For many cultures around the world, birds are viewed as seers who can foretell the future. Among the Ch'orti Maya of southern Guatemala, birds play an important role in many aspects of peoples' lives. Through an ethno-ornithological analysis based on fieldwork with the Ch'orti', this paper shows how birds function as the principal messengers of future happenings, prognosticating positive and negative events such as love, sickness, and/or death, and, perhaps significantly, rain. That birds can foretell information that is empirically beyond human abilities situates them in a category at once distinct from the gods in Ch'orti' thought, yet partakers in the divine. This paper argues for a classification of “semi-divine” for birds in Ch'orti' Maya culture, animals that can access the heavens through flight and convey messages from the gods that have a direct bearing on the day-to-day lives of the Ch'orti'. Having supernatural links also makes certain birds the animal of choice for sorcerers, thereby creating suspicion and mistrust of some birds by many Ch'orti'. The belief in the role of birds as prognosticators for future events is in a state of flux, however, as some in the younger generation have begun to discount certain signs given by birds as folklore and “nonsense.”

Birds are important in the thought of the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula, from prehistory down to the present. Maya/Spanish dictionaries from the Spanish colonial period contain almost 60 bird names. Codices and Colonial-era texts describe relationships between birds and the supernatural, medicine, and prognostication. Birds are especially noted as cause and cure of psychological ailments. Today, field studies show that birds are still associated with omens, luck, and beauty, and are kept as pets and otherwise loved. Their use in medicine is limited today, but magical uses of a few in love magic are still widely known. In general, the Yucatec Maya are acutely aware of birds and their ecological significance.

At the heart of the interplay between names and knowledge is the relative salience of different taxa. Hunn (1999) described four, semi-overlapping kinds of salience: phenotypic, perceptual, cultural, and ecological. While the first three are well documented, ecological salience remains largely hypothetical in the literature. In this paper, I test Hunn's concept of ecological salience by reference to 3186 recorded English folk-names of British birds. The numbers of names recorded across 57 species represented in this study range from two (Nightingale [Luscinia megarhynchos]) to 180 (Grey Heron [Ardea cinerea]). A significant positive correlation is demonstrated between the number of recorded folk-names for a species and a measure of ubiquity in the nineteenth century. Using original bird census data collected by the author for other purposes in the 1990s in farmland and woodland in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, I demonstrate an overall correlation across Linnaean species between the number of names, number of monolexic names, and three measures of specific relative abundance and distribution. The percentage of names for a species that are monolexic, which is an indicator of familiarity, also correlated with the relative abundance of species in farmland, but this relationship was driven entirely by species with little recorded folklore. For those taxa with documented significance to nineteenth century and earlier English folk culture, which tend to carry more names than predicted by ecological ubiquity alone, there was no relationship between the extent of monolexis and the relative abundance of a species. The study suggests that ecological salience was a significant driver in bird naming in pre-industrial English folk culture, that more frequently encountered species were more likely to develop an associated folklore, but that an effect of acquired cultural salience operated as a driver of overall specific salience, potentially masking the effects of ecological salience.

The role of traditional ecological knowledge in identifying trends in environmental change is potentially complicated by the impact environmental and cultural changes may have on knowledge maintenance. This study examines these possibilities in a case study in which traditional knowledge of forest birds was examined in two indigenous Rarámuri communities in southwestern Chihuahua, Mexico—Cabórachi, which had been logged extensively for close to 50 years, and Pino Gordo, which retains unharvested pine-oak forests. Research participants in both communities shared their knowledge of pine-oak (Pinus–Quercus) forest birds by sorting of 105 color bird pictures into those birds they could name in Rarámuri or Spanish, those which they recognized but which had no names, and by offering their observations of changes in bird abundance witnessed over the course of lifetimes. We assessed differences between the communities in these categories and in recognizing birds which the literature indicates as more common within old growth forests. Cabórachi residents were statistically less likely to recognize old-growth associated species and demonstrated lower recognition and naming rates for birds than residents of Pino Gordo. Few small birds receive unique Rarámuri names in either community and species which share the same Rarámuri name in Pino Gordoi often are referred to in Spanish in Cabórachi. Respondents reported changes in abundance for 15 bird species and species groups, along with the presumed sources of those changes, including the overharvest of dead trees, the loss of highland wetlands, and the war on drugs.

Among symbolic representations of animals, birds appear to play a disproportionately large part. This paper explores the symbolism of a particular bird, the Russet-capped Stubtail (Tesia everetti), among the Nage of eastern Indonesia. The stubtail features in several contexts of Nage augury, myth, and metaphor but, in each instance, it stands in opposition to another bird category (or, more specifically, “folk-generic”). I also show how different symbolic contexts, in which the stubtail occurs, reflect different physical and behavioral features of this bird. Although the focus is a single small bird, the paper reviews and discusses several features of symbolic thought in general, giving attention especially to the ways symbolic knowledge of animals is mentally constructed differently from knowledge that informs folk taxonomies.

