Author:
Jan Scholten
Book:
Qjurious
Type:
Info
Chapter:
4-600.00.00
Aves
English: Birds.
Taxonomy
Birds are an extensive clade of animals that can be found all over the world.
Zoology
Birds are vertebrate animals that have common properties: they all have a beak and feathers. Most of them fly. About 140 million years ago, birds evolved from their predecessors, the reptiles. Most of the sorts and families that now exist, already populated the earth 60 million years ago. Nowadays some 9000 different sorts, individually characterised by form, measure, colour and voice, enrich our planet. Books and encyclopaedias on birds will help you differentiate between all these sorts.
Birds have feathers. That enables them to fly, with the exception of some birds like penguins, Sphenisciformes, ostriches, Struthioniformes.
Birds lay eggs and care for their eggs and youngsters, warm. Male and female often take turn in brooding, feeding the young and teaching them how to feed themselves, and only left to discover the world, when they can take care of themselves. Reptiles and fish also lay eggs, but mostly do not care for them.
Birds are warm-blooded.
Birds take care of the offspring.
Birds need highly nutricious food: seeds, insects, small animals, other birds, fish; nectar.
Birds don’t have a diaphragm, separating thorax from abdomen, and breathe quite differently then human.
Birds make sounds, can sing. Some make awful shrieking noises. There are different bird calls, for warning, for attacking, for seducing a mate in spring, for setting their territory. They can produce a melodious sound. Birds have a box like organ called the syrinx, there where the trachea bifurcates in the two bronchi. By pushing air through both pipes, sound is made, in each bird sort in a different way.
Mythology
In the Upanishads (Hinduism) two birds are seated in the tree of the world, one eating the fruit of the tree (symbolising active life), the other contemplating, a metaphor for the distance one can take to observe actions. Often the soul departing from the body after death is pictured as a bird… and birds can appear as messengers, when a dear one has just passed away.