Birds, Natural History of

Introduction

Two traits of birds mark them out as exceptional among animals: flight and song. The latter trait seems, especially in its language-like complexity, to place birds close to human beings, perhaps even to give them a share of something like reason. The former trait, from antiquity to the early modern period, set them sharply apart from human beings, yet at the same time made them the focus of human aspiration and the model of what human beings might someday achieve through artificial means. The fact that birds were bipedal, at least when they were not flying, sometimes placed them closer to human beings than to the “quadrupeds” in the order of nature – the human being was since antiquity defined, only semi-facetiously, as “a two-legg’d animal without feathers” (Willughby 1678, 2) and was frequently combined with their capacity for vocalization as a further reason to conceive them both as exceptional in the order of nature and as a sort of counterpart or mirror of the human...