatural beings, to birds-as-people/deities/supernaturals directly communicating with people, and combinations of these in different ways (Table 5). There are also many signs that are neither explicitly ecological nor supernatural communiqués. These middle-ground signs are reported as helping guide people, reducing feelings of uncertainty, and channeling intuitive knowing (Struck 2014). They are the majority of the bird signs in our sample—the omens and the luck signs that allow for possibility and lend texture to fate—things are not predestined in this zone, only loosely conditioned. Though the majority of the signs we recorded were “omens” we note that the prevalence of calling them that in the literature is likely in part due to researchers glossing culture-specific terms into English, in which the concept of omen is historically strong.

How People Relate to Birds Matters

Worldwide, landscapes managed by Indigenous peoples account for 80% of biodiversity (Sobrevila 2008; Toledo 2013; Ogar et al. 2020). The ways people notice, interpret and think with birds in their environments have a material effect in terms of how many birds survive and whether or not they find habitats within which to flourish (Wilder et al. 2016). An ecocultural conservation approach prioritizes whole ecosystems that include people, birds, and other living and non-living things, and recognizes the histories of local knowledge systems, including scientific, symbolic, and diverse other ways of relating to other life forms. Local people-bird information networks about the weather, seasonal change, social, or personal forecasting represent healthy inter-species communication webs, which is good for both the birds and the people in a place because it creates the conditions for sophisticated local understanding and action.

Because the material in our sample is in published literature, we did not have a process for contacting and consulting with more than a hundred relevant contemporary communities about reprinting their bird knowledge, including quoting knowledge holders directly. However, there are digital sovereignty initiatives underway that would facilitate this kind of engagement, such that members of a knowledge community could add labels to published material to mark it as, for example, belonging to a secret society and requesting a curtailing of re-publication. In other cases, more details could be added via this labeling and notice system for fuller context, such as for stories that should only be told in certain seasons or other cultural protocols that can help protect members of the group of knowledge origin. These innovations, such as those by LocalContexts.org, aim to engage “locally based decision-making and Indigenous governance frameworks for determining ownership, access, and culturally appropriate conditions for sharing historical, contemporary and future collections of cultural heritage and Indigenous data” (LocalContexts 2022). We hope to engage these developments and support transparent and interactive ethno-ornithological records controlled by communities of knowledge-origin via the Ethno-ornithology World Atlas (EWAtlas.net), which both authors have designed and developed with colleagues at the University of Oxford and BirdLife International. EWA is a site for communities around the world to record their bird knowledge, access already-published material about their knowledge, and create dialogue between outsider researchers and local experts to amplify Indigenous and local science and diverse ways of knowing nature (Wyndham et al. 2016). We advocate for increased recognition of citizen science and the importance of widely shared natural history knowledge learned from a young age. We recognize that Indigenous science has been foundational to a majority of the world’s food, health, and ecosystem management systems and advocate for conservation initiatives to politically engage with and support local and Indigenous access to and ownership of land and resources.

The Importance of Folk Taxonomies

The ways people perceive and talk about birds varies in regular ways across languages. In analyzing our sample, most reports of bird sign were made below the taxonomic level of family, identifying them at bird group, genus, or species/ subspecies levels. We had to group owls at the order level, however, because this is how most of the ethnographic material recorded owl signs. This overemphasizes the already significant role that owls play in human societies around the world (Benavides and Ibarra 2021). It also may point to the fact that, being so significant and relatively similar-looking and nocturnal, people group them together not only in nomenclature but also in significance. In contrast, when chickens were involved, usually in divination practices, the records operate at a species-varietal taxonomic level. Though inconvenient to our comparative analysis, this phenomenon is in itself a window into how certain birds, by evolutionary or cultural history, take up proportionately large spaces in the human repertoire, and the ways this can be reflected in local languages and classifications. It is an example of how a closely interactive historical relationship with a bird, such as that between people and chickens, often develops into specialized symbolism. In the case of chickens, their closeness to the domestic sphere and ready availability makes them widely useful reading their behavior and/or innards as a way to reduce environmental or social uncertainty. Unfortunately, the way the identifications of the taxonomic levels of birds show up in most lay descriptions or ethnographic literature is not a reliable guide to how local people classified birds. Unless written by ethno-ornithologists who understood ethnotaxonomic methods, the person recording information was often limited in their own bird knowledge, had difficulty finding physical or voice specimens to confirm identifications, or had other translation problems between spoken languages as well as the many languages of science. Collaborative, inter-science dialogue between ethnnoecologists, local experts, and outsider ornithologists can produce robust and useful areas of crossover understanding about sociolinguistic diversity in bird taxonomies, that is, how birds are named, grouped, and understood in relation to other living kinds.

