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9 FOREWORD There is much philosophical substance in Ricardo Rozzi’s Introduction to this multi-ethnic bird guide. I would like to reinforce and perhaps even to augment some of the more challenging philosophical ideas that are found in his Introduction. I begin with the following statement from Section III: “Each time we observe a bird, our perception is informed by something of the bird, and something of ourselves—our senses, instruments, and concepts.” Our instruments, surely: we often observe birds with the help of binoculars, which bring the birds closer and reveal detail not revealed to the naked eye. Our senses, not so obviously, but just as surely as our instruments: our eyes perceive the bird’s shape and color. But what is color? It is the way the human eye and visual center of the brain translate the frequency of light waves into sensory qualities and “objects.” If our eyes had evolved differently, and we did not distinguish colors, we might be completely unaware of the bright plumage that is among the most appealing characteristics of birds. And what of concepts? Concepts are mental classificatory devices, pigeonholes (as we say, appropriately in this context) into which we file the various objects of our experience. Birds are one such concept. Other animals we put into other mental pigeonholes—mammals, reptiles, and so on. Ornithologists elaborate or refine the concept of bird in various ways: phylogenetically, into genuses and species; ecologically into raptors, frugivores, insectivores, and so on. When our concepts change our experience changes and thus our reality changes, no less than if we were to buy new more powerful binoculars or lose our color vision. In the case of birds, we now know that they are the nearest descendents of dinosaurs. Having learned that, I look out my windows and now see the descendents of dinosaurs at my feeders and imagine their archaeopteryx, microraptor, and anchiornis ancestors. How transformative is that? Apassage inAldo Leopold’s essay, “Marshland Elegy” in A Sand County Almanac profoundly changed my reality quite dramatically: Our appreciation of the crane grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history. His tribe, we now know stems out of the remote Eocene. The other members of the fauna in which he originated are long since entombed within the hills. When we hear his call, we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies the daily affairs of birds and men. After reading that, I no longer saw cranes as another water-loving large bird, little different, to all unschooled appearances, from herons, except by flying with neck outstretched rather than crooked back to form an S shape. I saw a creature near indeed, phylogenetically speaking, to the saurian ancestors of all birds, just an eon away from the K/T boundary. I began to study cranes and to 10 frequent their marshy redoubts; I sought out an association with the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and I make an annual pilgrimage to Texas’sAransas National Wildlife Refuge, the wintering ground of the beautiful and endangered whooping crane. Reality is, as it were, filtered through our sensory and cognitive lenses. Immanuel Kant was the first of the great European philosophers to explore the epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical consequences of that recognition. There is an external X, according to Kant, an unknown and unknowable objective reality, which Kant called the Ding an sich—the thing in itself. We “know” things in themselves only as they are present in consciousness, structured and transformed by the “forms of intuition” (the spatial and temporal parameters of our senses) and the “categories of the understanding” (our conceptual framework). Kant believed that these sensory and cognitive filters were universal, common to all human beings. Notoriously,however,Kant,livingintheeighteenthcentury,neverlefthisnativeKoenigsberginPrussia. By the nineteenth century, the age of cosmopolitanism and globalization had begun. Philosophers had to confront the fact that while our human sensory organs and central nervous systems (and thus our forms of intuition) were universal in the single species, Homo sapiens, the many human languages and associated conceptual frameworks (and thus the categories of our understanding) were very different from one another. Language is the medium in which concepts are expressed, communicated, and transmitted. Different languages semantically divide up and categorize the world differently and they syntactically integrate it differently. Those who speak two or more languages fluently fluidly migrate between (or...

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