How Birds Made Us Human

I've been kicking around many of the initial ideas here since at least 2005 when I was working on my urban bird conservation PhD dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin and working at Audubon. Starting in 2006 while conducting Mayan ethnornithology fieldwork in Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico with Kerry Hull, the role of birds in contem porary and ancient traditional cultures became my primary research interest.  Rob Fergus (front) and Kerry Hull with Lacandon Maya guide in Chiapas, Mexico The more I saw how birds fit into ancient and traditional human societies, the more I came to hypothesize that many of the technologies and behaviors that we consider to be uniquely human actually derived from an ancient pattern of copying bird behavior. I first presented this idea as a slide in “The Future of Urban Bird Conservation” presentation at the International Conference on Metropolitan  Planning and Ecology at Almere, Netherlands on 23 March 2017. The more I looked at how bi...