Biography of 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 contemporary 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 birds may have influenced human physical, behavioral, and social evolution and technological development, the more I found and I started working on an outline for a book.

I wanted to test out these ideas with academic audiences, and started with a presentation “In Search of Homo avimimus: Archaeo-ornithological, ethno-ornithological, and historical explorations of how birds made us human” at the Middle Atlantic Division American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Catonsville, Maryland on 15 November 2019.  With the favorable response there, I was set to present “The Rise of Homo avimimus: How Birds Made Us Human” at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, 6-10 April 2020. The abstract was accepted and I was excited to present. Then Covid-19 hit. The conference never happened.

AAG Divisional Conference Presentation 2019

As society began recovering from the pandemic, I started presenting my ideas to public groups and university courses, continually reworking the book outline and adding material. At its maximum it was a five part lecture series presented at for the Osher Lifelong Learning Instutute at Widener University and a 263 slide deck guest lecture at a BYU biology class in 2023 (see one public lecture version here on YouTube).

Public lecture version, similar cover slide, even more info

Then in 2023 I got a job opportunity that led me out of academia. The possibility of a full-fledged book still lingers in the background. But that background is less pressing all the time.

So here we are. This blog will collect my thoughts, ideas, and arguments. Maybe someday it will become something more. But for now, let's just enjoy exploring the possibilities of How Birds Made Us Human!