Essay on Birds

500 words essay on birds.

Birds are very special animals that have particular characteristics which are common amongst all of them. For instance, all of them have feathers, wings and two legs. Similarly, all birds lay eggs and are warm-blooded. They are very essential for our environment and exist in different breeds. Thus, an essay on birds will take us through their importance.

essay on birds

Importance of Birds

Birds have different sizes and can be as small as 2 inches and as big as 2.75 metres. For instance, bee hummingbird (smallest) and ostrich (largest). Bird’s existence dates back to 160 million years ago.

There are different types of birds that exist which vary in characteristics. For instance, there are penguins that cannot fly. Further, there are birds that are known for their intelligence like Parrots and Corvidae.

Moreover, we have peacocks which are beautiful and symbolize rain and good weather. Next, there are bats and vultures as well. Birds connect very closely to the environment and are quite intuitive.

They can predict the weather conditions and some are kept near coal mines for the prediction of a mine explosion. It is because they are sensitive to the release of high levels of carbon monoxide. They are quite social and enjoy singing as well. Birds enjoy the freedom of moving anywhere without boundaries.

My Favourite Bird

My favourite bird is the parrot. It is a colourful bird that is present in many parts of the world. It comes in many shapes, sizes and colours. Parrots are famous for having vivid colours.

Some have a single, bright colour while others have a rainbow of different colours. Parrots are usually small and medium in size that mostly eats seeds, nuts and fruits. The lifespan of a parrot depends on its species.

Larger ones like cockatoos and macaws live for 80 years while the smaller ones like lovebirds live for around 15 years. In fact, parrots are quite intelligent. They have the ability to imitate human speech which is why many people keep them as pets.

Consequently, they are also the most sought-after type of bird for commercial purposes. All over the world, people are taking measures to ensure parrots get nice treatment. Many cultures also consider them sacred.

Parrots are highly intelligent and thrive at their best when they are free and not captured in cages. I used to have a parrot when I was little and I never kept it in a cage. It used to sit on my shoulder wherever I went and never flew away. Parrots are my favourite bird.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Birds

Due to hunting, poaching and disruption of the ecological balance, many birds are getting extinct. As a result, birds living in water like swans, ducks and more are also falling drastically in number because of pollution. Thus, we all must take proper measures to help the birds live and save them from extinction. Birds are vital for our ecosystem and its balance, thus we must all keep them safe.

FAQ of Essay on Birds

Question 1: How can we save birds?

Answer 1: We can save birds by doing little things like providing a source of water for them to drink. Further, we can elevate bird feeders and plant native plants and trees for them. Similarly, we can put up birdhouses and garden organically so that birds can feed on insects and worms.

Question 2: Why birds are important in our life?

Answer 2 : Birds are significant for our environment as well as for human beings as they play an important role in every living thing present on earth. Birds are one of the seed dispersers for plants who deliver us food, shelter and medicines and more.

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Essay on Birds for Students and Children in 1000+ Words

July 7, 2020 by ReadingJunction 1 Comment

Essay on Birds for Students and Children in 1000+ Words

In this article, you will read an Essay on Birds for students and children in 1000+ words. It includes nature, living situation, voices, habitats, importance and 10 lines about birds.

So, let’s start this essay on birds…

Table of Contents

Introduction (Essay on Birds)

Birds are the unique creature that has the ability of flying. If they fly and spread wings in the sky, then an attractive scene is present.

In the morning and evening, the earth gets resonated with their killer. The beauty of forest-provinces is enhanced by their residence. Everyone is fascinated by their attractive colours.

Nature of Birds

Birds are very strange. Some black, some green and some purple. Their body is very light because of which they can fly easily. Their wings are light and colourful. They have two legs and two eyes.

With the help of the feet, they roam the earth . Some birds fly in the sky at very high altitudes, and some can decide only two-four feet distance.

Just as there are many types of variations found in the world, in the bird world also, many types of variations are found. But two characteristics are the same in all – one can fly, and the other is that all birds lay eggs.

Living Situation of Birds

Birds are deeply attached to nature . They live in forests, nesting in bushes and on trees. Most birds live in a shelter that it creates.

Collected the weeds, added the straw, and made a nest. Some birds are very skilled at building a nest, such bird’s know as nesting birds. They make it on sight.

Some birds do not make a nest and make a shelter in a tree cover. The woodpecker makes holes in the wood. Some large birds, such as peacocks , do not build nests and take refuge in bushes.

Voices of Birds

The soft tone of some birds attracts us. Cuckoo, papaya, parrot, etc. are all convincing of the melodious sound of birds. There is a great discussion of his voice in literature.

He has great praise in the compositions of poets. But the dialect of some birds is considered hoarse. It has also been said that who does the cuckoo give and what does the crow take, but everyone dislikes it because of the ravenous bird of the crow.

In this way, the birds want to be free, but some birds are kept domestic by humans. Birds like pigeon, parrot , a rooster can be domesticated. The parrot is ensconced in many houses and can mimic the voice of a man.

It is kept in a cage and is known and considered a special symbol of peace. Rooster is very important from a commercial point of view. We obtain eggs and meat from them.

Eating Habits of Birds

Eagle, crow, heron, rooster, etc, are some birds that eat the flesh of dead or living animals. Some birds sit on the bodies of living beings like cows , buffaloes, and eat the parasites present on their bodies.

Carnivorous birds fill their stomachs by eating meat, fish, and insects. Their activities keep the balance of the environment on the earth. Many birds are herbivores. Vegetarian birds eat cereal grains, fruits, legumes, and vegetables.

Some birds live in inaccessible places. Penguin is one such bird. It can also survive in icy places in the Polar Regions. Some birds live in water. Cranes, heron, swan, watercourse, etc. are such birds. They can prey on the water for fishes and other small creatures on earth.

National Bird of India

Peacock is known as the national bird of our country, India. The wings of Peacock are colourful. It dances gracefully by spreading its wings. Various types of decorative items are made from their wings. It is a very adventurous bird. It defeats snakes in battle.

Importance of Birds

Keeping the environmental balance in mind, if birds have great significance in human life. Flying in the sky, these birds are very natural means of cleaning the environment. … How many animal birds is there that protect the flora useful for human life by eating insect germs and polluted things ?

Birds like heron, goose, and duck swim on the water and feed on the fish. A stork is a migratory bird that migrates according to the seasons. Birds also fly in the sky, run on the ground, and also swim on the water. Birds are also the identity of a nation.

Same as the national bird of India is a peacock, the Kiwi is recognised as the national bird of New Zealand. Some birds are in a particular country. The Kiwi bird is found only in New Zealand.

Humans have shared borders, but there is no border for birds. Birds can be allowed in any country of the world without permission. This entire world belongs to him, where a man cut trees in his greed.

The tree is a habitat for birds, and so it is our responsibility to protect the habitat of birds. Many birds are rare, which are going extinct. Birds are essential for life on Earth.

10 Lines on Birds

  • The survival or disappearance of animal birds is very harmful to humans.
  • Birds protect flora useful for human life by eating polluted items.
  • The number of the human race has increased, and the number of animal birds is decreasing day by day.
  • Flying in the sky, these birds are very natural means of cleaning the environment.
  • Birds continue to eradicate the rotting objects lying in the piles of garbage.
  • One should make the utmost effort to protect them at every level.
  • Birds which are necessary for our environment. Their number is continuously decreasing.
  • In this age of today, it has become difficult to spend a life of birds.
  • There are many such birds, those who live their rain in the fields.
  • To protect the birds from extinction, we should plant more and more plants.

Birds are an integral part of our environment. But because of poaching and dwindling forest area, some birds are in trouble. Some of these are becoming rare.

The government has enacted the Wildlife Act and sanctuaries for their safe abode. People should make reasonable efforts to save rare birds. I hope you liked this lovely essay on birds.

Thanks for reading.

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February 16, 2022 at 8:09 am

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an essay about birds

How to Write an Essay on Birds: 9 Interesting Areas to Focus

How to Write an Essay on Birds

How to write an essay on birds? There are some interesting facts you can write about. Information about birds can be an excellent source for a creative essay. Birds are found in every part of the globe, creating a large variety of species to write about, especially when well-researched. Interesting bird facts can create wonderful topics for an essay, including unique theses that a student can explore and develop an enjoyable piece of writing.

When writing an essay about birds, it’s important to consider researching these facts, especially their biological composition. For instance, one can write an essay about birds by highlighting some distinguishing characteristics between bird species. This type of writing would be most interesting in English, particularly due to the distinctive nature of scientific descriptions. You can also include a short note about their biological differences in each section to make the essay more appealing.

Interesting Facts for Writing an Essay on Birds

Feather distinction.

One of the most interesting topics for an essay on birds is their feather diversity. Birds have distinctive appearances in structure, order, and color. Feather distinction is one of the distinguishing characteristics between species. However, some species have different colors based on various biological and environmental factors. For instance, some bird species have distinctive differences between the feathers of a male and a female. In other cases, the differences may appear disorderly but are worth investigating.

Migration marvels and global distribution

Some bird species are migratory, traveling between regions, even continents. Since the migrations coincide with seasons, they create some migration marvels worth writing about. For instance, seagulls migrate between winter and summer, running from the cold weather. During their travels, the birds create awesome displays of their traveling routines, mating habits, and hunting traditions. This topic is most suitable for nature lovers, people willing to investigate many species for their beauty and scientific facts.

Nesting prowess

You can also write an essay on birds based on their architectural techniques. Birds build their nests differently depending on their size, primary predators, and location. While the weaverbird prefers loosely hanging tree branches, the penguin can only nest on the ground near mountains and ocean shores. The structure and composition of the nest also differ significantly, creating an array of architectural designs to compare. Any person interested in birds understands the importance of a nest, especially during mating and incubation.

an essay about birds

Egg laying facts

Birds are oviparous or egg-laying animals in English. Different species lay different egg sizes, colors, and shapes. They have distinctive characteristics based on their egg-laying habits, including location and responsibility. Some birds, such as the Cuckoo , exhibit parasitic behaviors in brooding. They lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, forcing the foster parents to incubate a foreign egg and feed an adopted chick afterward. Egg-laying habits can be quite an impressive topic for an essay on birds, especially due to the amount of scientific evidence available online.

Sociocultural rituals

Another interesting concept you can write about birds is their social lives. Like humans and any other living thing, birds socialize on different occasions. Some live in large groups, while others are loaners. However, all birds have distinctive mating rituals. Some specials engage in colorful, elaborate courtship traditions. They display marvelous moves to attract mates, using their wings and, in some cases, their avian architectural prowess to assert dominance. Birds engage in long relationships that resemble marriage in humans. The bald eagle is a good example of a bird species that marries or mates for life. The differences in sociocultural behaviors can create an amazing topic for a good essay.

