YELLOW BIRDS IN THE SHADE

Environment and History ©The White Horse Press, 2016

Birds are emblematic natural elements of landscapes. Readily noticeable and appreciated due to their songs and flight, they have been thoroughly used as components of literary scenarios. This paper analyses their representations in an enlarged corpus (144 writings by 67 writers) since the nineteenth century, divided in three time - periods. It aims to understand which wild birds are represented in Portuguese literature, how those representations prevail over time, and what literary texts reveal about distribution and abundance of the birds mentioned, linked to major environmental and landscape changes. Based on common names, 112 taxonomic units are identified, corresponding to either one species, species of the same genera or family, or a higher taxon. In addition, historical distribution and abundance are extracted from literary texts and compared with data from biological sources, such as ornithological reports, guides, atlas and red data books. We conclude that bird representations are frequent and diversified in terms of taxonomic units, and this richness tends to prevail over time. The most prolific wild birds’representations are linked to the writers’own experiences of the Portuguese countryside during their childhood and youth. It is particularly significant in the writers from the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, with a rural origin, like most of the population. Despite landscape and social changes the rough time, contemporary literature still reveals a sound knowledge of birds and a proximity and appreciation of nature, which can be explained by the rural ancestry of some current writers, as a kind of countryside nostalgia and embodiment of an environmental discourse of wildlife preservation.

2022

Lisbon, 10-11 November 2022 Museum of Natural History and Science, University of Lisbon An interdisciplinary conference organised by Marta Lourenço and Catarina Simões (Museum of Natural History and Science, University of Lisbon) ; Alexandre Tojal (Museum of the Presidency of the Republic, Lisbon) ; Flaminia Bardati (Università di Roma La Sapienza), Julien Bondaz (Université Lyon 2), Emmanuel Lurin (Sorbonne Université, Paris) and Mélanie Roustan (Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris) - PuNaCa Research Program. Led by an international and multidisciplinary scientific team, and in line with the PuNaCA research program (« Putting nature in a cage: an interdisciplinary research program on aviaries ») , this event focuses on the place of non-European birds in the history of Portugal, Portuguese-speaking culture, European countries and their relations with the world, now and then. First of all, it is about highlighting the importance and the richness of the collections of birds – living, preserved, described or depicted – that were assembled, displayed and studied in the early modern period, and also some existing testimonies of these practices, kept today in Portuguese institutions (archives, museums, zoological parks, residences and historic gardens, etc.). The event will also bring together researchers and curators to initiate a reflection on these avian collections, the devices involved in their captivity and display (cages, aviaries, display cases), and also on their scientific interpretation and presentation to different audiences. The category of "exotic" birds – those which were imported, acclimatised, commodified and exploited by humans from the Middle Ages, within the framework of colonial expansions – will be questioned through the prism of history of science and knowledge, anthropology, cultural studies, architecture, landscape and art histories. Drawing from important contributions of both the “material turn” and the “animal turn” of recent decades, we will be looking at birds themselves and also their material remains, analysing their different agencies and the diverse ways in which they were entangled and interacted with humans. Therefore, living and preserved birds and their byproducts, capture and transportation techniques, captivity constructions, architectural structures, scientific documentation practices, methods of artistic representation, structures for conservation, exploitation, representation or display will be studied from a cross-cultural perspective and in different contexts. We will be particularly interested in the relations that these avian collections, their material structures and their multiple elements maintain with the coeval imperial and colonial activities (political, scientific, commercial and so forth), the construction of ornithological knowledge in Portugal and other European countries, the history of landscapes, architecture, artifacts and taste in the Portuguese-speaking world, as well as the elaboration and dissemination of gender and racial stereotypes, from pre-imperial times to the present day.

2009

Coming out of the University of Zululand's 2008 Literature & Ecology Colloquium at Twinstreams Environmental Education Centre, this special issue of Alternation is devoted to articles about birds, in and out of literature. The birds under discussion range from the symbolic to the literal, the mythological to the real, and the local to the cosmopolitan. The twelve articles, book review, and two review articles contribute in multiple and compelling ways to ecological literary criticism (ecocriticism) in South Africa and beyond, while the section titled 'Recently Reviewed South African Life Writing Publications VI' continues a regular feature in Alternation.

Neotropical Birding

Journal of Field Ornithology, 2011

ZooKeys, 2016

The former Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical-IICT (Lisbon, Portugal), recently integrated into the University of Lisbon, gathers important natural history collections from Portuguese-speaking African countries. In this study, we describe the bird collection from the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and

Anglia

with photos by Jack Breakfast www.smallbirdsongs.com

Vie des Arts N. 243, Vol. LXI (Summer, 2016)

Rebecca Jewell is currently Artist in Residence in the Oceana Department of the British Museum. Like her namesake, Jewell’s art, finely rendered on actual bird feathers and other delicately modelled surfaces, has the lustre and polish of cut gems. Brilliant hues alternate with dove grey and subtle taupe, on tiny feather ‘canvases’ and constructions.