Human uses of birds

Human uses of birds have, for thousands of years, included both economic uses such as food, and symbolic uses such as art, music, and religion. In terms of economic uses, birds have been hunted for food since Palaeolithic times. They have been captured and bred as poultry to provide meat and eggs since at least the time of ancient Egypt. Some species have been used, too, to help locate or to catch food, as with cormorant fishing and the use of honeyguides. Feathers have long been used for bedding, as well as for quill pens and for fletching arrows. Today, many species face habitat loss and other threats caused by humans; bird conservation groups work to protect birds and to influence governments to do so. Birds have appeared in the mythologies and religions of many cultures since ancient Sumer. For example, the dove was the symbol of the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Inanna, the Canaanite mother goddess Asherah, and the Greek goddess Aphrodite. Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, had a little owl as her symbol, and, in ancient India, the peacock represented Mother Earth. Birds have often been seen as symbols, whether bringing bad luck and death, being sacred, or being used in heraldry. In terms of entertainment, raptors have been used in falconry, while cagebirds have been kept for their song. Other birds have been raised for the traditional sports of cockfighting and pigeon racing. Birdwatching, too, has grown to become a major leisure activity. Birds feature in a wide variety of art forms, including in painting, sculpture, poetry and prose, film and fashion. Birds also appear in music as well as traditional dance and ballet. In certain cases, such as the bird-and-flower painting of China, birds are central to an artistic genre.

Context Culture consists of the social behaviour and norms found in human societies and transmitted through social learning. Cultural universals in all human societies include expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing. The concept of material culture covers physical expressions such as technology, architecture and art, whereas immaterial culture includes principles of social organization, mythology, philosophy, literature, and science. This article describes the roles played by birds in human culture, so defined.

Economic uses Birds are important economically, providing substantial amounts of food, especially protein, largely but not exclusively from the domestic chicken; feathers and down are used for bedding, insulation, and other purposes.

As food

Birds were among the wild animals hunted for food before the Neolithic Revolution and the development of agriculture. For example, in the Epipaleolithic of the Levant, between c. 14,500 and 11,500 BP, both waterfowl and migratory birds were eaten. Archaeologists have studied the return in terms of energy from captured food compared to the energy expended to capture it; birds provide a smaller return than larger game such as deer, but better than many plant materials. For example, waterfowl captured in a drive can yield a return of around 2,000 kcal/hour, whereas an antelope can yield as much as 31,000 kcal/hour, and wild rye around 1,000 kcal/hour.

Birds have been domesticated and bred as poultry for use as food for at least four thousand years. The most important species is the chicken. It appears to have been domesticated by 5000 BC in northeastern China, likely for cockfighting, and only later used for food. In ancient Egypt, poultry including ducks, geese, and pigeons were captured in nets and then bred in captivity. Chicken now provides some 20% of the animal protein eaten by the world's human population in the form of meat and eggs. Chickens are often raised intensively in battery farms; this facilitates production but has been criticised on animal welfare grounds. Other species including ducks, geese, pheasants, guineafowl and turkeys are significant economically around the world. Less commonly raised species such as the Common ostrich are starting to be farmed for their meat, which is low in cholesterol; they have also been kept for their feathers, and for leather from their skin. Birds are hunted in many countries around the world. In the developed world, ducks such as mallard, wigeon, shoveler and teal have for centuries been captured by wildfowlers, while pheasants, partridges, grouse, and snipe are among the terrestrial birds that are hunted for sport, generally with guns. In other parts of the world, traditional subsistence hunting still continues, as in rural Northern Papua, where cassowaries, crowned pigeons, hornbills and megapodes are captured for food. Seabirds such as muttonbirds, penguins and auks have been hunted for food, formerly with sufficient intensity to threaten many populations and to make some, such as the great auk, extinct. Seabird hunting continues at more moderate levels today, for instance with the traditional Māori harvest of sooty shearwater chicks.

Assisting hunters and gatherers

The archaeological and historical records suggest interdependence between humans and vultures for millions of years. Like other animal species, early hominins probably used these birds as beacons signalling the location of meat, in the form of carcasses, in the landscape. Cormorant fishing is a traditional fishing method in which trained cormorants are used to catch fish in rivers. Historically, cormorant fishing has taken place in Japan and China since about 960 AD. The greater honeyguide guides people in some parts of Africa to the nests of wild bees. A guiding bird attracts a person's attention with a chattering call, and flies in short bounds towards a bees' nest. When the human honey-hunter has taken their honey, the honeyguide eats what is left. The Boran people of East Africa use a specific whistle, which doubles the encounter rate with honeyguides; they find that using a honeyguide reduces the time to find honey by two-thirds. The Bushmen of the Kalahari thank the honeyguide with a gift of honey.

Materials

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