Cognitive capacity

Some bird species are worth writing essays about, especially those that have shown high intelligence. Students can investigate intellectual abilities in birds to find impressive topics for their term papers and final research. You can even hire an experienced academic writer to help with the information gathering and drafting. For instance, CustomWritings professional essay writing service is a prominent helper with over ten years of experience supporting students’ journeys. While intelligent avian is attractive, finding accurate and reliable supporting evidence on such a topic can be daunting. With professional assistance, you can access scholarly articles and integrate findings from research in your essay on birds.

Vocal abilities

Birds are also known for their vocalization capabilities. While students cannot transcribe bird songs into writing, investigations into singing abilities can constitute a good essay. Most importantly, one can research birds’ ability to vocalize or mimic different sounds. Some bird species are known for their vocalization, especially when imitating humans and other birds. Others can produce relatively unique sounds, making them an attractive piece of marvel for analysis.

Scholars and researchers tend to focus on the biological differences between birds. Notably, biologists have invested significantly in understanding the genetic differences for classification and knowledge gathering. With this information, students can develop exciting topics for their essays or end-term research papers. Another interesting point of focus is the survival instincts and abilities of birds. While some species rely on camouflage for safety, others are birds of prey. The details about each bird’s genetics can help explain distribution and preferences.

Life expectancy

Similarly, the biological differences explain the differences in life expectancy. It’s difficult to ascertain the length of life in wild birds due to constant migration. However, scientific evidence suggests that some birds live longer than others. A good essay writer would consider analyzing the reasoning behind these differences and identify genetic and environmental characteristics affecting the length of life.

How Do I Write an Essay on Birds?

The best approach for writing an essay on birds involves conducting sufficient research. A good student would start by identifying an interesting fact to write about birds and research it. The information gathered from the knowledge search can then be used to create a comprehensive essay topic with a compelling thesis. The interesting facts about birds can also be a good hook for the introduction. The essay on birds should be organized professionally, adopting a basic paper structure with an introduction, body, and conclusion.

Writing an essay on birds should also incorporate scientific and scholarly evidence. A good writer understands the need to integrate external sources with supporting and counterarguments. This approach will make your essay more interesting to read and easy to grade. Your professor may be impressed by your capacity to research a wild topic and investigate evidence found in scholarly works. Besides, supporting your arguments with reliable and verifiable arguments makes your writing believable. You can also impress the reader with ideas corroborating your knowledge of birds. For instance, you can integrate information about mating in an essay about birds’ vocal abilities to demonstrate a connection between the two issues. In the end, your essay about birds should be compelling and informative.

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an essay about birds

Friday essay: on birds — feathered messengers from deep time

an essay about birds

Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing, UTS, University of Technology Sydney

Disclosure statement

Delia Falconer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Technology Sydney provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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When I experienced a great loss in in my early forties — almost a year to the day after another — I went to see my mother in the family home. She wasn’t a hugger or giver of advice, so instead we fed the birds. As she had when I was a child, she stood behind me in the kitchen with her shoulder propped against the back door, passing slices of apple and small balls of minced meat into my hand.

Each bird, apart from the snatching kookaburras, was touchingly gentle in the way it took food from my fingers. The white cockatoos ate daintily, one-legged. The lorikeets jumped onto the sloping ramp on both feet, like eager parachutists, to quarrel over the apple and press the juice from the pulp with stubby tongues.

Lined up on the veranda rail, the magpies cocked their heads to observe me before accepting meat precisely in their blue-white beaks. They had a beautiful, carolling song, with a chorded quality in the falling registers. But the bright-eyed butcher birds had the most lovely song of all: a full-throated piping, which I’ve heard compared to the Queen of the Night’s aria in Mozart’s Magic Flute.

Over decades, a family of these little blue-grey birds, had come to stack their hooked meat-eaters’ beaks with mince, which they flew to deliver to young somewhere in our neighbour’s garden, though we had never bothered to try to work out where they lived. This afternoon, when my mother and I opened the door, they landed by our side as they always had, having spotted us from their watching places. For a brief moment, surrounded by these vital creatures, I felt as if I might still want to be alive.

Small agents

Birds have always been small agents charged with carrying the burden of our feelings simply by following the logic of their own existence. The Irish imagined puffins as the souls of priests. The ancient Romans released an eagle when an emperor died in the belief it would “conduct his soul aloft”. In the Abrahamic religions, doves are given powers of revelation. We have even been inclined, right up until the present, to imagine birds as the souls of our recently departed returned to us, if only for a moment.

an essay about birds

Even without being recruited into such labour, birds touch on our lives in small but significant ways. Once, in the botanical gardens of Melbourne, a boyfriend laughed until he almost cried at the mechanical, eager hopping of the tiny fairy wrens, a fact that only made me like him more. A friend tells the story of her uncle who ordered quail for the first time at a restaurant and cried when he saw it on his plate. “She had a raven’s heart, small and obdurate,” American author Don DeLillo writes of a nun in Underworld ; it is my favourite description in any novel.

In Japan, where my partner and I tried to ease our sadness, the calls of crows were ubiquitous in every town. Like the low sounds of its deer, they had a subdued, almost exhausted quality, as hollow as the bells that are rattled to call the oldest spirits to its Shinto temples.

In 1975, when his first wife left him, Masahise Fukase began to photograph these birds, which he had seen from the window of a train. He would keep taking their pictures – on a hilltop tori at dusk, grouped on the budding branches of a bare tree, in flying silhouette – for ten years. Ravens would become one of the most famous books of modern photography , hailed as a “masterpiece of mourning”. While some people see the birds in his photos as symbols of loneliness I see them as embodiments of pure intention. “I work and photograph to stop everything,” Fukase said. As if fulfilling a prophecy, he would spend the last two decades of his life in a coma, after falling down the stairs at his favourite bar.

Yet for all our emotional investment in them, we’ve never treated birds particularly well. To train a falcon in Qatar, owners sew the young bird’s eyes shut, unstitching and then restitching them for longer intervals, until it is entirely dependent on its keeper. In Asia the appetite for caged songbirds is so great that their calls are disappearing from its forests. Our careless acceptance that these extraordinary creatures are subject to our will is perhaps as damning as any direct mistreatment of them. This is symbolised for me by that fact that, in North America, owners of long pipelines add a putrid odorant to the natural gas they carry so that turkey vultures, circling over the deathly smell, will alert them to methane leaks.

We are currently draining marshes globally three times faster than we are clearing forests. Migratory Red Knots fly 15,000 kilometres per year between Australia and their breeding grounds in the Arctic Tundra, but they’re declining because of the industrial development of the Yellow Sea’s tidal mudflats, where they stop to feed and rest. One of the details that most haunted me in the reports of Australia’s mega-fires was the fact that many birds that survived the radiant heat would die of smoke inhalation because the continuous one-way airflow of their breathing systems and air sacs meant they couldn’t cough to clear their lungs.

an essay about birds

When we first moved into my childhood home, wattlebirds fed in the grevilleas, calling from the rockery with voices that sounded, as a poet once said to me, like the cork being pulled from a bottle of champagne. While their long forms ending in a slim, curved beak seemed the embodiment of alertness, they were the birds our cat caught most often. To see one, rescued but internally injured, vomit up its honey and grow limp was one of my first intimations as a child of the world’s evils. Unable to bear the thought of their sleek, streaky bodies in the bare earth, my mother would bury them wrapped in tea towels. But it was the 70s and no one thought to keep the cat inside.

As my mother entered her nineties, her life contracted around her birds. Although experts were now advising that the lack of calcium could soften chicks’ bones, I continued, against my conscience, to put through her weekly grocery order, which contained as much bird mince as food for herself. She had stopped feeding the cockatoos, which had chewed her windowsills and the struts of the back door, but when they heard us in the kitchen they would still plaster their chests like great white flowers against the window or poke their heads through the large holes they’d made over the years in the door’s wire fly screen.

But it was only the butcher birds that ever entered through these gaps to wait for her by the sink, feathers fluffed calmly. Once or twice, one would come and find her in the dining room and quietly walk back ahead of her to be fed. When I came with the children, she would press food into their hands as she stood behind them at the door, leaning against the kitchen counter for support. So she continued to be one of the estimated 30 to 60% of Australian households that fed wild birds, a statistic that suggests that we need them far more than they need us.

an essay about birds

Scientists began to think in the 19th century that birds might have evolved from dinosaurs, when the 150-million- year-old fossil skeleton of Archaeopteryx — which we now know was capable of short bursts of active flight — turned up in a German quarry.

The Victorian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley observed the bony-tailed, feathered fossil’s striking resemblance to small dinosaurs like Compsognathus and proposed that it was a transitional form between flightless reptiles and birds. Huxley’s theory fell out of favour until the last decades of the 20th century, when a new generation of palaeontologists returned to the similarities between the metabolisms and bird-like structures of dinosaur fossils and birds, and there is now a consensus that birds are avian dinosaurs. That the birds with which we share our lives are the descendants of the hollow-tailed, meat-eating theropods is a true wonder that never fails to thrill me.

an essay about birds

Birds, like us, are survivors. They escaped the Cretaceous-Paleogene (or K-Pg) mass extinction event 65 million years ago: the fifth and last great dying in the history of our planet, until the Sixth Extinction taking place around us now.

Scientists were able to work out, from unusually high deposits of rare iridium (which mostly comes from outer space) in the Earth’s crust that a ten-kilometre-wide asteroid hitting the area that is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula had killed off three quarters of the world’s living creatures by causing forest fires and then a freezing “nuclear winter,” which inhibited photosynthesis and rapidly acidified the oceans. Its blast was thousands of times more powerful than the combined force of all the nuclear weapons in the world today. The dust and debris it dispersed into the atmosphere eventually settled into a thin grey band of iridium-rich clay, which came to be called the K-Pg boundary and, above it, no trace of a non-avian dinosaur can be found.

In historical ironies whose obviousness would shame a novelist, it was geophysicists looking for petroleum in the 1970s who would discover the existence of the Chicxulub crater. Walter Alvarez, who discovered the “iridium anomaly”, was the son of physicist Luis Alvarez, a designer of America’s nuclear bombs, with whom he posited the asteroid strike theory; Alvarez senior had followed in a plane behind the Enola Gay to measure the blast effect as it dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima.

The ground-dwelling, beaked avian dinosaurs were able to scratch out a life for themselves in the ferny “disaster flora” that replaced the obliterated forests; their intelligence, their feathery insulation, their ability to feed on the destroyed forests’ seeds, and to digest the “hard, persistent little morsels” as one writer puts it, would help them to survive, and later flourish.