Warblish

Warblish is a good example of how human language and bird vocalization can, at the interface between the two, become thoroughly entangled—each with its particular characteristics, but with blurring of the lines of what is exclusively bird and what is human. Each language encounters bird vocalizations slightly differently, adapting what they hear within their own language rules and parameters (Kurashkina 2012; Moreno Cabrera 2016). Warblish seems at first to be a trivial phenomenon, a clownish verbal play between children or whimsical adults calling out cheeeeeseburger or whip poor will to the birds. Beyond its role as a mnemonic to help people recognize birds by their calls, it is a meaningful biocultural sensory practice that helps train people to listen carefully, make the world “one’s own” and pay careful attention to the ecologies of the other-than-human life around them. Interpretations of warblish can vary between individuals of a language group, and even across an individual’s life, providing a mutable, creative interspecies interplay.

Multi-sensory Affect, Ideophones, and Sympathetic Communication

Though audible signs made up half of our sample, multiple senses emerge in the descriptions of why and how bird sign is interpreted—in particular, ideophones that point to other bodily sensations and proprioception such as being sick, tying rope, and cutting cloth. When the nightjar puhuy (Caprimulgidae) “cries, ‘making the sound of vomiting’ [it] is an evil omen” for the Chan Kom Maya of Yucatán (Redfield and Villa Rojas 1962:210). Similarly, when Zapotec people in Mexico heard the call of the Barn Owl (Tyto alba, also a bird of death)—tsica, tsica, tsica, tsica!—they said it was “cutting out somebody’s shroud” (Parsons 1970:316). The Eastern Toraja of Indonesia report that the mandopo bird (unidentified) makes its wings creak, “reminiscent of the creaking of a stretcher and therefore foretells that there will be a sick person or a dead one” (Adriani and Krujit 1950:442). In the realm of sight and movement through space, they also say that “if an eagle (kongka [Accipitridae]), comes from the east, describes circles above our heads, then we will live a long time. This is called ojoe ntinoewoe mainti, ‘a life knot that is firm’” (Adriani and Krujit 1950:27). All these are examples of what Frazer called sympathetic magic (in the homeopathic subcategory, 1922). Though not always strictly a sign or direct messaging, sympathetic magic can be thought of as action at a distance or analogic influence/ doctrine of signatures, or, in contemporary terms, perhaps even neural mirroring (Ferrari and Rizzolatti 2015). In the 1800s, Gila River Maricopa (U.S. Southwest) interviewees told Spier (1933:156) that those wishing to be orators would dream the Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos). This recognition of the garrulousness and mimicry of particular birds is also seen among the early 1900s Seminole: boys in Florida, USA, wishing to train as doctors would “knock down a mockingbird without killing it, then remove its heart and eat it raw […as an aid…] in learning and remembering songs (since the bird learns the songs of other birds)” (Sturtevant 1989:94). For Hopi people in the U.S. Southwest interviewed by Beaglehole and Beaglehole (1935:41–42) in the 1930s, one can help a child talk if you catch “the ⁱauʹXBa bird (unidentified, perhaps a kind of corvid), which talks a lot, remove the bird’s tongue and feed this to the child.” A final example is given by Waugh (1916:133) who cites Seneca (Iroquois) Chief John Gibson of the U.S. Northeast mentioning that “the flesh of the chickadee (Poecile atracapillus), an extremely small bird, is popularly said^.to make any one eating it a liar.”