We document Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and non-Indigenous observations of intentional fire-spreading by the fire-foraging raptors Black Kite (Milvus migrans), Whistling Kite (Haliastur sphenurus), and Brown Falcon (Falco berigora) in tropical Australian savannas. Observers report both solo and cooperative attempts, often successful, to spread wildfires intentionally via single-occasion or repeated transport of burning sticks in talons or beaks. This behavior, often represented in sacred ceremonies, is widely known to local people in the Northern Territory, where we carried out ethno-ornithological research from 2011 to 2017; it was also reported to us from Western Australia and Queensland. Though Aboriginal rangers and others who deal with bushfires take into account the risks posed by raptors that cause controlled burns to jump across firebreaks, official skepticism about the reality of avian fire-spreading hampers effective planning for landscape management and restoration. Via ethno-ornithological workshops and controlled field experiments with land managers, our collaborative research aims to situate fire-spreading as an important factor in fire management and fire ecology. In a broader sense, better understanding of avian fire-spreading, both in Australia and, potentially, elsewhere, can contribute to theories about the evolution of tropical savannas and the origins of human fire use.

Human-wildlife conflict (HWC) is a widespread issue of increasing concern to conservationists, as it impacts people's lives and livelihoods and reduces their tolerance to the species concerned. HWC is often interpreted as a result of people encroaching upon and destroying natural habitats, but some incidents could be linked to economically driven emigration that results in depopulation and institutional and cultural disruption. Here we use an ethnobiological approach to gain insights on HWC dynamics from a case study in Mexico, where emigration is common in rural areas. We carried out a five-year study of HWC in the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve, a biodiversity-rich protected area in Mexico that also supports a human population of nearly 100,000 mostly poor and marginalized people. We found that villagers reported conflict incidents involving 25 terrestrial vertebrate species, contradicting the original self-perception that HWC mostly involved cattle ranchers and a few large carnivore species. As a response, we develop a multi-layered assessment of villagers' perspectives, emotions, and attitudes towards wildlife based on the local roles of gender, probability of encountering wildlife, and the conflicting moral beliefs and switching ethical responses of people with different cultural and economic backgrounds. Our assessment identifies the need for pluralistic approaches to enhance the sustainable use and management of wildlife in the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve.

The Balsas River Basin (BRB) area is the major source of wild medicinal plants commercially sold in Mexico; thus, the region is important in the conservation of these high-demand resources. We studied wild medicinal plant species extracted from the BRB to document the species richness of traded plants and analyze the commercialization dynamics and socioecological vulnerability. We constructed a database of the medicinal plant species traded in the BRB and we developed a risk index from 14 different ethnobotanical, socioeconomic, and ecological variables to assess the vulnerability of each species. The medicinal flora that are traded in the BRB include 257 species, 176 genera, and 83 families. The use of 91% of these species is unregulated by the government. Tropical deciduous forests contribute the greatest number of taxa (38.5%) and herbs are the most harvested plants (45.9%). Less than 5% of these species are protected by national and international regulations. The highest-risk category primarily consists of tree species with the greatest number of uses and plant structures harvested and sold in the largest number of local and regional markets. Due to high commercial demand in the BRB, intensive harvesting is not compatible with conservation. Therefore, public policies that regulate trade and local practices to protect and preserve medicinal plant species must be developed. These policies should maintain people's livelihoods, especially in regions with high marginalization but great biological and cultural richness, such as the BRB.

Indigenous communities manage shaded coffee (Coffea arabica) plantations by applying traditional practices which promote and conserve forest structure and tree diversity while providing a wide variety of environmental services, as well as social and cultural functions. We studied coffee production by a Mixe indigenous community in the Mixe mountains region of Oaxaca, Mexico, to identify the relationship between traditional management of coffee plantations and tree diversity conservation through the analysis of forest structure, richness, composition, and tree uses. A total of 85 tree species were recorded in three classified coffee production areas, the majority of which were natives. Seven species use categories were identified. The results demonstrate variations in coffee plantation structure according to topographic conditions, distance to the community, and management practices. Norms, traditions, and customs of the community guide coffee plantation management. The tree diversity registered in coffee plantations and in uncultivated medium tropical deciduous forest contributes to the maintenance of forest diversity. Thus, traditional coffee management promotes biodiversity conservation. In this particular case, the local community conserves medium tropical deciduous forest within its coffee plantations.

People interact with the landscape and use its resources on a daily basis. An ecotope is the smallest ecological place culturally recognized within a landscape. Many ecotopes reveal the interaction between local communities and the environment and perceptions about ecotopes are based on the experiences of their observers. We studied local perceptions of ecotopes recognized by rural men and women, in order to understand the decision-making processes related to ecotope management and the use of plant resources in these landscapes. The study area was in Ribeirão Taquaras (Ibirama municipality, Santa Catarina, Brazil), a region populated with descendants of German immigrants. Through 91 interviews (41 men and 50 women) and four participatory workshops, two with women and two with men, we identified 12 ecotopes. The interaction between people and the environment determines their knowledge about plant resources and the environment and this varies according to their social roles. These interactions occur with cultivated and harvested plant resources and in ecotopes under different intensities of management. The perception of the environment reflects this interaction, social roles and relationships, and the historical context reflected in the environment. The different perceptions of men and women reveal features and complementarities in decision-making and daily tasks on rural properties.