More incredibly, these dinosaurs were already recognisably bird-like, inside and out; capable of at least short horizontal flight like quails, the parts of their brains that controlled sight, flight and high-level memory as expanded as those of modern birds’, while our early mammal ancestors — small, nocturnal, insectivorous, shrew-like mammals — were hiding in clefts and caves.

an essay about birds

It is now thought that the world’s oldest modern bird, Asteriornis maastrichtensis , could probably fly and was combing the shallow beaches of today’s Belgium, in the way of modern long-legged shore birds, 700,000 years before the K-Pg mass extinction.

Because of a wealth of new fossil evidence in China, we now also know that feathers are far more ancient than we once thought; they didn’t evolve with birds 150 million years ago but are instead probably as old as dinosaurs themselves. In fact, many of the dinosaurs that we have been trained to think of as scaly, were at least partially feathered, including the fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex , which may have used its primitive feathers, like a peacock, for display.

Powerful electron microscopes have allowed scientists to determine that the long filaments covering 150-million-year-old Sinosauropteryx , the first feathered non-avian dinosaur discovered, in China, in 1996, were “proto-feathers”; and even, looking at the melanosomes inside them, that they were ginger, running in a “Mohican” pattern down its back and ending in a stripey white-and-ginger tail. Similar examination of the melanosomes of another Jurassic-era theropod found that it had a grey-and-dark plumage on its body, long white and black-spangled forelimbs, and a reddish-brown, fluffy crown.

Scientists are puzzled about what dinosaurs’ feathers, which developed before the capacity of feathered flight, were “for”, but I don’t really care: the fact of them is startling enough, along with the imaginative readjustments we have to make in seeing the fearsome creatures of paleoart that we grew up with, locked in orgasmic conflict, as softly plumaged. Did their young call for them with the same open-mouthed yearning as baby birds, I wonder? Did they possess their own sense of beauty? If we imagine dinosaurs as being less alien and fluffier, does it make our own era’s potential annihilation seem more real?

Read more: Meet the prehistoric eagle that ruled Australian forests 25 million years ago

Over the last century folkorists and psychoanalysts have kept trying to account for birds’ deep hold over our imaginations; as agents of death, prophets, ferriers of souls, omens, and symbols of renewal and productivity. Some attribute it to the power of flight and their ability to inhabit the heavens, others to the way eggs embody transformation. But could it be that the vestigial shrew-like part of ourselves has always recognised them instinctively as the emissaries of a deep past, much older than we are? “We float on a bubble of space-time,” writes author Verlyn Klinkenberg , “on the surface of an ocean of deep time”.

an essay about birds

Recently, this deep past has begun to reassert itself as, even during coronavirus lockdowns, burned fossil fuels continue to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, bringing its concentration in the air to levels not seen since the Pliocene three million years ago when the seas were 30 metres higher. To try to help us understand the literal profundity of this moment in the history of the earth, writers have been looking increasingly below its surface, far beyond the human realm, to its deepest, billions-of-years-old strata.

In his astonishing Underland , English writer Robert Macfarlane travels physically far underground into caves, mines, and nuclear waste bunkers, to revive our ancient sense of awe as forces and substances once thought safely confined there begin to exert themselves above ground, but also to convey the enormity of the long shadow we will cast into the future of a planet that has already seen periods of great transformation.

In Timefulness , geologist Marcia Bjornerud argues that understanding the Earth through her discipline’s vastly expanded time-scales can help us avoid the almost unthinkably grave consequences of our actions. We live in an era of time denial, she writes, while navigating towards the future with conceptions of the long patterns of planetary history as primitive as a 14th-century world map. And yet, she writes, “as a daughter, mother, and widow, I struggle like everyone else to look Time honestly in the face.”

Yet here, I think, all around us on the surface of the planet, are our vivacious and inscrutable companions, feathered messengers from deep time, who still tell their own story of complex change.

an essay about birds

What lives and dies

At a writer’s festival in northern New South Wales, I remember, a magpie lark landed between the chair and speaker on stage to let forth a cascade of liquid notes, “as if, to say,” a droll friend sitting next to me said, “I too have something to contribute!” while I found myself wondering, yet again, how something with such a small heart could be so alive.

an essay about birds

To think about dinosaurs, as evolutionary biologist Steven Brusatte writes , is to confront the question of what lives and what dies. To think that dinosaurs were far more complex than we imagined, Klinkenberg muses, interrupts the chain of consequence we’ve been carrying in our heads, which assumes that deep time’s purpose was to lead to us as the end point of evolution. The history of feathers and wings, in which the power of flight appears to have been discovered and lost at least three times, shows that evolution is not a tree, but a clumped bush. And yet, Klinkenberg writes, “Because we come after, it’s easy to suppose we must be the purpose of what came before.”

The same could be said of mothers. When the time came to choose the photographs for my mother’s funeral, the images of her as a child in Mexico and Canada seemed as unreal as dispatches from the moon. The photographs of our mothers as young girls are so affecting a friend wrote to me, because they show them living lives that were whole without us. Now my own children turn their heads away from pictures of me as a girl, because, they say, “You don’t look like you.” And yet, if our minds struggle to encompass the deep time of our mothers, I think, how can they hope to stretch across aeons?

On my last visit to my mother, I left her on her front step throwing meat to the two magpies which had learned to come around from the backyard, away from the other birds, and would follow her on stilted legs around the garden. When she pressed her emergency pendant the next morning, I missed her call; it was my partner, hearing her faint answers, who called the ambulance. Unconscious in the hospital, she died having never known that she had left her home. When I stopped back at the house afterwards, one of the butcher birds, which I had never seen around the front, was on the windowsill of her dark bedroom, break pressed against the glass, looking for her.

This is an extract from Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss by Delia Falconer, published by Simon and Schuster.

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Essay on Birds in 600 Words for School Students in English

an essay about birds

  • Updated on  
  • Jan 15, 2024

Essay on birds

Essay on birds: Did you know that the fastest bird, the Peregrine Falcon, can fly at a speed of 300km per hour? Birds are an important part of our environment and help with the ecological balance.

We all love the chirping sound of birds. But do you know that listening to the chirping birds can help you reduce your stress? Yes, it is about wondering how the language of any creature can help humans in their tough times.

Another, most interesting fact about birds is that they are found everywhere in the atmosphere. From the coldest region on Earth to the warmest place on Earth, you can find birds everywhere, and this way they bring you closer to the natural world.

Table of Contents

  • 1 Types of Birds 
  • 2 Why Birds are Important for the Environment 
  • 3 Why are Birds Endangered?

Also Read: English Essay Topics

Also Read: How to Write an Essay in English

Also Read: Speech on Republic Day for Class 12th

Types of Birds 

It is assumed that in total there are 11,000 species of birds and among those species, there are 50 billion birds that live on the Earth. In the huge population of birds, we can classify the population based on their habitat, the type of food they eat, how they appear, their vocalization and as well as the fact of fun, which generally belongs to the family of corvid, the strongly built and stout billed birds around 9 to 28 inches long. 

Why not share some details about the type of birds in short? 

The habitat birds or bird habitat are the type of birds that are restricted to a specific area. These areas meet all the requirements of the essentials needed by the type of habitat birds. 

It is surprising that birds too have their unique tastes related to the type of food they eat. 

We can classify such categories into sub-categories such as Carnivorous which feed on meat, Avivorous are the birds that eat other birds, Insectivorous are the birds that feed on insects, Granivors main food includes grain and seeds, Mucivorous feed on the mucus of plants and trees, Nectivorous are the birds which are feed on the nectar of flower, and last but not the least Palynivorous are the birds which only eats pollen of flowers. 

Why Birds are Important for the Environment 

Where on the one hand birds provide peace to the human brain so on the other hand they also help the ecosystem. It helps in pollination, and fertilization and helps in bringing a new flower into the world. As scavengers birds, they also help bring back nutrients into the ground and help the ecosystem keep clean by consuming the dead organisms. 

It will be a surprising fact for you that even the poop of birds can fertilize the land for your crop. All the services of birds that help the planet keep growing are called ecosystem services. 

Why are Birds Endangered?

After learning about the list of benefits of the birds for the environment, it becomes more important to know why the birds are at risk or endangered.

One of the major reasons for the extinction of birds is the expansion of the human population and its settlement. Cutting down trees, clearing the forest for timber or urbanization makes further mating and availability of food difficult. Also, the spreading of pollution, and the use of pesticides which when consumed by the birds not only make them unhealthy but also become one of the major reasons for their death. 

¨I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.¨ 

D. H. Lawrence

In conclusion, birds are just not the mode of entertainment or bringing peace to our minds. They are the best gift from the almighty to our Earth and desire to live in the same way as any other creature exists. Dreaming to live like a bird is easy but to endanger a bird without our profit is a bit hard, but as humans, we can do this and return them what they give us. 

Also Read: Birds of a Feather Flock Together Meaning and Example

Ans: Birds help in the process of pollination, their poop can fertilize the soil, they help in controlling pests, and helps in the dispersal of seeds. 

Ans: A bird is a warm-blooded animal, featured with feathers that are modified from forelimbs.

Ans: The five characteristics of birds are: Birds have feathers; not all birds can fly; the beak of birds is made up of a bony core which is surrounded by a layer of keratin that is thin; all birds lay eggs with a hard shell mostly made up of calcium; and birds help in reducing stress.  

Ans: Yes, birds are adoring and attractive pets. 

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Deepika Joshi

Deepika Joshi is an experienced content writer with expertise in creating educational and informative content. She has a year of experience writing content for speeches, essays, NCERT, study abroad and EdTech SaaS. Her strengths lie in conducting thorough research and ananlysis to provide accurate and up-to-date information to readers. She enjoys staying updated on new skills and knowledge, particulary in education domain. In her free time, she loves to read articles, and blogs with related to her field to further expand her expertise. In personal life, she loves creative writing and aspire to connect with innovative people who have fresh ideas to offer.

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Essay on Birds 200+ Words

Birds are incredible creatures that grace our skies and forests, adding beauty, diversity, and significance to our world. In this essay, we will explore the marvelous world of birds, their importance in our ecosystem, and the fascinating aspects of their lives.

A World of Diversity

Birds come in an astonishing array of shapes, sizes, and colors. From the majestic bald eagle soaring high to the tiny hummingbird flitting about flowers, there’s a bird for every environment. In fact, there are over 10,000 different species of birds worldwide, each with its unique characteristics.

The Power of Flight

One of the most remarkable features of birds is their ability to fly. Their wings allow them to navigate the skies effortlessly. Birds have fascinated scientists for centuries, and their aerodynamic designs have inspired innovations in aviation. Leonardo da Vinci, a brilliant inventor, studied bird flight to create his flying machine designs.

