Avian Illuminations: A Cultural History of Birds

by Boria Sax

An exquisitely illustrated journey through the complex and crucial relationship between humans and birds.
 
Avian Illuminations examines the many roles birds have played in human society, from food, messengers, deities, and pets, to omens, muses, timekeepers, custodians, hunting companions, decorative motifs, and, most importantly, embodiments of our aspirations. Boria Sax narrates the history of our relationships with a host of bird species, including crows, owls, parrots, falcons, eagles, nightingales, hummingbirds, and many more. Along the way, Sax describes how birds’ nesting has symbolized human romance, how their flight has inspired inventors throughout history, and he concludes by showing that the interconnections between birds and humans are so manifold that a world without birds would effectively mean an end to human culture itself. Beautifully illustrated, Avian Illuminations is a superb overview of humanity’s long and rich association with our avian companions.

Genres: Nonfiction, Birds, History, Animals

456 pages, Hardcover

Published December 21, 2021

About the author

A person is not a list of accomplishments, and so I prefer not to introduce myself in that way. It is more accurate to say each of us is a collection of stories. Like others, I have more stories than I could ever tell or even know. I have been, among other things, a human rights activist, an impoverished poet, a manual worker, an expert on online education, and a pioneer in Animal Studies.

I was raised on Communism, the grandest of grand narratives. it sought to explain everything but didn’t explain anything very well. I have always missed its dramatic sweep. I wanted big answers for the big questions. I wouldn’t accept the little ones and kept getting in trouble with my teachers.

My father had been a Soviet spy, passing atomic secrets, and the initial years of my life were spent with my nearly destitute family trying to shake the FBI by moving many times a year. My father, a Russian Jew, was impulsive, brilliant, loving, abusive, and seriously mentally ill. My mother, coming from a rather puritanical British background, saw him as a romantic rebel. She was drawn to the Civil Rights movement and was a co-founder of CORE (the Congress on Racial Equality), but the difficulties of survival overwhelmed her idealism. She held our family together with a sort of everyday heroism, and my parents divorced after 18 tempestuous years.

Rather than focusing exclusively on any specialty, I like to draw analogies between domains that appear very far apart. In the 1980s, when I began to write about literature, I was disappointed to discover that I had to spend far more time sorting through commentaries than with poems and stories. The topic of animals in literature and folklore was, however, relatively new. Browsing in used bookshops, I came across eighteenth and nineteenth century encyclopedias of animals, which were an uncharted world of comedy and romance, filled with turkeys that speak Arabic, beavers that build like architects, and dogs that solve murders. They revealed every bit as much about human society as about birds and beasts.

I started writing mostly about human-animal relations and never stopped. Indulging my fondness for paradoxes, I addressed subjects like Nazi animal protection, the modernity of the ravens in the Tower of London, and the Thanksgiving turkey as a sacrificial offering. As for trees, I think of them as just a kind of animal. By now, I have published roughly twenty books, which have been translated into many languages. I often violate academic protocols, not only by addressing broad themes but also by inserting humor and lyricism into my texts. I teach in the college program of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility and the graduate literature program of Mercy University.

There have been two constants in my somewhat untidy life. One is the support of my wife Linda, who has been with me over half a century and whom I cannot thank enough. The other is my writing, which I have worked on continually but am unable to judge. Thanks, reader, for reading this, and I hope you are inspired to read more.

Reviews

[Shyamal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent overview of birds in human culture. The chapters are Birds in Philosophy and Religion, Birds in History, Birds in Art and Birds and the Future. I went mainly for the birds in art section, but the coverage of the relations between humans and birds is far broader. There are however naturally numerous possible areas that are not covered, particularly outside anglophone geography. I also found that there was more visual material (a choice of truly beatiful artworks) and only a bit on the audible and its cultural impact. I was hoping to find something about human cultures and the whistled imitations of bird song (I have written on this here). I also saw some unfortunate wording that seems to reflect a failure of communication perhaps between the humanities and science faculties. For instance the speculation on the pose of a tree sparrow in the art of Huang Quan is readily dispensable if one asked around. The bird is clearly a young one, the fleshy gape of the bill clearly illustrated and shown in a typical food begging posture.

I certainly think this is a work that all ornithologists should take a look at and probably contribute to by way of commentary and review.

