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Part Two of a conversation with Amadeo Rea, taxonomic ornithologist and ethnobiologist who has spent most of his life working with the Piman people of the greater south-western American deserts.

A real highlight for me was catching up with Amadeo Rea, whose magistral book “Wings In The Desert ” on the ethnoornithology of the Northern Piman peoples is one of my all time favourites. I’m looking forward to bringing my interview with him to these pages soon.

One night King Solomon invited all the birds to sing to his noble guests. All came except the hoopoe. Angry, the king ordered a search, and when the hoopoe was found and rebuked, the bird explained that he was not guilty of disrespect. On the contrary, for the last three months he had hardly tasted any food or water, flying all over the world to discover if any place existed which was not yet subject to Solomon. Finally he found the land of Sheba, ruled by a beautiful and wise woman called Queen Balkys, where they have not heard the name of Solomon.

I gave up attending conferences without presenting at them a long time ago and this year I’m giving two presentations tomorrow in a session dedicated to ethnoornithology and titled “Birds in historical, cultural & archaeological context” where we will “examine birds and human culture in a variety of contexts, including birds, humans and fire, birds and archaeology and what happens when birds, birders and sacred and ancient grounds meet.”

In a famous example, Ralph Bulmer explained that the Kalam of the highlands of Papua New Guinea consider the cassowary not as the bird that science classifies it as but as akin to mammals, and not because it possesses peculiar physical features but because it is perceived as an untrusty affine.

Young people, feeling hopeless, began to tell each other to follow their ancestors and kill themselves like Purrukapali. But the real story said something else. The true story was about creation, how our first man died to create the Curlew, from the spirit of our first woman, his wife, and how the moon was created from the spirit of Purrukapali’s treacherous brother. This was the real story. How can we sort it out?” he asks. “How can we change the ending of the story?”

Further to my previous post here on the 33rd Society of Ethnobiology meeting at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, the following week I traveled up to the small resort town of Tofino for the 12th International Congress of Ethnobiology conducted by the International Society of Ethnobiology. There I joined with my colleague from Nature Kenya, Fleur Ng’weno, to co-chair a larger symposium on Ethnoornithology than I had presented the week before in Victoria, BC.

In recent years Ethnoornithology has emerged as a valuable sub-discipline of ethnobiological research, partly for its potential to be able to make a valuable contribution to bird conservation and also as a means of empowering people of all cultures preserve, re-examine and discover the connections between individuals, groups and cultures and the birds that people hunt, venerate and cherish.

While it is easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that thousands of birds are kept in appalling conditions purely for human exploitation, profit and enjoyment, it is important to note that, as with most of the relationships between people and birds, things are a bit more complex than that.