Environmental Indicators

Birds serve as important indicators of the health of our environment. They are highly sensitive to changes in their surroundings. Ornithologists, scientists who study birds, often use bird populations as indicators of environmental changes. A decline in certain bird species can signal problems like pollution or habitat destruction.

Ecosystem Engineers

Birds play vital roles in ecosystems by acting as “ecosystem engineers.” For example, woodpeckers create holes in trees that later become homes for other animals. Birds also help control insect populations by feeding on them. In this way, they help maintain the delicate balance of nature.

Seed Dispersers

Many birds are essential for spreading seeds. When birds eat fruits and then travel to other locations, they help plants spread and grow in new areas. This process, known as seed dispersal, is crucial for the survival of various plant species.

Songbirds and Their Melodies

Songbirds are famous for their melodious tunes. They communicate, find mates, and establish territories through their songs. Ornithologists have discovered that some birds, like the nightingale, have incredibly complex songs, with each note having a specific purpose.

Migration Marvels

Birds embark on incredible journeys during migration. They fly thousands of miles to find food, avoid harsh weather, or breed in suitable areas. For example, the Arctic Tern holds the record for the longest annual migration, traveling from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back.

Birds as Inspirations

Birds have been a source of inspiration for humans throughout history. Their grace and beauty have inspired countless works of art, literature, and poetry. Famous painters like John James Audubon dedicated their lives to depicting the beauty of birds in their natural habitats.

Birds and Biodiversity

Birds are an essential part of Earth’s biodiversity. They contribute to the interconnected web of life, where every species plays a role. When we protect birds and their habitats, we also protect countless other species and the overall health of our planet.

Conclusion of Essay on Birds

In conclusion, birds are more than just creatures that fill our skies and forests. They are diverse, adaptable, and vital to the balance of nature. Birds’ ability to fly, their environmental significance, and their cultural and artistic inspiration make them truly remarkable. It is our responsibility to appreciate, protect, and conserve these feathered marvels and ensure that they continue to enrich our world for generations to come. Birds are not just a part of nature; they are a part of our shared human heritage, reminding us of the wonders of the natural world.

Also Check: List of 500+ Topics for Writing Essay

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vivid pink American flamingos on a black background

Why Birds Matter, and Are Worth Protecting

They help the environment, but they also help our souls. In 2018 we’ll explore the wonder of birds, and why we can’t live without them.

For most of my life, I didn’t pay attention to birds. Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling and who hurries out to see a golden plover that’s been reported in the neighborhood, just because it’s a beautiful bird, with truly golden plumage, and has flown all the way from Alaska. When someone asks me why birds are so important to me, all I can do is sigh and shake my head, as if I’ve been asked to explain why I love my brothers. And yet the question is a fair one, worth considering in the centennial year of America’s Migratory Bird Treaty Act : Why do birds matter?

My answer might begin with the vast scale of the avian domain. If you could see every bird in the world, you’d see the whole world. Things with feathers can be found in every corner of every ocean and in land habitats so bleak that they’re habitats for nothing else. Gray gulls raise their chicks in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth.

Emperor penguins incubate their eggs in Antarctica in winter. Goshawks nest in the Berlin cemetery where Marlene Dietrich is buried, sparrows in Manhattan traffic lights, swifts in sea caves, vultures on Himalayan cliffs, chaffinches in Chernobyl. The only forms of life more widely distributed than birds are microscopic.

To survive in so many different habitats, the world’s 10,000 or so bird species have evolved into a spectacular diversity of forms. They range in size from the ostrich, which can reach nine feet in height and is widespread in Africa, to the aptly named bee hummingbird, found only in Cuba. Their bills can be massive (pelicans, toucans), tiny (weebills), or as long as the rest of their body (sword-billed hummingbirds). Some birds—the painted bunting in Texas, Gould’s sunbird in South Asia, the rainbow lorikeet in Australia—are gaudier than any flower. Others come in one of the nearly infinite shades of brown that tax the vocabulary of avian taxonomists: rufous, fulvous, ferruginous, bran-colored, foxy.

The Year of the Bird

In 1918 Congress passed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to protect birds from wanton killing. To celebrate the centennial, National Geographic is partnering with the National Audubon Society , BirdLife International , and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to declare 2018 the Year of the Bird . Sign the pledge to find out this month's action and share your actions using #BirdYourWorld to increase your impact.

a secretary bird with white feathers and an orange eye ring on a black background

Birds are no less diverse behaviorally. Some are highly social, others anti. African queleas and flamingos gather in flocks of millions, and parakeets build whole parakeet cities out of sticks. Dippers walk alone and underwater, on the beds of mountain streams, and a wandering albatross may glide on its 10-foot wingspan 500 miles away from any other albatrosses. I’ve met friendly birds, like the New Zealand fantail that once followed me down a trail, and I’ve met mean ones, like the caracara in Chile that swooped down and tried to knock my head off when I stared at it too long. Roadrunners kill rattlesnakes for food by teaming up on them, one bird distracting the snake while another sneaks up behind it. Bee-eaters eat bees. Leaftossers toss leaves. Thick-billed murres can dive underwater to a depth of 700 feet, peregrine falcons downward through the air at 240 miles an hour. A wren-like rushbird can spend its entire life beside one half-acre pond, while a cerulean warbler may migrate to Peru and then find its way back to the tree in New Jersey where it nested the year before.

From finery to flight

Feathers first appeared not on birds but on dinosaurs long before birds evolved; even some early tyrannosaurs sported primitive ones. Dinosaur feathers were likely used for insulation or display. More complex feathers specialized for flight took birds—the sole remaining dinosaur lineage—to new heights.

a Malayan peacock pheasant on a black background

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Birds aren’t furry and cuddly, but in many respects they’re more similar to us than other mammals are. They build intricate homes and raise families in them. They take long winter vacations in warm places. Cockatoos are shrewd thinkers, solving puzzles that would challenge a chimpanzee, and crows like to play. (On days so windy that more practical birds stay grounded, I’ve seen crows launching themselves off hillsides and doing aerial somersaults, just for the fun of it, and I keep returning to the YouTube video of a crow in Russia sledding down a snowy roof on a plastic lid, flying back up with the lid in its beak, and sledding down again.) And then there are the songs with which birds, like us, fill the world. Nightingales trill in the suburbs of Europe, thrushes in downtown Quito, hwameis in Chengdu. Chickadees have a complex language for communicating—not only to each other but to every bird in their neighborhood—about how safe or unsafe they feel from predators. Some lyrebirds in eastern Australia sing a tune their ancestors may have learned from a settler’s flute nearly a century ago. If you shoot too many pictures of a lyrebird, it will add the sound of your camera to its repertoire.

a colorful bird on a black book cover

But birds also do the thing we all wish we could do but can’t, except in dreams: They fly. Eagles effortlessly ride thermals; hummingbirds pause in midair; quail burst into flight heart-stoppingly. Taken all together, the flight paths of birds bind the planet together like 100 billion filaments, tree to tree and continent to continent. There was never a time when the world seemed large to them. After breeding, a European swift will stay aloft for nearly a year, flying to sub-Saharan Africa and back, eating and molting and sleeping on the wing, without landing once. Young albatrosses spend as many as 10 years roving the open ocean before they first return to land to breed. A bar-tailed godwit has been tracked flying nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand, 7,264 miles in nine days, while a ruby-throated hummingbird may burn up a third of its tiny body weight to cross the Gulf of Mexico. The red knot, a small shorebird species, makes annual round-trips between Tierra del Fuego and the Canadian Arctic; one long-lived individual, named B95 for the tag on its leg, has flown more miles than separate the Earth and the moon.

a bright green superb parrot on a black background

For Hungry Minds

There is, however, one critical ability that human beings have and birds do not: mastery of their environment. Birds can’t protect wetlands, can’t manage a fishery, can’t air-condition their nests. They have only the instincts and the physical abilities that evolution has bequeathed to them. These have served them well for a very long time, 150 million years longer than human beings have been around. But now human beings are changing the planet—its surface, its climate, its oceans—too quickly for birds to adapt to by evolving. Crows and gulls may thrive at our garbage dumps, blackbirds and cowbirds at our feedlots, robins and bulbuls in our city parks. But the future of most bird species depends on our commitment to preserving them. Are they valuable enough for us to make the effort?

Value, in the late Anthropocene, has come almost exclusively to mean economic value, utility to human beings. And certainly many wild birds are usefully edible. Some of them in turn eat noxious insects and rodents. Many others perform vital roles—pollinating plants, spreading seeds, serving as food for mammalian predators—in ecosystems whose continuing wildness has touristic or carbon-sequestering value. You may also hear it argued that bird populations function, like the proverbial coal-mine canary, as important indicators of ecological health. But do we really need the absence of birds to tell us when a marsh is severely polluted, a forest slashed and burned, or a fishery destroyed? The sad fact is that wild birds, in themselves, will never pull their weight in the human economy. They want to eat our blueberries.

The gift of song

Wake up early enough almost anywhere, and you’ll likely be treated to some tunes from songbirds, which make up almost half the world’s avian species. Unlike instinctual calls, the extravagantly complex pitch, rhythm, and structure of true birdsongs must be learned early in life and can vary locally within a species.

a yellow prothonotary warbler with it's beak open on a black background

What bird populations do usefully indicate is the health of our ethical values. One reason that wild birds matter—ought to matter—is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They’re the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it. They share descent with the largest animals ever to walk on land: The house finch outside your window is a tiny and beautifully adapted living dinosaur. A duck on your local pond looks and sounds very much like a duck 20 million years ago, in the Miocene epoch, when birds ruled the planet. In an ever more artificial world, where featherless drones fill the air and Angry Birds can be simulated on our phones, we may see no reasonable need to cherish and support the former rulers of the natural realm. But is economic calculation our highest standard? After Shakespeare’s King Lear steps down from the throne, he pleads with his elder two daughters to grant him some vestige of his former majesty. When the daughters reply that they don’t see the need for it, the old king bursts out: “O, reason not the need!” To consign birds to oblivion is to forget what we’re the children of.