[Megan S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picture the most engaging textbook about the relationship between birds and humans throughout art, culture and history; make it accessible to an everyday reader yet still academic in its scope and tone, and you have this book. Now maybe that isn't a winsome tagline for you, and I would have agreed a few years ago.
Before I moved to New Zealand, birds were uninteresting to me. I loved wildlife, but the focus of my delight was on mammals in all their endearing fluffy cuddliness and relatibility. Reptiles were hidden and slow, fish were only seen on a plate or dead in the supermarket, and birds were background. Seagulls and bald eagles, there they were, but hardly anything to delight my imagination. Or if birds did wander to the foreground, they were boisterous and irritating crows, barging into human spaces uninvited with their noisy caws and intimidating stares. I simply never considered birds as a topic of passionate interest.
Then, as I said, I moved to Zealandia, the continent of the birds. Humans of course being very recent arrivals (700 years before the present), birds had been centre stage here for millennia. Mammals played no significant role here besides a few species of bat, so birds had taken over all the evolutionary niches on offer. Moa took the spot of bison, Haast eagle were lions, kiwi were hedgehogs, and kea the apes. It was a fascinating cast of characters - unfortunately most were extinct or near extinct. But despite this sad history, Kiwis (the people) delighted in the remaining bird species and birdwatching is a national pastime. So as my years here went by, I, too became sucked into the intriguing world of the birds.
All that personal history to say - birds are amazing. They are the descendants of planet-conquering dinosaurs and have a vastly different evolutionary history than us, yet they live alongside us every day and, in the case of many species, thrive with us. Our language is flush with bird figures-of-speech, and our works of art and religious imagery are filled with winged creatures. How did their constant presence impact human culture and history - and how did we impact their evolution and extinction? Those are the questions this book seeks to answer, and I was spellbound to the last page.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review title: Birdsmith

Birdsmith is my play on the word "Wordsmith" which is a smartphone app for a scrabble-derived word game that I play daily, and my honest mistake for the name of the board game "Wingspan" that I love playing with my grown children when we are together. As soon as I saw this title and the beautiful cover and production of quality graphics on high quality paper on the new-book shelf of my local public library, I knew I had to read it to supplement both of those personal interests.

Avian Illuminations reminds me of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization which I read earlier this year, as it too looks at the way humans have lived with, romanticized, loved, feared, and at times destroyed a vital part of the natural world around us. These multi-disciplinary studies bridge art, literature, science, and history to help us understand how we humans as a species shape and are shaped by the creation we share. Of all animals, writes Sax, birds represent "esoteric wisdom" (p. 51), the unattainable (the recent technology of powered flight so unlike the freedom and movement of birds), and even the divine; the Holy Spirit in scripture sometimes is identified as a dove, in both the New Testament at Jesus's baptism and the Old Testament at the creation ("as soon as the heavens and the earth had been created, 'God's spirit hovered upon the water' (Genesis 1:2, Jerusalem translation)" (p. 66). Birds have been "omens, food, bearers of messages, disposers of waste, deities, environmental indicators, pets, and models for decorative motifs." (p. 9).

Sax, with beautiful and abundant illustrations, includes sections on birds in philosophy and religion, history, and art. The final section is "Birds and the Future", considering the way humans have been both the cause of the extinction of many species and have begun to attempt to protect and revive species with a new appreciation of the importance of birds in their symbiotic relationship with us. The eradication of huge flocks of passenger pigeons in 19th century US and sparrows in 20th century China because of the prevailing desire to protect crops from the birds resulted in massive swarms of locusts (previously eaten by the now extinct birds) causing exponentially greater damage to crops (p. 351-353). The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson's seminal environmentalist study echoed with the silenced sounds of bird song.

Bird song, when we can hear it, is one of the unique Illuminations that birds provide. Birds can "distinguish many variations of sound that human perception runs together. . . . What sounds like 'tweet' to us can be a succession of ten tonal variations, which is roughly the equivalent of a substantial sentence. " (p. 103) Is birdsong art (p. 311)? Nightingale songs are on fact "largely learned, constantly altered and very individual." (p. 316) Google "nightingale song recording" to hear many examples.

