“Listen Carefully to the Voices of the Birds”: A Comparative Review of Birds as Signs

1. What they did

People all over the world notice birds and read them as signs: of weather, food, danger, visitors, luck or death. The authors set out to find which birds most often “tell people things”, how those signs reach people, and why some birds matter more than others.

They searched the published literature in English and Spanish. A Web of Science search for “ethno-ornithology” gave 166 books and articles, of which 20 focused on birds as signs. They then searched the electronic Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF) World Cultures database, a large indexed collection of ethnographies, for passages on birds. In total they analysed 598 culturally defined bird signs, involving 498 kinds of birds, from 169 publications and 123 ethnolinguistic groups on every inhabited continent.

They counted only signs that were conventional and ongoing, not one-off stories, and left out bird symbolism, totems and bird calls people use to signal each other. They identified each bird as far as the source allowed (often only to subfamily, such as “crows” or “jays”), recorded how the sign was delivered (voice, behaviour, physical presence, or reading the bird’s innards), and compared the birds with world bird species totals and conservation status.

2. What they found

How common bird signs are

• 113 of the 307 groups searched in eHRAF (37%) mentioned birds as signs at least once.
• Local explanations often pointed to birds’ vision: they see far across the land, rise high for a “bird’s-eye view”, and, for night birds, see in the dark. Crow consultants in the early 1900s said owls signify because they “can see in the dark and into the future”.
• Birds that looked or behaved strangely were often read as signs, even common birds. An Ojibwe woman took a hawk caught in a rabbit snare as a sign, because such birds are almost never snared.

Which birds

• Of the 498 birds, 100 could not be identified below “bird”. The rest fell into 23 orders, 77 families, 98 subfamilies and 247 species.
• The most reported were owls (57 reports), crows (23), cuckoos (19), woodpeckers (17), herons (15), and chickens, eagles and nightjars (13 each).
• Passerines (songbirds and perching birds) made up 23% of all the birds in the sample, although they are 58% of the world’s bird species. Near-passerines (34% versus 25% worldwide) and non-passerines (23% versus 18%) were over-represented.
• Most reports named birds at the subfamily level, which the authors see as a common worldwide way of grouping birds.

How the signs reach people

• Voice 50%, behaviour 24%, physical presence 10%, finding a nest 1%, and reading innards or eggs 2%. 13% did not say.
• Most voice signs were calls, not songs: the top birds (owls, crows, cuckoos, woodpeckers, herons, eagles) are “callers” rather than “singers”.

Conservation status

• Of the 247 identified species, 92% were of Least Concern, compared with 77% of birds worldwide. Near Threatened (4% versus 10%), Vulnerable (2% versus 7%) and Endangered or Critically Endangered (2% versus 6%) birds were under-represented.

3. What they concluded

• In any part of the world, certain birds, if present, are more likely to be read as signs than others.
• Owls are perhaps the prototypical sign bird: a striking voice, a human-like face, a swivelling neck, night habits and senses beyond ours. The authors suggest that breaking categories helps make a bird an effective sign. Many top sign birds (owls, crows, raptors) are also linked with death as meat or carrion eaters, and night birds with danger.
• Signs come most from common-enough, but not too common, birds with distinctive life histories and seasonal behaviour. Very rare birds, very common birds and birds closely tied to people (such as pets) work poorly as signs.
• Naming birds at subfamily level reflects flexibility, not a failure to tell birds apart: widely shared meanings last better at broader levels (“jay” rather than a particular jay).
• Predictive signs help people remember past experience and anticipate the future. Paying attention to birds builds ecological awareness that reaches beyond what people can see: by listening to birds, people can know what is happening up to a kilometre away, and by watching them, sometimes when a big storm is coming. The authors speculate that people’s habit of looking ahead may have grown from reading their surroundings through careful observation and tracking, then spread to ideas of luck, fate and spirits.
• “Start by keeping the birds happy, and the rest will follow.”

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• The electronic Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF) World Cultures database, with subject-indexed paragraphs for cross-cultural comparison.
• The full data set is public through the Ethno-ornithology World Atlas, with links to the original sources.
• The authors discuss the ethics of reusing older ethnographies, some of which use offensive terms or published knowledge communities considered secret, and the need to return control of such material to the communities it came from.

7. Implications for conservation (from the paper)

• Collections like this one also record negative views of birds that are feared, hated and killed, most notably owls, which in many places are linked with sorcery and death despite their role in rodent control.
• Sign birds are mostly common birds that tolerate some human disturbance, so they are less directly relevant to programmes for endangered species. Even so, people’s everyday relationships with common birds shape attitudes to all birds, animals, plants and landscapes, as in BirdLife International’s “Keeping Common Birds Common” initiative.
• Healthy traditional relationships often include killing birds for food or medicine. Western conservation can learn most from the holistic, subtle awareness of how species’ wellbeing is connected; lively, vocal birds suggest that plants, water and other animals are also doing well, and birds can be important indicators of ecosystem health.