Tailored to the task

“The shape of a beak tells a poignant story of each bird’s evolution and survival, and helps us to understand its place in the world,” writes Noah Strycker in Birds of the Photo Ark . A sparrow’s sturdy triangular beak packs the power to crack seeds, while a hawk’s sharp, hooked beak makes short work of prey.

a white-headed duck with a light blue beak on a black background

A person who says, “It’s too bad about the birds, but human beings come first” is making one of two implicit claims. The person may mean that human beings are no better than any other animal—that our fundamentally selfish selves, which are motivated by selfish genes, will always do whatever it takes to replicate our genes and maximize our pleasure, the nonhuman world be damned. This is the view of cynical realists, to whom a concern for other species is merely an annoying form of sentimentality. It’s a view that can’t be disproved, and it’s available to anyone who doesn’t mind admitting that he or she is hopelessly selfish. But “human beings come first” may also have the opposite meaning: that our species is uniquely worthy of monopolizing the world’s resources because we are not like other animals, because we have consciousness and free will, the capacity to remember our pasts and shape our futures. This opposing view can be found among both religious believers and secular humanists, and it too is neither provably true nor provably false. But it does raise the question: If we’re incomparably more worthy than other animals, shouldn’t our ability to discern right from wrong, and to knowingly sacrifice some small fraction of our convenience for a larger good, make us more susceptible to the claims of nature, rather than less? Doesn’t a unique ability carry with it a unique responsibility?

For the benefit of all

Beyond the sheer joy they provide, birds play a vital role in the environment, pollinating plants, dispersing seeds, controlling insects, and removing rotting flesh. “The future of birds, and us, are intertwined more than we know,” writes photographer Joel Sartore in Birds of the Photo Ark . “We soar, or plummet, together.”

three Cape vultures on a black background

A few years ago in a forest in northeast India, I heard and then began to feel, in my chest, a deep rhythmic whooshing. It sounded meteorological, but it was the wingbeats of a pair of great hornbills flying in to land in a fruiting tree. They had massive yellow bills and hefty white thighs; they looked like a cross between a toucan and a giant panda. As they clambered around in the tree, placidly eating fruit, I found myself crying out with the rarest of all emotions: pure joy. It had nothing to do with what I wanted or what I possessed. It was the sheer gorgeous fact of the great hornbill, which couldn’t have cared less about me.

The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value. They are always among us but never of us. They’re the other world-dominating animals that evolution has produced, and their indifference to us ought to serve as a chastening reminder that we’re not the measure of all things. The stories we tell about the past and imagine for the future are mental constructions that birds can do without. Birds live squarely in the present. And at present, although our cats and our windows and our pesticides kill billions of them every year, and although some species, particularly on oceanic islands, have been lost forever, their world is still very much alive. In every corner of the globe, in nests as small as walnuts or as large as haystacks, chicks are pecking through their shells and into the light.

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Essay on birds

Essay on Birds 3 Models

Essay on birds is interesting because it deals with the life of birds in detail. Several examples such as a short essay on types of birds, a paragraph on raising birds at home, the economic value of keeping birds, names of some birds of prey, how to take care of domestic birds, how birds take care of their young, and what is the largest bird.

Information about birds that benefit all students, the food of birds, their reproduction, in addition to the migration of birds, why do birds migrate from their home to another place that may be thousands of kilometers away from their original home.

Essay on birds is a sample topic for fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students, and first, second, and third grade students of middle school and high school.

Essay on birds

Birds are beautiful creatures, which is why all children love them. There are many types of birds, which we will mention in the essay on birds, and the forms of birds differ in terms of size, color, and the way nests are built.

All birds are characterized by beauty and bright colors, in addition to the softness of their feathers. Some birds are able to fly very long distances, even crossing the ocean during their migration without resting. Among the few species that cannot fly at all are penguins and ostriches.

Birds are vertebrates, and they are among the most diverse organisms, with approximately 10,000 species. Birds live in a variety of environments, where they live in mountainous areas, deserts, forests and farms, fields, gardens, cities and homes. That is, they live in diverse environments.

Supernatural qualities distinguish some birds

  • Voice: God distinguished some birds with amazing sounds, which musicians cannot imitate. Examples include the goldfinch and other birds with wonderful sounds, which are more beautiful than the sounds of musical instruments in their beauty. Birds use sounds and vibrations to talk to each other. These sounds are the language of the birds through which they communicate, express their fear or happiness, and other important matters for them, such as places of food, water, and expressions of feelings also during the mating seasons.
  • Feather colors: Birds are characterized by the beauty of their feathers, and its bright colors, and there is an amazing consistency between the colors of birds, which no artist can imagine, just as fashion designers cannot imitate it with the same accuracy. In the essay on birds we will show examples of birds with dazzling colors as the peacock. The male peacock is considered a beautiful painting, as it is characterized by colors and patterns that no artist can paint with such beauty. The colors of birds have many benefits, including attracting females during mating seasons, hiding from enemies, and so on.
  • The power of sight: Some birds are distinguished by the power of sight, such as the falcon, the eagle, and others. The power of sight is useful in hunting prey, as they are seen and their movements are monitored from long distances. Thus, the bird can pounce on its prey without getting away from it. Birds of prey are often distinguished by the power of sight, as they can see prey 1.5 km away.
  • The strength of the limbs: Birds are characterized by the strength of their limbs, as they carry their prey with their claws for long distances. They carry prey to the top of the trees where they build their nests, they carry prey to feed their young, so it is important that their limbs are strong. Some birds also use their legs and wings to defend themselves, or to defend the young.
  • The strength of the beak: Birds’ beaks are generally considered strong, but in birds of prey they are strong and sharp. For example, a hawk or an eagle can slaughter its prey by using the beak. It can also tear the prey into small pieces that it can eat, and the bird also uses its beak to defend itself, and the best example of the strength of the bird’s beak is the woodpecker, which can make holes in the trunks of trees with its beak, while these trees were not affected by storms or rain, and a small bird was able to make large holes in the trunk of the tree so that this hole would be its home, and the birds also feed on solid grains.
  • Sharp claws: Birds have sharp claws, and this helps them in self-defense, as well as in steadfastness on tree branches, so they do not fall while they sleep. Likewise, birds of prey catch their prey with claws, so that they cannot escape, then they also carry it with their claws and fly in the sky until they reach their nests.

Interesting information about bird life

  • Birds are social beings: Most birds live in groups, flying in flocks. Essay on birds We explain the social life of birds, where there is understanding and cooperation between a group of birds, and they support each other. We also see the family bonding between birds, where both the male and the female participate in building the nest, incubating the eggs, feeding the young and defending them. The role played by the male or female varies depending on the type of bird. There are birds in which the male is in charge of preparing the nest, and in other birds the female is in charge of preparing the nest. Sometimes both the male and the female participate in preparing the nest. There are also birds, the male is associated with only one female throughout his life, and the birds grieve when they die or lose one of the spouses or one of the children, they have feelings of love and compassion.
  • Birds lay eggs: the size and color of eggs varies from one bird to another. The ostrich egg is the largest egg, while the smallest egg is the eggs of some types of small birds. Bird eggs are characterized by the strength and hardness of their shell to suit environmental conditions. The male and female exchange incubating the eggs until the young hatch, and in most cases the incubation period for eggs may reach 21 days, as in chickens, or 30 days, as in ducks, geese, and others.
  • The body of birds is lightweight: light weight helps them to fly. In the essay on birds, we will explain this, as birds have a lightweight body, and a streamlined shape that helps them fly. Birds were the source of inspiration for humans in the manufacture of aircraft, scientists have studied the physical characteristics of birds so that they can make aircraft. Its streamlined shape also helps it dive into the water and catch fish.
  • Feathers are soft and shiny: There is no doubt that bird feathers are the source of their beauty, but they also have other benefits, such as protecting the flying body from direct shocks, helping the bird to fly, protecting the bird from weather fluctuations, especially as it protects the bird from rainwater, as rainwater slips on the feathers and does not reach the body of the bird.

Benefits of birds

  • Birds play an essential role in maintaining the ecological balance. Some birds feed on insects, such as the Cattle egrets bird, which works to clean the soil which make the agricultural plants free from parasites and harmful insects, in addition to aerating the agricultural soil, and this helps in improving agricultural production.
  • Birds are an important source of white meat, and bird meat is more beneficial than the meat of other animals such as cows, buffaloes, and sheep, and therefore it is preferred by most people.
  • Bird meat is an important source of proteins that we need for the growth of the body and strengthening the immune system. Bird meat is also characterized by its delicious taste.
  • Pillows are made from the feathers of some birds, and for example, ostrich feathers, from which comfortable pillows are made, and therefore they are sold at very high prices.
  • Birds carry pollen from one tree to another, and this helps trees pollinate naturally without human intervention. This helps to increase the production of fruits such as fruits and others.

The economic importance of birds

We cannot neglect to talk about the economic value of birds. We will mention the importance of expanding bird breeding in the essay on birds, especially poultry farms, which have become widespread in all countries of the world. Poultry farming has become an important industry with high economic value.

Man has been able to develop this vital industry, so that it produces the largest quantity of poultry, in order to meet human needs. There are modern ways to raise poultry, as it provides medical care for poultry, as well as the quality of food, setting the appropriate temperature inside farms and other things that help achieve good profits from poultry farming.

At the end of the essay on birds, interesting information about the life of birds, miraculous qualities that distinguish some birds, and the economic importance of birds have been presented.

It is important to realize that birds are social beings, and they have feelings like us, and they express their feelings by issuing certain sounds, and they grieve at the death of one of the spouses, so that they also become depressed and may die of grief.

Therefore, we must treat birds gently, and provide them with the necessary health care, and you can seek the help of a veterinarian to learn how to properly raise birds.

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Simple Essay on Birds in English for Kids and Students (500 & 1000 Words)

Essay on birds for students (1000 words).

Birds, members of the class Aves, are one of the most diverse and captivating groups of animals on Earth. With over 10,000 species found in various ecosystems across the globe, they display a wide range of behaviors, adaptations, and ecological roles.

Birds have long captured the human imagination, serving as symbols of freedom, beauty, and mystery. In this essay on birds , we will explore the world of birds, delving into their evolution, anatomy, behavior, ecological significance, and the unique characteristics that make them so fascinating.

Evolution of Birds

1. origins of flight.

The evolution of birds can be traced back to a group of small, bipedal, feathered dinosaurs known as theropods. Approximately 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic period, these theropods began to develop adaptations for powered flight, ultimately giving rise to the first true birds. Archaeopteryx, a famous fossil from the late Jurassic, is considered an important transitional species, showcasing both reptilian and avian features. The evolution of feathers played a pivotal role in the development of flight, providing both insulation and aerodynamic capabilities.

2. Adaptive Radiation

Following the emergence of true birds, they underwent remarkable adaptive radiation, leading to the diverse avian species we see today. This radiation saw the development of various ecological niches and specialized adaptations, such as beak shapes, wing structures, and feeding strategies, which allowed birds to exploit a wide range of environments, from forests and grasslands to deserts and oceans.

Anatomy and Physiology

1. feathers.

