From harvesting feathers to training eagles, humans have exploited birds for as long as the two groups have lived alongside each other. For thousands of years, a diverse array of peoples have developed relationships with—and traditions around—their avian neighbors.

They’ve closely studied some, enfolding the animals’ knowledge in oral tradition. Others they’ve partnered with (like Mongolian hunters and golden eagles, or the Yao people of southeastern Africa and the honeyguide), or domesticated, like junglefowl, waterfowl, and doves. And many more they’ve consumed for generations, gathering eggs, feathers, and meat.

From harvesting feathers to training eagles, humans have exploited birds for as long as the two groups have lived alongside each other. For thousands of years, a diverse array of peoples have developed relationships with—and traditions around—their avian neighbors.

They’ve closely studied some, enfolding the animals’ knowledge in oral tradition. Others they’ve partnered with (like Mongolian hunters and golden eagles, or the Yao people of southeastern Africa and the honeyguide), or domesticated, like junglefowl, waterfowl, and doves. And many more they’ve consumed for generations, gathering eggs, feathers, and meat.

Some of these living traditions go back hundreds or thousands of years. They speak to the sophisticated ways that peoples have learned to manage bird populations, a shared resource often capable of moving across vast swaths of territory. The variety and longevity of these techniques demonstrate keen observational skills and careful approaches to resource management and trade—the same abilities needed to tackle wider questions of conservation and resource management in the 21st century.

A villager wears a cassowary feather headdress during the Asmat Cultural Festival in the Papua province of Indonesia, which borders Papua New Guinea, on Oct. 9, 2013. Auscape/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

In the valleys and highlands of Papua New Guinea, dagger-toed cassowaries, rare survivors of human contact among large flightless birds, prowl the forests, eating fruit and dispersing seeds through their dung.

These modern dinosaurs are formidable, secretive, and twitchy—which hasn’t stopped the island’s peoples from collecting their eggs and raising their chicks.

The bodies of cassowaries have plenty of traditional uses, according to Papuan conservationist Miriam Supema. Their shaggy feathers can be used to make skirts and headdresses; their bones can be carved into knives for hunting and cooking. (They’re a good source of protein, too.)

Cassowary meat “can be traded, it can be used as a wedding gift,” Supema said. “If you’re sharing cassowary meat, it’s seen as symbolic of uniting people and strengthening relationships.”

The simplest way to keep these valuable animals on hand is to hatch and rear the young birds in captivity, where they can imprint on humans. But simple isn’t the same thing as easy—cassowary nests are hard to find, and guarded by protective males. Collecting them requires intimate knowledge of the forest and the birds, Supema said. “[The hunters] can tell when certain species like cassowary are breeding just by looking at the trees or fruits that are in season.”

Cassowaries themselves play a role in this. “In communities right in the heart of the forest, there are those who refer to the cassowary as ‘the gardener,’ and to their droppings as cassowary gardens,” Supema said. “They can tell if it shows the forest is healthy.”   

Three illustrations from the island of New Guinea depict indigenous artifacts that make use of cassowary feathers alongside a drawing of a cassowary bird. The images date from the late 1700s to the early 1800s and the time of European exploration of the region. Louis Isidore Duperrey and John Frederick Miller via Getty Images

This kind of careful observation and harvesting has incredibly deep roots. A study of 9,000-to-11,000-year-old fragments of cassowary eggshells—collected from ancient rock shelters in the island’s eastern highlands—showed that most of the eggs had been only a few days away from hatching. That’s a sign of what archeologists call “preferential harvesting,” said Kristina Douglass, an archeologist at Penn State University, which means ancient Papuans knew as well as their modern counterparts exactly when to go and fetch the eggs.

“It suggests knowledge of the reproductive ecology of these birds, knowledge of the environments in which resources can be found, potentially people watching or monitoring nests, and the possibility that people are doing this in order to hatch or rear cassowary chicks,” Douglass said.