In the field of art, birds have appeared in prehistoric cave art, extensively in classical Egyptian art, delicately drawn in Chinese painting, and perhaps most famously in Audubon's detailed bird books. However, Sax notes that such illustrations intended to define and illustrate species' characteristics "made the subjects seem diminished . . . . By eliminating story, the authors also largely did away with motion, and the birds in their illustrations were placed in stiff symmetrical poses." (p. 263). Indeed, Audubon's drawings were all done from dead birds he had killed. Another aspect of such scientific illustration was to" disregard anomalies such as birds with unusual plumage or behavior for their species. The whole concept of zoological, or ornithological, illustration is based on an Implicit theory of ideal forms." (p. 240); appropriately Sax includes a chapter on how birds relate to Plato's philosophy of ideal forms. And while scientific artists would ignore the anomalous, in the mid 19th century there was a brief craze for collecting unique breeds of hens (p. 221), similar to the earlier Dutch tulip fad.

Avian Illuminations is a reminder that the book form is not dead and that publishing is still an art. Sax's writing is scholarly, with footnotes and an annotated bibliography, yet accessible. There are separate indexes for bird species and a general index. One minor quibble is that some of the illustrations are specifically described in the text but page numbers aren't referenced, forcing the user to flip back and forth to find the illustration. Small quibble for an illuminating Illumination.

[Annie Yotova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boria Sax defines the scope of his book on the first page of his introduction: "This is what I call 'avian illumination' - an intense identification of a person, or group of persons, with counterparts among birds". While this is what his intention may be and technically can be used to describe the book, the subtitle actually may be a better explanation what the book is all about - it is all about the connection between humans and birds - from the early days of myths and early representation of birds on cave walls to the movies and conservation efforts of the 21st century and beyond.

The book contains 207 illustrations (129 of them in color), most of them at least half-page (with a lot of them being full page ones). None of them is specifically created for the book - they are reproductions of paintings and statues, photos and drawings from old books. The author tries to separate the book into 3 parts (Birds in Philosophy and Religion, Birds in History and Bird in Art) but they blend into each other and some references show up in multiple parts - sometimes because the work itself belongs to both (where do you draw the line between early myths and history or early art and religion) and sometimes because the work in question may be art (or tied to religion) but it is important in history.

Sax admits early in the book that he cannot cover the whole world - birds had been important for humanity pretty much at any time of its development as humans and each culture on Earth, regardless if it is still existing, seems to have at least a few myths about birds. But he does not let that stop him from bringing examples from everywhere - both from the past and from the present. While it does not make the books exhaustive, it does make it somewhat global and allows the reader to see some connections which are rarely seen - birds, as different as they are across the world, play a similar role for humans by just being there, in the air.

The book weaves a mix of mythology, art history (as it relates to birds), exploration of literature (both fiction and non-fiction) and social history to explore all kinds of relationships between humans and birds - here are the chicken and turkeys (and all other birds we eat), the falcons, eagles, vultures and the parrots, the captive birds and the migratory birds, the dodo and the wren. It starts in the caves of France and moves through the world, stopping by in Mesopotamia and the Far East, Africa and the Americas, Australia and New Zealand (not entirely chronologically in the early stages). It is the later historical times where the books gets more West-centric and explores the relationship between humans and birds mainly from the Western perspective - but then this is to be expected to some extent and it does touch on some other cultures occasionally.

The publisher (Reaktion Books) decided to use the heavy paper stock used usually for coffee table books and images inserts in non-fiction for the complete book which allowed the pictures to be printed where they belonged and to have them interspersed with the text. There are rarely 3 pages in a row without at least one image (the book has 374 pages of text outside of the notes (all of them about sources of specific information), the two indexes (general and index of birds) and the further reading recommendations) and each image has a caption (a few of them slightly incorrect even if the text above them cited it correctly - the editor probably should have taken another pass through the book). Just reading through the captions and looking at the images may be enough to appreciate what the book is about and its scope.

While the book could get repetitive in places (and Sax tried to get the book back to his definition of illumination in a somewhat clunky way occasionally), it is pretty informative and readable. I may have wished more details in some places (and less in others) but the scope of the book is enormous and choices always need to be made.

If one wants to explore further any of the covered topics, the further reading section has not only a pretty good list of books but also an explanation on why that book is there - something I wish more people producing recommendations will adopt as a practice - and is followed by a list of useful sites (with enough details to find them if the site moves one day).

Overall an interesting book if you are looking for the history of the connection between humans and birds - although we don't always end up looking like the more intelligent side of that pair. But then that's not unexpected.

[Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.5

[Verónica Juárez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Qué libro tan más maravilloso e iluminador. Seguir la historia humana a través de la relación con las aves en el arte, la religión, la filosofía ha sido un gran recorrido.