Among our sample, we also found descriptions that support the tenet that for any local pattern, there will be exceptions and diverse interpretations. Several ethnographers recorded a lack of omen-birds as well as the opinions of skeptics, pragmatic realists, or individuals willing to express minority interpretations about bird signs. Gifford (1965:88) writes that for the California Coast Yuki of the late 1800s to early 1900s, he was told there were no bird omens; that “a bird entering a house was meaningless.” Sanapia, a Comanche thinker and eagle doctor from what is now Oklahoma, USA, commented on her Diné Apache neighbors’ beliefs, “They get scared of them owls…they might hear them holler or something. It ain’t nothing but a funny bird. A bird can’t hurt nobody and they think it’s a ghost” (quoted in Jones 1972:49). These practices are also reported in a range of tone from serious to light-hearted; even laughable. Cicero was a bird-diviner, a priest in the Roman college of augury and he seems to also have been a skeptic and self-satirizing about divination, particularly that of the haruspex (professional entrail diviners). In his letters he cited Cato as wondering, “How is it that when one augur meets another, they don’t burst into laughter?” (Tucker 1976:172).

Ecocultural conservation works principally by protecting, amplifying, and supporting local sui generis modes of relating to nature. Action items by outsider individuals or groups should follow local and Indigenous leadership and may take the form of land and waterways restitutions, inter-science dialogue and sharing of regional or global datasets, and other modes to amplify local management capacity. To conclude, we give more detail for three applications of bird signs that specifically bolster ecocultural conservation: (1) reduction of uncertainty in local and regional systems; (2) birds as biocultural provocations in an ecosystem services framework; and (3) prioritizing connectivity and amplifying historical relationships between people and birds.

Reduction of uncertainty.

This survey has shown that many, if not all societies have made extensive use of bird sign to gain ecosystem and other forms of knowledge. Indexical signs in particular help people in food and water procurement, predator avoidance, and weather and season prediction. They point to subtle or indirect causalities in environments (Turpin et al. 2013; Wyndham 2009) that may otherwise be hard to detect. Human attunement to environmental indicators is key to individual and group development of institutions for environmental relations and local ethics systems. Within local networks of knowledge, or information interactions, signs extend one’s scope of reference. Just as language allows for communication about things that are not present in time or space, bird signs extend one’s awareness of what may be going on beyond one’s immediate sphere (Wyndham 2020) and are, perhaps, a core informational aspect of human development and evolution. Symbolic and iconic bird signs, while less “translatable” to outsider or global conservation schemes, are also important to the constitution of personal and group psychological well-being via the reduction of uncertainty in everyday life. By supporting local expertise and traditional forms of education about the complex informational relations between birds, other species, and time, an ecocultural approach can amplify existing or help restore healthy human-bird ecosystems. In many cases, this support would simply be a removal of adverse pressure on these knowledge systems, their local languages, and access to and control over landscapes. In other cases, it would be active political and financial support towards, for example, land and resource restitutions and reparations.

Though these inter-species systems of communication and ecological perception were generally more common in the past and among societies in which people spend more time out of doors, they persist today but are rarely integrated into assessments of local environmental change and adaptation (though see the LICCI project, which is a network of researchers, practitioners, and the general public who are recording details of Indigenous and local phenological knowledge and climate change [www.licci.eu]). Local patterns of changing bird sign, as noted by experts immersed in local eco-information networks, have the potential to mitigate uncertainty on a coarser scale, for example, for extreme weather events or shifting migration flyways. In other cases, such as the historical mapping of bird names and knowledge on EWAtlas.net, local communities may find ways to trace past relationships with birds that no longer occur in the region.

Biocultural provocations.

