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After a few years of working on the Urban Bird Project, it still amazes me the diversity and relevance of the phrase “culturally significant birds.” One of the best sources that we have found (thanks to Dr. King-Kostelac) for understanding cultural significance is the research led by Graciela Alcántara-Salinas, Eugene S. Hunn, and others, especially in their recently published “Bird conservation status and cultural values in Indigenous Mexican communities: towards a bioculturally informed conservation policy” in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine (2022). Theses scholars have synthesized decades of ethnographic research with Indigenous communities to demonstrate the close parallel among linguistic diversity and biodiversity across the U.S. Southwest and Greater México. For them, birds can be culturally significant through name recognition, material uses (food, medicine, ornaments, rituals), symbolic uses (omens, oral storytelling, narrative, poetry), and local ecological value (habitat indicators, endemics, etc.). We’ve found this way of approaching significance to be useful even if it’s not complete. For example, some birds are also technologically significant—that is they have inspired the design of technology. Aircraft engineers have taken inspiration from Peregrine Falcons’ (and other falcons) tubercle, which is a unique structure in their nostrils that functions as a baffle—a structure that curves incoming air in a spiral manner to prevent excessive air pressure from entering the nostrils directly. This function is important for flying in high speed, and many planes now have similar features.
The significance of naming is hard to overstate. In our various interactions with borderlands birdpeople, we’ve been inspired by local knowledge holders who often know multiple names of any single “species” of bird. Naming is important because names hold collective histories, understandings, and relationalities. For example, here is our Veracruzano friend, Ornithologist Ernesto Ruelas Inzunza, speaking about the names of birds, all the names he knows for the Great-Tailed Grackle, and his friend Pedro Mota:
When you look at the etymology of names, these collective histories, understandings, and relationalities are made apparent: Grackle comes from the Latin gracule meaning jackdaw or European Crow. So, this is how Europeans first understood the Grackle—as a kind of crow (however inaccurate we now understand that name to be). In México, the Náhuatl name for the Great-Tailed Grackle is teotzanatl or sacred black bird with a curved bill. The Florentine Codex provides an account of the bird’s introduction from the Veracruz coast under the protection by Emperor Ahuitzotl. So, for the Mexica/Aztecs, the bird was sacred; for Europeans, the bird was like a jackdaw or crow. These names carry histories, understandings, and relationalities that carry forward to this day where Grackles are still commonly understood as a nuisance bird by folks in the U.S., while they are still revered in México and across the U.S. Southwest. Names matter. They define our relationships to birds.
For Alcántara-Salinas et. al., some bird names have descriptive force—that is, some names are associated with a special symbolic value. For example, in many tribal cultures the eagle, el aguila, is associated with a ritual of prayer since the aguila (eagle) flies the highest and is able to carry your prayers to the creator. The eagle as a prayer carrier is also a good example of the second method of cultural significance—material significance such as in food, medicine, ornaments, and rituals. This category of significance is vast and it can be fairly obvious or opaque—eating turkey for Thanksgiving; consuming bird medicines like Vulture soup; ornaments like Cardinals/Red Birds in Christmas tree decorations; and rituals like feather ceremonies or the release of caged white doves. One of our favorite examples of material significance is feather workers, and especially the work of our Fall 2024 guests, Rubén Flores and Gaston Aguilar de Arte Plumario Kozamalotl.
Material significance can overlap with the third method of cultural significance, symbolic uses (omens, oral storytelling, narrative, poetry), which is also a vast resource of birdpeople relationality. As one of our collaborators, Dr. Christy Hyman, recently mentioned to us, in many stories of grief a bird appears. Mixed-blood literary scholar, Thomas Gannon, spent his career studying the symbolic use birds in European Romantic Literature and Native American Literature (see his resource list here). His non-fiction memoir Birding While Indian is a wonderful example of how birds take on various symbolic and material values. Of course, birds are a wellspring of inspiration for poets. For example, UBP’s Carolina Hinojosa has written a chap book of poetry titled Becoming Coztōtōtl. Oral storytelling is filled with birds, especially in good or bad omens (la lechuza, canary in a coal mine, the raven, etc.). These symbolic uses have a long history. Ornithomanteia, or the practice of taking directions, counsels, omens, and divination from birds, is one of the oldest scientific practices in the world, which makes sense given that many bird species and humans co-evolved and share a long and interwoven biocultural history. The symbolic uses of birds are vast and infinite, they can be deeply personal or collective, and perhaps best of all, they are readily available to create new stories based on the real experiences of trauma and healing through birding. Hence, the importance of #slowbirding and #mindfulbirding
In their work, Dr. Alcántara-Salinas and her colleagues importantly show how cultural values and strongly correlated with the knowledge of professional biologists regarding avian threats. In promoting biocultural conservation, they offer the concept of “Bioculturally Prominent Bird Species.” They argue that this concept can help México and other nations develop conservation policy tools that start with local places and people. At a time when linguistic diversity, avian diversity, and traditional ecological knowledges are under threat, doubling down on efforts for biocultural conservation can help us understand how biological loss also threatens traditional knowledge, and cultural diversity. The importance of this work is that it offers a new way to do conservation through the mixing of biological and cultural significance. While the identification of biological taxa and global definitions of “objective (scientific) criteria” are assumed to be valid cross-culturally and cross-nationally, these methods largely ignore, suppress, or take for granted local cultural knowledge. Dr. Alcántara-Salinas and her colleagues show how there is great value in working in the opposite direction: “…conservation needs to adopt a biocultural approach that takes into account not only international scientific agendas, but also the values and priorities of local people, to move from “top-down” to “bottom-up” initiatives, that recognize the role of ‘local’ and ‘regional’ experiences that include use, management, and worldview to build biocultural strategies for more effective conservation” (p.14).
During this moment of damaged international relations, UBP’s avian restor(y)ation digital repository is one local/regional attempt to build an archive and community field guide to uplift the cultural significance of U.S./Mexico borderlands birds. Such projects remind us just how connected we are across national boundaries and that sustaining biocultural diversity relies on all of us to create welcoming and diverse spaces in our homes, and habitats, with humans and nonhumans together.
References
Ruelas Inzunza, Ernesto. Plática with Ernesto Ruelas Inzunza on the naming of birds and his friend Pedro Mota. 10 November 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4xnA9_68no
Graciela Alcántara‑Salinas, Eugene S. Hunn, María Elena Ibáñez‑Bravo, Elda Miriam Aldasoro‑Maya, Noé Flores‑Hernández, Juan Antonio Pérez‑Sato, Natalia Real‑Luna, Rafael Arturo Muñoz‑Márquez Trujillo, Diana Lope‑Alzina and Jaime Ernesto Rivera‑Hernández. “Bird conservation status and cultural values in Indigenous Mexican communities: Towards a bioculturally informed conservation policy.” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine (2022) 18:69. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13002-022-00567-z