Human uses of birds
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
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
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.File:Battery hens -Bastos, Sao Paulo, Brazil-31March2007.jpg|thumb|upright|Battery hens: poultry is a major source of food, the chicken alone providing 20% of the world's animal protein.
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
Feathers are used to make warm and soft bedding, including eiderdowns from the belly down of the eider duck, and winter clothing as they have high "loft", trapping a large amount of air for their weight.Feathers were used also for quill pens, for fletching arrows, and to decorate fishing lures.
Bird bones were used by Stone Age peoples to make awls and other tools.
Guano, the droppings of seabirds, rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, was once important as an agricultural fertiliser and is still used in organic farming. The War of the Pacific in 1865 was in part about which country had control of the territory containing valuable guano sources.
Today, birds such as the chicken and the Japanese quail are used as model organisms in ornithological and more generally in biological research, for instance in toxicology.
Clothing and fashion
Feathers have been important and colourful items of clothing and fashion from before the birth of civilisation. Elaborate, brightly coloured headdresses containing feathers are worn by indigenous peoples of the Americas such as the Bororo of the Mato Grosso. In Polynesia, sega ula lory bird feathers were major trade items, used to decorate high quality mats in Samoa and Tonga. The use of bird skins for Inuit clothing has been documented across all Inuit groups, although it was most common in the eastern and western Arctic, where larger animals like caribou were less available.In Western culture, feathers are used in boas and decorating elaborate hats and other items of ladies' clothing. Feathers in fashion were a status symbol well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Belle Epoque draped its clothing in feathers as ornaments. The Hudson's Bay Company of Canada traded in swans and sometimes geese, for their skins and quills in the 18th and 19th centuries; the skins were then sent to Europe. Ostrich plumes were a luxury commodity in Europe for centuries, leading to serious harm to wild ostrich populations, and subsequent establishment of ostrich farms. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Plume hunting for feathers used in hats decimated bird populations, especially in the American South where egrets and spoonbills were common targets. Efforts to stop the decline in bird populations caused by these practices by early conservation groups led to the creation of the first National Wildlife Refuge, Pelican Island. Classical 1930s Hollywood films used feathers in abundance, arguably as a metaphor for female sexuality. For example, in the 1935 musical Top Hat, Ginger Rogers danced "Cheek to Cheek" covered in white plumes that emphasised her movements. Late twentieth century designers such as Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen used feathers to make fashion statements.
Sports and hobbies
from eagles to small falcons have for centuries been used in falconry, often to catch other birds, whether for pleasure or for food.Cockfighting is an ancient spectator sport. It formed part of the culture of the ancient Indians, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans. It continues to be practised in South America and across South and Southeast Asia, often combined with betting on the result. It is practised in religious ceremonies in Hindu temples in Bali, but is now banned in many countries on grounds of cruelty.
Pigeon racing involves releasing specially trained racing pigeons to return to their homes over a measured distance of between. The sport was popularised in Belgium in the 19th century, and is now competitive worldwide. Also in Belgium and Flanders is vinkensport, in which participants have male chaffinches compete to make the most bird calls in an hour.
Birdwatching has since the nineteenth century become a major leisure activity. Millions of people around the world, amounting to nearly half of all households in some developed countries, put out birdfeeders to attract birds to their gardens or windowsills, at a cost of billions of dollars each year.