Feathers are perhaps the most iconic feature of birds. They serve multiple functions, including insulation, waterproofing, camouflage, and, of course, flight. Feathers are made of a protein called keratin, the same substance found in human hair and nails. The intricate structure of feathers contributes to their remarkable strength and flexibility, enabling the complex motions required for powered flight.

2. Skeleton and Musculature

The skeletal structure of birds is highly adapted for flight. Hollow bones reduce weight while providing strength, and the fused bones in the avian skeleton contribute to its rigidity. Powerful flight muscles, often constituting a significant portion of a bird’s body mass, enable birds to generate the force necessary for takeoff and sustained flight. Additionally, the unique structure of the avian respiratory system, including air sacs, allows for a continuous flow of oxygen, supporting the high metabolic demands of flight.

Birds are renowned for their exceptional vision. Many species have keen eyesight, with some raptors capable of spotting prey from great heights. The adaptations in their eyes, including a higher number of cones for color vision and a specialized structure called the pecten, enhance their visual capabilities.

Behavior and Communication

1. courtship and mating.

Birds exhibit a remarkable diversity of courtship rituals and displays. From the elaborate plumage of male peacocks to the intricate songs of songbirds, these behaviors play a crucial role in mate selection. Monogamy, polygamy, and even cooperative breeding systems are observed in various bird species, each with its own set of social dynamics.

2. Song and Vocalizations

Birds use vocalizations for a variety of purposes, including territory defense, communication within flocks, and attracting mates. The complexity of bird songs is astounding, with some species capable of mimicking other sounds, including human-made noises. The learning and development of songs in species like songbirds offer valuable insights into the neural basis of complex behavior.

3. Migration

Migration is a behavior observed in many bird species, enabling them to cope with seasonal changes in resource availability. The journeys of migratory birds cover thousands of miles and often involve impressive feats of navigation. Advances in tracking technology have shed light on the intricacies of these long-distance migrations.

Ecology and Conservation

1. ecological roles.

Birds play essential roles in ecosystems as pollinators, seed dispersers, scavengers, and predators. Their interactions with plants, insects, and other animals have far-reaching effects on the structure and function of ecological communities. Birds also contribute to nutrient cycling through their activities, such as nesting and foraging.

2. Threats and Conservation

Despite their ecological significance, many bird species face threats to their survival. Habitat loss, pollution, climate change, and invasive species have led to population declines and extinctions. Conservation efforts, including habitat restoration, captive breeding programs, and international agreements like the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, aim to protect these vital members of our ecosystems.

Notable Bird Species

1. bald eagle.

The bald eagle is an iconic symbol of the United States and a conservation success story. Once endangered due to habitat destruction and the effects of the pesticide DDT, the bald eagle has made a remarkable recovery following protective measures.

2. Albatross

Albatrosses are known for their incredible wingspans and long-distance oceanic flights. They are masters of dynamic soaring, a technique that allows them to cover vast distances with minimal energy expenditure.

3. Hummingbirds

Hummingbirds are renowned for their rapid wing beats, hovering abilities, and iridescent plumage. Their unique feeding behavior involves sipping nectar from flowers while hovering, and they play a crucial role in pollination.

Birds are amazing. They show how animals can change and adapt over time. Birds started out as feathered dinosaurs. Now they fly high in the sky like eagles. Or sing beautiful songs.

Birds do interesting things. Their bodies are complex. They play key roles in nature. So we should protect birds and their homes. This will keep them around for future generations. It will help keep nature in balance.

Birds Essay in English (500 Words)

Introduction: Birds, the feathered denizens of the skies, are a fascinating and diverse group of creatures that have captured the human imagination for millennia.

From the majestic eagle soaring high above the mountains to the tiny hummingbird, hovering delicately by a flower, birds inhabit virtually every corner of our planet, adapting to a wide range of environments and playing vital roles in ecosystems.

In this essay, we will delve deeper into the captivating world of birds, exploring their remarkable adaptations, behaviors, and ecological significance.

The Wonder of Avian Adaptations

1. feathers: nature’s masterpieces.

Feathers are the defining feature of birds, serving multiple functions beyond flight. While they enable powered flight in species like eagles and sparrows, feathers also provide insulation, waterproofing, and camouflage.

Their astonishing diversity includes everything from the iridescent plumes of peacocks to the specialized wing feathers of owls, allowing for silent flight.

2. Beaks and Bills

Birds exhibit a stunning variety of beak shapes and sizes, each finely tuned to their dietary preferences. From the long, probing bills of hummingbirds to the powerful, hooked beaks of raptors, these adaptations enable birds to access and consume a wide range of foods, including nectar, seeds, fish, and insects.

3. Migration Marvels

Many bird species engage in remarkable long-distance migrations, covering thousands of miles. These epic journeys are driven by seasonal changes in resource availability. Navigation and orientation abilities honed over generations allow them to traverse oceans, deserts, and mountains with astonishing precision.

The Symphony of Birdsong

1. communication and song.

Birds are renowned for their vocalizations, with each species having its unique repertoire of calls and songs. These sounds serve various purposes, from attracting mates and defending territories to communicating within flocks and warning of predators.

The songs of birds, such as nightingales and canaries, have inspired human musicians and poets for centuries.

2. Complex Learning

The ability of some bird species, notably songbirds, to learn and imitate songs is a testament to their cognitive prowess. Young birds learn their songs from adult conspecifics, and this process involves the brain regions responsible for learning and memory. Studying this behavior has provided insights into the neural basis of complex learning.

Ecological Significance

1. pollinators and seed dispersers.

Birds play crucial roles in ecosystems as pollinators and seed dispersers. Hummingbirds and sunbirds, for example, are effective pollinators for numerous plant species. Additionally, birds consume fruits and disperse seeds, aiding in the regeneration of forests and the diversity of plant life.

2. Pest Control

Many bird species are voracious insectivores, helping to control insect populations. Barn swallows and purple martins, for instance, consume large numbers of flying insects, benefiting agriculture and reducing the need for chemical pesticides.

Conservation Challenges

1. habitat loss.

Habitat destruction remains one of the most significant threats to bird populations worldwide. Deforestation, urbanization, and agricultural expansion continue to fragment and degrade natural habitats, pushing many species towards endangerment or extinction.

2. Climate Change

Climate change poses additional challenges to bird populations. Shifts in temperature and precipitation patterns can disrupt migration timing, alter food availability, and impact nesting success. Birds must adapt rapidly to these changing conditions, often facing an uphill battle for survival.

The preservation of birds and their habitats is not merely an ecological concern but also a moral and cultural imperative. Conservation efforts, from establishing protected areas and wildlife corridors to reducing pesticide use and promoting sustainable land management practices, are essential to safeguarding avian biodiversity.

Birds, with their stunning adaptations, captivating songs, and vital ecological roles, enrich our lives in countless ways. They remind us of the intricate web of life that connects all living beings on our planet. As stewards of the Earth, it is our responsibility to cherish and protect these feathered wonders, ensuring that the skies continue to be filled with their symphony of life and diversity for generations to come.

More Essays:

Essay on Birds for Students, 500 Words Essay

Essay on Birds: Birds are a diverse group of feathered, warm-blooded, egg-laying, and vertebrate animals. They are found all over the world and can be found in a wide range of habitats, from deserts to rainforests, and from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Birds are known for their ability to fly, which is made possible by their lightweight, hollow bones, and powerful muscles.

Essay on Birds

Introduction, types of birds and their characteristics, the role of birds in the ecosystem, threats to bird populations.

Essay on Birds

Birds have a wide range of physical characteristics, depending on the species. They come in many different shapes, sizes, and colours , and have a variety of beak and feather types. Birds also have specialized adaptations that help them to survive in different environments, such as webbed feet for swimming and talons for hunting.

Birds play an important role in the ecosystem. They are important pollinators, seed dispersers, and pest controllers. They also play a role in the food chain, serving as both predators and prey. Many bird species are migratory, travelling long distances between breeding and wintering grounds.

Birds are facing many threats, including habitat loss, pollution, climate change, and hunting. These threats have led to a decline in bird populations and many species are now considered endangered. Conservation efforts are being made to protect bird populations, such as habitat restoration and protected areas, but more work is needed to ensure their survival.

  • Sparrows are small, brown birds with short beaks.
  • Eagles have large, powerful bodies and sharp talons for hunting.
  • Pigeons are plump, gray birds that are often found in cities.
  • Hawks have sharp beaks and talons and are strong flyers.
  • Parrots are brightly coloured birds with curved beaks, they are known for their ability to mimic human speech.
  • Robins have red breasts and are known for their cheerful, melodic songs.
  • Peacocks are large, colourful birds with long tails and are known for their distinctive calls.
  • Ostrich is the largest bird in the world with long legs and necks, they can run at high speeds and cannot fly.
  • Swans are large, graceful birds with long necks and pure white feathers.
  • Hummingbirds are tiny birds known for their rapid wing beats and ability to hover in mid-air while feeding on nectar.

Description of different bird families and their unique characteristics

  • Sparrows belong to the family Passeridae and are known for their small size, brown plumage, and short beaks. They are found in a wide range of habitats around the world and are known for their adaptability.
  • Eagles belong to the family Accipitridae and are known for their large, powerful bodies and sharp talons. They are found on every continent except Antarctica and are known for their hunting and scavenging abilities.
  • Pigeons and doves belong to the family Columbidae and are known for their plump, gray bodies and short beaks. They are found on every continent and are known for their ability to thrive in urban environments.
  • Hawks belong to the family Accipitridae and are known for their sharp beaks and talons, and strong flying abilities. They are found in a wide range of habitats around the world and are known for their hunting and scavenging abilities.
  • Parrots belong to the family Psittacidae and are known for their brightly coloured plumage and curved beaks. They are found in tropical and subtropical regions around the world and are known for their intelligence and ability to mimic human speech.
  • Robins belong to the family Turdidae and are known for their red breasts and cheerful, melodic songs. They are found in wooded areas and suburban gardens in North America and Europe.
  • Peacocks belong to the family Phasianidae and are known for their large size, colourful plumage, and long tails. They are found in Asia and are known for their distinctive calls.
  • Ostriches belong to the family Struthionidae and are the largest bird in the world. They have long legs and necks and can run at high speeds. They are found in Africa and are known for their flightless nature.
  • Swans belong to the family Anatidae and are known for their large size, graceful movements, and pure white feathers. They are found in a wide range of freshwater and coastal habitats around the world.
  • Hummingbirds belong to the family Trochilidae, they are known for their tiny size, rapid wing beats, and ability to hover in mid-air while feeding on nectar. They are found in the Americas and are known for their bright colours and high energy.

Birds play a vital role in the ecosystem. They are important pollinators, seed dispersers, and predators that help to control insect and rodent populations. They also provide food for other animals, including mammals, reptiles, and other birds. Some birds are also important indicators of ecosystem health, as changes in their populations or behaviour can signal problems with the environment.

