A History of Birdwatching in 100 Objects

This red ochre rock art painting is thought to represent two flightless Genyornis newtoni, which probably became extinct about 45,000 years ago, possibly co-existing with aboriginal Australians for several thousand years until the Ice Age climate wiped them out.

Representations of birds date back as far as the cave and rock paintings of the Paleolithic period, which ended with the retreat of Ice Age glaciation about 10,000 years before present (BP). The oldest known rock art in the world, discovered in south-west Arnhemland in Australia’s Northern Territory, depicts two Emu-like ratites daubed in red ochre and is dated at around 45,000 years BP.

The drawings in the ornithological graffiti closely resemble Genyornis newtoni, a large, short-legged and stubby-beaked carnivorous ratite resembling the modern-day Emu, believed to have become extinct at around that date, coinciding with the original colonisation of humans – it was possibly even the first anthropogenic extinction.

An alternative theory is that the paintings are younger – the oldest radiocarbon-dated cave drawings being 28,000 years old and from the same region – and provide evidence that Genyornis or a similar form became extinct much later than fossils show, probably as a result of the Ice Age. Yet a further possibility is that the painting represents a kind of folk memory of such species, preserved in the local tribes’ Jawoyn Dreaming beliefs and drawn as a mythological caricature. If the painting is Genyornis, then the rock art represents the first recorded identification of a known species and suggests that throughout the evolution of Homo sapiens, birds have played an important cultural role, literally and possibly even spiritually.

Other ancient artistic depictions of birds include an unidentifiable waterfowl in carved mammoth ivory from Hohle Fels Cave, Bavaria, Germany, dated at between 31,000- 33,000 years BP; a Carrion Crow head in the lower caves at Grotte d’Oxocelhaya, Pyrénées-Atlantique, France, dated at about 14,000 years BP; and recognisable Sooty Terns drawn about 3,000 years ago on Rapa Nui, Easter Island, in the South Pacific. In fact, as humans spread out of Africa and across the globe, their cave and wall art went with them, and so did their figurative drawings of birds. Africa’s cave paintings date back almost 25,000 years, those of India and Asia 12,000 years, and basic ‘stick’ birds are present on cave walls at Rio Pinturas, Argentina, dated at 9,000 years old.

Many archaeologists have attempted to work out what such illustrations represented psychologically or practically, and there may have been artistic licence and abstract meaning to some; others may represent religious beliefs.

Henri Breuil’s idea that these paintings were ‘hunting magic’ is widely accepted, with hunters believing that the art served to increase the numbers of prey or prevent bad luck; studies of modern hunter-gatherer societies indicate that shamen paint images of wildlife seen in trances to enhance their own ‘powers’ or represent the will of the gods. In different cultures around the world, cave and rock paintings vary from mere lines and hand prints to well-coloured and sophisticated works; hand prints also indicate that they may have been executed by both sexes.

Many bear a more literal and educational interpretation. Much of this ancient artwork may have been created by hunters attempting to pass on seasonal, behavioural and tracking information to each other or to less experienced colleagues, almost as if the walls were a school textbook or a newspaper. This may explain the presence of animal and bird tracks drawn on the walls of some sites, and might also justify the curious aspects of some, portraying animals twisted up at unnatural angles from their tracks, as if graphically illustrating their owner.

Though popularly known for hunting the striking megafauna of the Pleistocene, we can be sure that humans in the distant past more often relied on smaller game, and bird identification and knowledge of their habits would have been paramount when larger animals and seasonal vegetables were unavailable. Intimate observations of the natural world are essential to hunters to this day, and these involve classifying the world around them. Jared Diamond found, in an oft-quoted short paper, that the primitive Fore people of the New Guinean highlands were able to identify 110 taxa, nearly all of which corresponded to species or species complexes recognised by modern science (the remainder were the dimorphic sexes of four bowerbirds and birds-of-paradise).

Such well-observed (though somewhat unempirical) and traditional knowledge would reach a first flowering when the early civilisations of the Middle East, particularly ancient Egypt, evolved and developed agriculture and intensive labour, and consequently the leisure time to begin attempting true ‘art for art’s sake’. And observation for observation’s sake.