Simon & Schuster's Guide to Birds of the World [antikvár]

i: rí, : 11 ' ' ', II- Right: Mourning Doves (Zenaida macrourá), drawing by John James Audubon (1785-1851) from his worl< Birds of America, first published between 1827 and 1838. The Wonder of Flight There is no doubt that more books have been written about birds than about any other class of animal. It is their ability to fly that has intrigued man most of all. If we are to choose just a few examples of the importance that birds have had in popular folklore, literature and the arts, we have only to think of the Egyptian paintings, ceramics and reliefs representing Horus, the falcon-god, or Nekhebet, the vulture-goddess, who supervised births in Egyptian religions; the Greek myths of Prometheus and Tityos, who were torn to pieces by eagles and vultures for having offended the gods; the Etruscan "augurs" who predicted the future by interpreting the flight of birds; the famous geese of the Capitol, which saved Rome during the Gallic raids; of eagles, the symbol of Rome and its power, fluttering on the standards of those invincible legions, and the symbol of the Austro-Hungarian empire; of the Thunderbird, or Voc bird, in the pre-Columbian mythology of Central America and the Caribbean; of the owl, symbol of Athens and sacred to the goddess Minerva; of the dove, symbol of peace in Christendom; of Garuda, the favorite bird of Vishnu; down to the marvelous paintings by ornithologists John Gould and John James Audubon in the nineteenth century (the four hundred beautiful illustrations in Audubon's work Birds of America were called by Cuvier "the most splendid monument ever erected by man to nature") and, to mention just two names, the paintings and drawings of Chagall and Braque in the twentieth century. But this is just a handful of examples, chosen somewhat at random, to show something of the wide interest aroused in man by the fascinating world of birds. We shall now briefly describe the main features of birds. In the context of the scientific classification of the animal kingdom, they form a class in the phylum Chordata. They are vertebrates (animals with vertebrae) and Amniota (i.e., vertebrates with an amnion, which is an embryonic membrane forming a cavity filled with a fluid that envelops the embryo). They can fly (although some species are flightless, despite the fact that all birds are descended from flying forms), since their front limbs have been transformed into wings, and only their hind legs are used for walking or running on the ground. They are homoio-thermic, or warm-blooded (i.e., they have a constant body temperature), although some species have revealed cases of marked temperature drop and even a sort of winter lethargy or hibernation. A bird's heart is divided into two parts, each consisting of two cavities, and there is total separation of arterial blood and venous blood. Birds have a beak, or bill, consisting of modified jawbones and sheathed with a horny covering called the rhamphotheca. Finally, birds lay eggs, which are hatched. During the last century, the evolutionist Thomas Huxley defined birds as "glorified reptiles" because, in the slow evolutionary process that has led from a world showing the first 10