Birds are also important for cultural and aesthetic reasons. They are enjoyed by people for their beauty, songs, and behaviour, and many people participate in birdwatching as a hobby. Birds are also important in many cultures and religions and have played a role in the mythology and folklore of many societies.

Birds also have an ecological role, for example, Some birds such as vultures, eagles, and condors are scavengers and help to clean up dead animal remains. Hawks, falcons, and owls are predators that help control rodent and insect populations. Woodpeckers, nuthatches, and other birds that feed on tree-dwelling insects help to control these pests and protect forest health. Many songbirds are important pollinators and help to fertilize plants by carrying pollen on their feathers as they move from flower to flower. Birds also play a role in seed dispersal, helping to spread the seeds of plants over large areas.

Birds play multiple roles in the ecosystem, such as:

  • Pollination: Many songbirds help fertilize plants by carrying pollen on their feathers as they move from flower to flower.
  • Seed Dispersal: They help to spread the seeds of plants over large areas, and thus play an important role in plant regeneration and forest health.
  • Pest Control: Hawks, falcons, and owls are predators that help control rodent and insect populations. Woodpeckers, nuthatches, and other birds that feed on tree-dwelling insects help to control these pests and protect forest health.
  • Scavenging: Some birds such as vultures, eagles, and condors are scavengers and help to clean up dead animal remains.

There are various threats to bird populations, some of the main ones include:

  • Habitat loss: The destruction, fragmentation, and degradation of natural habitats such as forests, wetlands, and grasslands is a major threat to bird populations. Many bird species are adapted to specific habitats and are unable to survive when these habitats are destroyed.
  • Climate change: Climate change is having a major impact on bird populations. Changes in temperature and precipitation patterns can affect the timing of migration, breeding, and food availability, making it difficult for birds to find the resources they need to survive.
  • Invasive species: Non-native plants and animals can outcompete native species for food and habitat, making it harder for native birds to survive. Invasive species can also introduce diseases that can harm native bird populations.
  • Pollution: Pollution in the form of pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals can harm birds and their food sources, making it difficult for them to survive.
  • Overhunting and poaching: Illegal hunting and poaching can have a significant impact on bird populations, particularly in tropical regions where many species are hunted for their feathers, meat, or eggs.
  • Human disturbance: Some birds are also threatened by human disturbances such as light pollution, noise pollution and human encroachment, which can disrupt their breeding, migration and feeding.

Overall, these threats are interconnected, and conservation efforts must address multiple issues in order to be effective in protecting bird populations.

In conclusion, birds play a vital role in the ecosystem and are important for cultural, aesthetic and ecological reasons. However, bird populations are facing many threats such as habitat loss, climate change, invasive species, pollution, overhunting and poaching and human disturbance. These threats are interconnected and must be addressed in order to effectively protect bird populations and maintain the balance of the ecosystem. Conservation efforts such as habitat restoration, protection of breeding and migration sites, regulation of hunting and trapping, and reducing pollution and human disturbance are essential to preserving bird populations and the vital services they provide.

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an essay about birds

Essay On Birds

500+ words essay on birds, their characteristics and how they’re important for the environment.

Of all animals in the world, birds are one of the most fascinating creatures. These winged animals can walk on the ground and even fly high in the skies. The wings, the hundreds of feathers that cover their bodies and their hollow bones are what helps them lift their bodies and fly. But not all birds can fly, birds like ostriches and penguins are flightless birds. 

There are thousands of species of birds on Earth and each of them is unique. Most of them are herbivorous, but a few species of birds are carnivorous. For example, kites, vultures, hawks, eagles etc are called birds of prey because they eat other animals.

Birds are extremely important for our environment. From pollination to keeping the earth clean and even predicting weather conditions, birds are extremely useful. In this essay on birds, learn about the characteristics of birds and how they’re vital to our ecosystem and it’s balance.

Essay On Birds: Characteristics Of Birds

Here are 5 major characteristics of birds:

  • Wings: Wings are what differentiate birds from other animals. These wings are what help the birds fly. But not all birds have wings. Some birds like penguins have flippers, which helps them swim.
  • Feathers: Feathers are another defining feature of birds, which separate them from other animals. Feathers help birds fly and also keep them warm and protect them against the elements.
  • Beak or bill:  All birds have a beak or a bill, which is a bony projection on their faces. These beaks or bills are the entry to a bird’s mouth. Different species of birds have different kinds of beaks or bills depending on their diet. For example, predatory birds like hawks and eagles have sharp, hooked beaks, which helps in tearing and ripping meat. Birds with cone shaped beaks help them break the shells of nuts and seeds to eat them. Aquatic birds like ducks and geese have bills, which help them strain food from the water. Some birds like hummingbirds have a sharp needle-like beak that helps them suck nectar from flowers.
  • Skeleton: Another distinguishing feature of birds is their hollow and lightweight but strong skeleton. This is what helps the bird lift itself off the ground and fly into the sky. But this differs in flightless birds. Penguins have large, marrow-filled bones and fat, which protects them against the cold in their frozen habitat. Ostriches have heavy, solid bones and muscles in their legs, which gives them the strength to run at high speeds and kick powerfully. 
  • Eggs: Another distinctive feature of birds is that they give birth to their young ones by laying and hatching eggs. Most birds construct nests to lay and hatch their eggs and care for their hatchlings.

Now that you know the different characteristics of birds, read on to learn about the importance of birds for our environment in this essay on birds.

Also explore: Essay on animals and Essay on Zoo .

Essay On Birds: The Importance Of Birds

Birds are an important part of our environment and food chain, they’re vital to maintain a balance in the ecosystem. In fact, sometimes we need birds more than they need us.

  • Pollination and Seed Dispersion: Birds are extremely important for pollination and dispersing seeds. This helps more plants grow. Additionally, bird droppings also add more nutrients to the soil, so they’re important for soil fertility too.
  • Balance the food chain: Carnivorous birds eat pests and rodents like mice, rats, snakes etc. This keeps a check on rodent population and helps in pest control. Birds that eat carrion help keep the environment clean of decaying matter.
  • Predicting weather: Birds are very intuitive creatures. They’re very sensitive to changes in weather and can sense high levels of carbon monoxide. So, they are often used to predict explosions in coal mines.

Sadly, these beautiful creatures are in danger. The greed of humans, climate change and pollution pose a threat to these fascinating creatures. We need to ensure that the species survives to keep the ecosystem from falling apart.

We hope you found this essay on birds helpful. For more such essays on different topics, check Osmo’s essays for kids .

Frequently Asked Questions On Birds

What are the characteristics that distinguish birds from other animals.

The characteristics that distinguish birds from other animals are their wings, feathers, beaks or bills and their lightweight and hollow skeleton.

How are birds important to the environment?

Birds are important for dispersing seeds and pollination, pest control, balancing the food chain and predicting the weather.

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Essay On Birds – 10 Lines, Short and Long Essay

Essay On Birds – 10 Lines, Short and Long Essay

Key Points to Remember When Writing An Essay On Birds For Lower Primary Classes 

10 lines on birds for kids, paragraph on birds for children, short essay on birds in english for kids, long essay on birds for children, amazing facts about birds for children, what will your child learn from the essay on birds.

Birds, a beautiful part of nature , add joy to our world with their lovely colours, delightful songs, and graceful flights. This article presents a comprehensive bird essay in English designed to engage children and fuel their curiosity about these fascinating creatures. Writing essays on fascinating subjects like birds is a fantastic way to enhance a child’s cognitive abilities . It enhances their research, analysis, and writing skills , ultimately improving their academic performance .

Creating an engaging and informative essay about birds for lower primary classes requires a clear understanding of the subject. Here are some key points to keep in mind:

  • Always start with an interesting introduction.
  • Keep the language simple, making it easy to understand.
  • Use fun facts to keep young readers engaged.
  • Include colourful illustrations, if possible.
  • Finally, end with a thought-provoking or fun conclusion.

In this section, you’ll find an essay on birds for class 1 & 2 children, consisting of 10 simple lines. This brief write-up gives children their first taste of essay writing , with a few lines on birds:

1. Birds are lovely creatures that can fly high in the sky.

2. They have two wings, two legs, and a beak.

3. Birds come in many different shapes, sizes, and colours.

4. They lay eggs, and their babies are called chicks.

5. Birds eat various foods like insects, seeds, fruits, and nectar.

6. Many birds migrate long distances when the seasons change.

7. Some birds can talk or sing beautifully.

8. The peacock is known for its vibrant, colourful feathers.

9. The owl can turn its head almost completely around.

10. Birds help in pollination and seed dispersal.

Next, let’s explore a bird paragraph tailored for young readers. This section, slightly more detailed than the last, provides an opportunity to dive deeper into the fascinating world of birds.

Birds are vital to our ecosystem, bringing it to life with their vibrant colours, charming songs, and remarkable abilities. They vary significantly in size, colour, habitat, and behaviour. Some birds, like sparrows and pigeons, live close to human settlements, while others, such as eagles and penguins, thrive in remote areas. Birds communicate through various sounds, and some can even mimic human speech. Birds are fascinating creatures; understanding them can provide valuable insights into the natural world.

Here is a short essay for students in classes 1, 2 and 3:

Birds, fascinating sky creatures, have captivated human beings for ages. Their grace, beauty, and flying ability make them unique among all living beings. From their colourful plumage to melodic songs, birds are essential to our ecosystem and hold a special place in our hearts.

Birds are delightful creatures that bring joy to our lives. They come in various shapes, sizes, and colours. Some popular ones include sparrows, pigeons, parrots, and peacocks. Birds have feathers and wings that enable them to fly high in the sky, soaring through the clouds. They build nests to lay eggs and take care of their young ones. Watching birds in nature is a delightful experience that teaches us to appreciate the world’s beauty.

Birds, the enchanting creatures of the sky, have long captured the imaginations of people, young and old. From graceful flights to vibrant plumage and melodic songs, birds have an undeniable charm that makes them fascinating subjects to study. In this essay on birds for class 3 and above, we will delve into the captivating world of birds, exploring their diverse species, unique characteristics, ecological significance, and the places they call home. As we embark on this avian adventure, we hope to instil a deeper appreciation for these feathered wonders and their crucial role in maintaining the delicate balance of our planet’s ecosystems. So, let us spread our wings of curiosity and soar into the captivating realm of birds!

What Are Birds?

Birds are warm-blooded vertebrates characterised by their feathers, beaks, and the ability to fly. They belong to the class Aves and are found in various habitats worldwide, ranging from polar regions to tropical rainforests. With around 10,000 species, birds exhibit remarkable diversity in appearance, behaviour, and ecological roles.