There nothing innate or primordial about such knowledge. It comes from practice and experience—and it’s quite likely that some people died in the process of trying to take cassowary eggs. But eventually, the island’s Indigenous peoples arrived at a deep, intergenerational understanding of how to manage and track their large and irascible neighbors.

Papuan communities “know the role the cassowary plays,” Supema said, “especially those who are hunting and who use the forest a lot for their daily needs and survival.”

An Aboriginal girl uses a fire stick to burn off dry grass in Arnhem Land, Australia, circa 1997. Ben Tweedie/Corbis via Getty Images

Sometimes birds are teachers. In the dry season of Australia’s Arnhem Land, the spiraling, diving black kites and the keen-eyed brown falcon hover over advancing fires. Both species are keen to feast on the small marsupials and reptiles flushed out by the flames—and according to Robert Redford, a member of the Rembarrnga people and a senior ranger with Mimal Land Management, they sometimes take matters into their own beaks.

MLM’s work involves using traditional controlled burns to prevent dangerous conflagrations during the dry season. Sometimes when they finish a fire, Redford said, they’ll see a bird swoop down, grab a burning stick, and “take it to another place. You’ll look up and see that another fire’s coming.”

The Rembarrnga, as well as other northern Aboriginal groups, have many stories of the brown falcon acting as a fire spreader; some groups even imitate them in Dreaming rites, where men taking the birds’ role carry lit sticks to unburned grass.

Most European researchers dismissed such stories outright, or attributed them to occasional accidents. Yet when ornithologist Bob Gosford began looking into the practice, he collected multiple reports from non-Aboriginal ranchers about black kites moving fire fronts up hillsides and across rivers, occasionally causing previously contained burns to get out of control, as well as detailed interviews with Aboriginal witnesses about the brown falcon’s activities.

Non-Aboriginal people claim “it’s an accident or it just doesn’t happen or birds just aren’t like that,” said Gosford. “But for the Aboriginal people we talk to, it’s wholly unremarkable.”

From left: A black kite flies outside Barcaldine, Australia; artist George Milpurrurru holds a bark painting of magpie geese in his Ganalbingu clan country near Murwangi, in Arafura Swamp, Arnhem Land, circa 1997; and a peregrine falcon near its nest ledge in southeast Arnhem Land. Ben Tweedie/Corbis via Getty Images; Auscape/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Controlled burns, which are used to encourage healthy savannahs and forestall deadly wildfires later in the season, were largely suppressed throughout most of Australia’s colonial history, just like similar practices in the Western United States.

But in 1976, major legislation delivered swaths of the Northern Territories back to Aboriginal ownership, allowing for the return of traditional burns—and making the recognition of Indigenous knowledge crucial in an increasingly fire-prone landscape.

France's Minister of Overseas Manuel Valls (R) watches as baby sea turtles are released into the ocean during a visit to Kwata eco-park and museum, on Awala-Yalimapo beach, in the French overseas department of Guiana on June 15. France's Minister of Overseas Manuel Valls (R) watches as baby sea turtles are released into the ocean during a visit to Kwata eco-park and museum, on Awala-Yalimapo beach, in the French overseas department of Guiana on June 15. The World Is Making Progress on Conservation—Without the United States Trump’s brand of isolationism and exceptionalism will be outlasted by the multilateral agreements made in the coming months. Argument | Sushma Raman, John Hocevar

The World Is Making Progress on Conservation—Without the United States

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As it happens, Redford said, Rembarrnga lore holds that they learned to use flame to shape landscapes by watching the brown falcon, which in turn comes to their fires to scope out potential prey. “We used to copy that bird, spreading that fire,” Redford said. “To make the grass come up green, so animals can come back.”

And for as much of a headache as firebirds can be, rangers largely accept that, whether brown falcons or black kites, they have an agenda of their own, which doesn’t always take that of humans’ into account. It’s the sort of thing you just have to live with.

“He’s really boss, that bird,” Redford said. “He’s really the land manager.”

