Born a Bird

Note: This is an excerpt from my recently published book, Birding for Life,

which is available for purchase on Amazon.

We are always in relationship to something. It is in discovering a wise and compassionate relationship to all things that we find a capacity to honor them all.

 – Jack Kornfield

Every human is born with Multispecies Intelligence, just as we are with Social Intelligence that speaks to human interactions. We innately focus on others, be they humans or other species, as our young brains discover who we are by being in relationships. Who we think of as the self is actually a bunch of neural wirings created by relationships. Infants have been studied thoroughly in this regard, and their emotional and mental development depends on who they relate to in their environment, usually quite strongly with parents but also with animals and trees. Their sense of self, called the ecological self, depends on who is in their environment, interactions, and relationships. The self is the brain weaving itself into a web of relationships. This worked on a meta level as human species’ physiology evolved around the environment, exerting selection pressure on our genes. This means that we are hard-wired, as well as culturally and developmentally prone, to be part of both the human group and the wider ecological community.  

A small boy following a flying seagull

Antone Martinho-Truswell, a behavioral ecologist and author of the book The Parrot in the Mirror: How Evolving to Be Like Parrots Makes Us Human, theorizes that the challenges of life on Earth — indeed, the ache of physical suffering and death — caused birds, especially parrots, and humans to develop similar traits in a process called “convergent evolution.” We both are social and smart, live long lives, move around mostly in the day, and raise our young more like birds than many other mammals. 

Wild yellow-naped parrot sitting on an egg in tree nest cavity in Nicaragua

 In Avian Illuminations, author Boria Sax similarly addresses how humans are like birds, but his conclusions are rooted in nonbiological causes. His theory is that humans’ close relationships to birds shaped our culture and human identity. With one example after another, he shows how intimately our bonds with birds are bound up in the matrix of ideas, practices, fears, and hopes that form human civilization. People from the earliest times followed birds for orientation, especially on large bodies of water, as well as to find destinations that would host a new home. Stories and myths built around this practice include the founding of Yamato by following a mystical crow, of Mexico City by following an eagle, and very possibly of London by following ravens. He concludes that a world without birds would effectively mean the end of humankind, for they not only tell us how we got to be who we are, but also who we might yet become. 

Listening and paying attention to everyone in our environment tells us who we and others are. We are not our own; others formed us. Birds formed us. Earth formed us. Multispecies intelligence isn’t about becoming the bird, but about gaining awareness that we are already the bird.

A woman watching flying geese