In all cultures, birds occupy a prominent place in art, iconography, folklore, religion, and ritual. In the cultures of Western Europe, for example, there is the Roman eagle, Mother Goose, Big Bird, and the stork that brings babies. Yet the symbolic centrality of birds has not translated into commensurate attention by scholars. We at the Sally Glean Center are working to change this by focusing on the role of birds in the indigenous cultures of the Western Hemisphere.  

Sally Glean
              Center for the Avian Arts



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Ethno-ornithology is the process of understanding what birds mean to human beings—by attending to how people talk about birds, represent them in their art, use them in ritual, and interact with them in everyday life.


Ethno-ornithology has developed out of ethnobiology, which is the study of how human cultures conceptualize plants and animals. This is an interdisciplinary conjunction of paths, drawing upon linguistics, anthropology, and ecology, as well as biology and other academic fields, while recognizing the centrality of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of the people themselves. Although ethnobiology has long emphasized ethnobotany (how people conceptualize and relate to plants), the field of ethno-ornithology is growing in importance, as people from various disciplines and holders of traditional knowledge come together to share, learn, and develop ways of addressing the problems that birds and people face when their habitats and homelands are threatened by destruction.


Our research has focused on the indigenous cultures of Latin America: how people in these societies understand birds in a multiplicity of ways—as game to be hunted, as pets to be nurtured, as sources of medicine, as vehicles of the gods, and as bothersome or even dangerous creatures.

When local people tell us that birds can teach us, they are not speaking figuratively. Just as  fishermen attend to the movements of sea birds for clues about the location of fish, so people on mountains and in forests attend to birds for information about food sources, changes in the weather, and so on. They say birds can teach us not only about the presence of plants and animals but the whole network of living beings in which human society is embedded.

Traditional knowledge of birds can also help deal with issues of bird ecology and conservation. For example, our work on the symbolic role of condors in traditional cultures provides another dimension for understanding how to better protect these species in both South and North America.

By learning how the cultures of Latin America relate to birds, we can better understand the role of birds in human thought in general as well as develop a more nuanced understanding of these fascinating and remarkable creatures.