Whooper swans swim on Lake Myvatn in Iceland circa 1960.CM Dixon/Heritage Images/Getty Images

In spring, the rich, shallow waters of Iceland’s Lake Myvatn absolutely teem with birds. Terns and whimbrel swoop low over the water, and the reeds and shallows throng with a huge variety of North American and Eurasian ducks—roughly 10,000 breeding pairs every year.

Icelanders aren’t usually what you’d think of when you hear the term “Indigenous.” But prior to the Norse arrival in the ninth century, the island was that rarest of historical places: a landmass that was truly terra nullius, empty of humans, home only to birds and a single species of fox.

The settlers rapidly recognized the lake’s bounty. Today, longstanding customs govern the harvesting of eggs from the migrating waterfowl, allowing residents to load up on eggs during the breeding season. By studying the microscopic structure of eggshells at sites like Skutustadir near the lake, a team of archeologists has traced this practice back 1,000 years, making it an example of how Indigenous cultures can sustainably manage and harvest birds over centuries.

In 2012, a crew of archeologists including Megan Hicks and Arni Einarsson discovered eggshells and other bird remains at Skutustadir. The remains of medieval hearths showed that, generally, Icelanders didn’t hunt grown waterfowl and instead preyed mostly on ground birds like ptarmigan. According to Hicks, an archeologist at City of New York College, they preferred the eggs, which became much more important during the nesting season: “It was a very marked aspect of people’s lives in Myvatn. They were just eating so many eggs.”

From left: A female tufted duck swims with her ducklings on Jan. 1, 2002; hands hold a collection of Barrow’s goldeneye eggs in an undated photo; and a horned grebe carries a chick on its back on Jan. 1, 2002, all at Lake Myvatn. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images; Tessa Bunney/In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images

But how to make sure they didn’t eat too many? That’s where the harvest rules come in, Hicks said, a set of customs practiced today and drawn from centuries-old mentions in law codes, diaries, and oral tradition. For example: During the breeding season, collect no more than half the eggs from any waterbird nesting on your stretch of lakeshore. (Ducks won’t notice the loss of a couple of eggs, but it’s extremely easy to permanently scare waterfowl away from a nesting site, Hicks said.) And: Hunt foxes to keep predation of waterbirds down—and production of eggs up.

Icelandic farmers also tended to create infrastructure for hole-nesting ducks like the barrows goldeneye, Einarsson said, which are “locally abundant, but extremely rare in other places.” The birds  happily make use of stone walls or nesting hutches, he added, and have learned to live with losing a few eggs a season to the farmers.

How far back do these rules stretch? It’s hard to say for sure, Hicks said, but the archeological team suggests that the presence of ancient eggshells—along with the absence of evidence that the farm’s residents cooked waterfowl, and Myvatn’s continued diversity of such birds—may link these customs back to the first known settlement at Skutustadir, around 900 years ago.

“Finding only an occasional duck bone, but a lot of domestic animal bones, tells you that the people were only going for the eggs and not hunting the birds,” Einarsson said. “This is just like today and supports the notion that the present-day egg harvest is based on a very, very long tradition.”

“Basically, people were preventing waterfowl from abandoning their micro-landscape as a breeding area—but the landscape effect is that waterfowl never abandoned the region,” Hicks said. “So what we have is still a really healthy and biodiverse ecosystem.”

Yao honey hunter Seliano Rucunua holds a male honeyguide caught for research in the Niassa Special Reserve in Mozambique in September 2022.Claire Spottiswoode/University of Cambridge/AFP via Getty Images

Unrestricted hunting and our modern buzz-saw of a built environment have had disastrous effects on the creatures around us. So has commercial trade, where wide-ranging, border-crossing organisms from fish to birds often find themselves in serious peril, and must be protected by cooperative management between nations.

This has understandably led to the idea that human usage of animals is inherently damaging. But as people from Australia to Iceland show, it’s possible for humans and animals to survive, and even thrive, side-by-side. All it takes is care, foresight, and—sometimes—knowing how best to get away with an egg.

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