Benavides and Ibarra (2021) describe the importance of cultural stimulation as a key service that owls provide to human communities, which is to provoke various kinds of unsettling imaginative and metaphorical thinking and social cohesion through shared narratives, in addition to biological services such as rodent control. This broad conceptualization of the kinds of services birds provides, which we modify slightly as “biocultural provocations”, is one that, as the authors suggest, could be integrated into (biocultural) ecosystem services calculations in global/regional policy discussions (for more on avian cultural services, see Echeverri et al. 2021). Feld (2012:131) illustrates how, in contrast to “hard words” in the Kaluli language of Papua New Guinea, “ ‘bird sound words’ are reflective and sentimental, ideally causing a listener to empathize with a speaker’s message without responding to it verbally,” thus provoking particular emotive sociality important in Kaluli daily life that depends on growing up hearing doves in the forest. In the transactional logic of ecosystem services, one could argue that in this case, doves provide important sociolinguistic provocations in Kaluli. It would be an exceptionally crude translation from local meaning to regional/global signification yet it is critical that the things that are important to local people, including language and meaning-making, be included in some fashion in policy-making circles. Space does not permit us to expand here on the multitudinous ways that birds inspire feeling, poetic imagination, symbolic and metaphoric understanding, yet this is a productive aspect of human–bird relationship that deserves to be more thoroughly linked with conservation practices (Clarke 2016; Velásquez Runk 2017; Peña et al. 2021). In an ecocultural conservation frame, these sociocultural forms of meaning are important motivators in local conservation and management, and are valued and defined internally. As Benevides and Ibarra (2021) suggest, by formally recognizing the role of birds as biocultural provocateurs in international schema for ecosystem services accounting, outsiders will have a frame for understanding and respecting diverse local manifestations of their relationships with birds.

Connectivity and relationship.

People with economies and social lives that are intrinsically tied to natural rhythms and wild organisms often relate to birds more as subjects, in relational ontologies that include the common identification of birds (and other animals and plants) as having personhood, or as formerly human but now seen in their bird incarnations. By prioritizing local information-ecosystems and in situ ecocultural systems for land and waterscape management, the well-being of both birds and people can be enhanced. Luck et al. (2011) and Cox et al. (2017) have found that people living in regions with high bird abundance and species richness reported better “mental health, personal and neighbourhood well-being as well as connection to nature” (cited in Methorst et al. 2020). Local priorities for ecocultural conservation may not align exactly with outsider priorities. Outsider conservationists may not understand all the dimensions of bird–people relationships involved, and different regions can vary significantly. However, avian conservation practices that intersect with human cognition, language, imagination, and ontological diversity, as described here in our analysis of bird sign, might more effectively articulate local community perspectives with regional and global conservation aims.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the Ethno-ornithology World Atlas laboratory group at the University of Oxford, Andrew Gosler; John Fanshawe; José Tomás Ibarra and the Center for Indigenous and Intercultural Research of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Villarica; Cristóbal Pizarro; Alberto Yanosky and their networks for rich conversations about the links between language, place, and birdlife. We are grateful to Catherine Lindell and two reviewers for their insightful comments to improve this article and to Nicole Sault for organizing the 2015 conference session that inspired this work. Opinions expressed belong to the authors rather than any organizations we are affiliated with. Special thanks for permission to re-use the phrase “Birds that tell people things,” a research frame developed by Myfany Turpin, Veronica Dobson, M. K. Turner, and Alison Ross, in collaboration with linguists and Arandic language speakers for the Cultural Signs Project, Charles Darwin University, Australia (Thompson et al. 2008).

Funding statement: Support for F.S.W. was provided by a grant from the Fulbright US Scholar program and the Center for Indigenous and Intercultural Research of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Villarica campus), Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico Chile (FONDECYT Chile).

Ethics statement: No birds were handled or observed as part of this research, nor was there any interviews with people or communities. This research analyzed published literature and did not use interviews or other methods that would require human subjects or ethics review.

Author contributions: FSW and KEP conceived the idea for the comparative analysis, gathered, analyzed the literature. FSW wrote the manuscript and KEP edited it; both created figures and tables.

Data availability: Full data sources list and dataset are hosted at the Ethno-ornithology World Atlas website (https://ewatlas.net/digital-heritage/listen-birds-supplemental-materials-full-data-sources-list-dataset).

LITERATURE CITED