Significance of Birds

  • Ecological Balance: Birds are crucial in maintaining environmental balance by controlling insect populations, dispersing seeds, and promoting ecosystem biodiversity.
  • Pollination: Some bird species act as pollinators for various plants, facilitating the process of reproduction and the production of fruits.
  • Indicators of Environmental Health: Birds’ presence and behaviour in an area can serve as indicators of the environment’s overall health and the impact of human activities.
  • Economic Importance: Birds contribute significantly to the economy through birdwatching tourism, poultry farming, and pest control services.

Characteristics Of Birds

  • Feathers: Feathers are a bird’s defining feature. They provide insulation, aid in flight, and display vibrant colours for courtship displays.
  • Hollow Bones: Birds have lightweight, hollow bones that reduce their weight, making flying easy.
  • Beaks: A bird’s beak size and shape are adapted to its diet, enabling it to catch, eat, and process food efficiently.
  • Endothermy: Birds are warm-blooded, maintaining a constant body temperature, essential for their high-energy activities like flying.
  • Oviparous: Birds lay eggs, which hatch into chicks, and the parents care for their young until they are independent.
  • Excellent Vision: Birds have well-developed eyesight, allowing them to spot prey from afar and navigate through various environments.

Type Of Food Birds Eat

  • Depending on their species, birds are omnivores, herbivores, carnivores, or insectivores.
  • Some birds, like eagles and hawks, are carnivores, hunting for small animals and fish.
  • Herbivorous birds, such as pigeons and doves, primarily feed on seeds, fruits, and plants.
  • Insectivorous birds like swallows and sparrows consume insects, helping control insect populations.

Places Where Birds Live

  • Forests and Woodlands
  • Wetlands and Marshes
  • Grasslands and Savannas
  • Coastal Areas and Seashores
  • Urban Areas and Gardens
  • Arctic and Antarctic Regions

My Favorite Bird

My favourite bird is the majestic peacock. With its stunning tail feathers, the peacock displays a mesmerising dance during courtship. It symbolises beauty, grace, and pride. The vibrant colours and intricate patterns on its feathers leave me in awe of the wonders of nature. Birds are integral to our ecosystem, providing aesthetic and ecological benefits. They teach us to appreciate the diversity and beauty of the natural world. Let us cherish and protect these beautiful creatures to ensure a harmonious coexistence on our planet.

Children love exciting trivia. Here are some amazing bird facts:

  • The smallest bird in the world is the Bee Hummingbird, less than 2.5 inches long ( 1 ).
  • The largest bird is the Ostrich , standing up to 9 feet tall ( 2 ).
  • Some birds, like the Arctic Tern, migrate over 25,000 miles yearly ( 3 ).
  • Parrots can mimic human speech ( 4 ).
  • Penguins are birds that cannot fly but are excellent swimmers ( 5 ).

This essay on birds helps children understand the vast diversity of birds and their vital role in maintaining the ecological balance. It also nurtures their curiosity, encourages their research abilities, and improves their writing skills.

1. Which was the first bird on the Earth?

The first bird on Earth was Archaeopteryx ( 6 ), which lived about 150 million years ago during the Jurassic period.

2. How many types of birds are there in the world?

There are about 10,000 known bird species in the world ( 2 ).

3. Why and How Should You Save Birds?

Birds play a crucial role in our ecosystem. We can save birds by conserving their habitats, avoiding harmful pesticides and single-use plastics, and supporting organisations that protect bird populations ( 7 ).

4. How long can birds live?

Bird lifespan varies widely. While some small birds live for only a few years, certain species, like parrots and albatrosses, can live up to 60-80 years.

5. What are the threats faced by birds?

Birds face numerous threats, including habitat loss, climate change, pollution, hunting, and the introduction of invasive species. These threats often decrease bird populations and can even result in the extinction of certain species.

Birds are indeed one of nature’s most delightful creations. Their dazzling diversity, fascinating abilities, and integral role in our ecosystem make them a compelling subject of study. Writing an essay on birds encourages children to explore the intriguing world of these winged wonders and cultivates their appreciation for biodiversity and the need to preserve it. In understanding and valuing birds, we are, in essence, taking strides towards nurturing a generation that respects and protects our planet’s myriad life forms. So, the next time a bird flits across your path, take a moment to appreciate its beauty and consider its crucial role in the harmony of life on Earth.

References/Resources:

1. Hummingbirds; BirdLife International; https://www.birdlife.org/birds/hummingbird/

2. Top 15+ Biggest Birds in the World; Geeks for Geeks; https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/worlds-largest-birds/

3. Arctic Tern; Cornell Lab All About Birds; https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Arctic_Tern/overview

4. Why Do Parrots Talk; National Audubon Society; https://www.audubon.org/news/why-do-parrots-talk

5. Why can’t penguins fly?; Cornell Lab All About Birds; https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/why-cant-penguins-fly/

6. The Origin of Birds; Understanding Evolutions; https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-origin-of-birds/

7. 7 Simple Actions to Live Bird Friendly; Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute; https://nationalzoo.si.edu/migratory-birds/7-simple-actions-live-bird-friendlyr

Also Read: Beautiful Bird Poems for Kids

an essay about birds

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Understanding Evolution

Your one-stop source for information on evolution

Macroevolution through evograms

The origin of birds.

The discovery that birds  evolved  from small carnivorous dinosaurs of the Late Jurassic was made possible by recently discovered fossils from China, South America, and other countries, as well as by looking at old museum specimens from new perspectives and with new methods. The hunt for the ancestors of living birds began with a specimen of  Archaeopteryx , the first known bird, discovered in the early 1860s. Like birds, it had feathers along its arms and tail, but unlike living birds, it also had teeth and a long bony tail. Furthermore, many of the bones in  Archaeopteryx ‘s hands, shoulder girdles, pelvis, and feet were distinct, not fused and reduced as they are in living birds. Based on these characteristics,  Archaeopteryx  was recognized as an  intermediate  between birds and reptiles; but which reptiles?

Bird evogram

In the 1970s, paleontologists noticed that Archaeopteryx  shared unique features with small  carnivorous  dinosaurs called theropods. All the dinosaur groups on this evogram, except the ornithischian dinosaurs, are theropods. Based on their shared features, scientists reasoned that perhaps the theropods were the ancestors of birds. When paleontologists built evolutionary trees to study the question, they were even more convinced. The birds are simply a twig on the dinosaurs’ branch of the tree of life.

As birds evolved from these theropod dinosaurs, many of their features were modified. However, it’s important to remember that the animals were not “trying” to be birds in any sense. In fact, the more closely we look, the more obvious it is that the suite of features that characterize birds evolved through a complex series of steps and served different functions along the way.

Take feathers, for example. Small theropods related to  Compsognathus  (e.g.,  Sinosauropteryx ) probably evolved the first feathers. These short, hair-like feathers grew on their heads, necks, and bodies and provided insulation. The feathers seem to have had different color patterns as well, although whether these were for display, camouflage, species recognition, or another function is difficult to tell.

Sinosauropteryx hair-like feathers

In theropods even more closely related to birds, like the oviraptorosaurs, we find several new types of feathers. One is branched and downy, as pictured below. Others have evolved a central stalk, with unstructured branches coming off it and its base. Still others (like the dromaeosaurids and  Archaeopteryx ) have a vane-like structure in which the barbs are well-organized and locked together by barbules. This is identical to the feather structure of living birds.

Left, branched downy feather. Right, asymmetrical flight feather.

Another line of evidence comes from changes in the digits of the dinosaurs leading to birds. The first theropod dinosaurs had hands with small fifth and fourth digits and a long second digit. As the evogram shows, in the theropod  lineage  that would eventually lead to birds, the fifth digit (e.g., as seen in Coelophysoids) and then the fourth (e.g., as seen in Allosaurids) were completely lost. The wrist bones underlying the first and second digits consolidated and took on a semicircular form that allowed the hand to rotate sideways against the forearm. This eventually allowed birds’ wing joints to move in a way that creates thrust for flight.

Oviraptorid dinosaur, Citipati osmolskae

The functions of feathers as they evolved have long been debated. As we have seen, the first, simplest, hair-like feathers obviously served an insulatory function. But in later theropods, such as some oviraptorosaurs, the feathers on the arms and hands are long, even though the forelimbs themselves are short. What did these animals do with long feathers on short arms? One suggestion comes from some remarkable fossils of oviraptorosaurs preserved in the Cretaceous sediments of the Gobi Desert. The skeleton of the animal is hunched up on a nest of eggs, like a brooding chicken. The hands are spread out over the eggs as if to shelter them. So perhaps these feathers served the function of warming the eggs and shielding them from harm.

Birds after  Archaeopteryx  continued evolving in some of the same directions as their theropod ancestors. Many of their bones were reduced and fused, which may have helped increase the efficiency of flight. Similarly, the bone walls became even thinner, and the feathers became longer and their vanes asymmetrical, probably also improving flight. The bony tail was reduced to a stump, and a spray of feathers at the tail eventually took on the function of improving stability and maneuverability. The wishbone, which was present in non-bird dinosaurs, became stronger and more elaborate, and the bones of the shoulder girdle evolved to connect to the breastbone, anchoring the flight apparatus of the forelimb. The breastbone itself became larger, and evolved a central keel along the midline of the breast which served to anchor the flight muscles. The arms evolved to be longer than the legs, as the main form of locomotion switched from running to flight, and teeth were lost repeatedly in various lineages of early birds. The ancestor of all living birds lived sometime in the Late Cretaceous, and in the 65 million years since the  extinction  of the rest of the dinosaurs, this ancestral lineage diversified into the major groups of birds alive today.

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Essay on Migration of Birds

Students are often asked to write an essay on Migration of Birds in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Migration of Birds

Introduction.

Bird migration is a fascinating natural event. It is the regular seasonal journey undertaken by many species of birds.

Why Birds Migrate

Birds migrate mainly due to changes in food availability, weather, or habitat. They travel to regions where living conditions are more favorable.

How Birds Migrate

Birds use a combination of the sun, stars, earth’s magnetic field, and landmarks to navigate during migration.

Challenges in Migration

Migration is not an easy task. Birds face threats like predators, harsh weather, and exhaustion.

Bird migration is a testament to nature’s wonder, showcasing the incredible endurance and navigation skills of these creatures.

250 Words Essay on Migration of Birds

Migration of birds is a complex and fascinating natural phenomenon. It involves the regular seasonal movement of birds, often north and south along a flyway, between breeding and wintering grounds.

The Process of Migration

Birds migrate to optimize their survival. During cold seasons, they move to warmer regions where food is abundant. The process is guided by several factors: genetic predisposition, day length, and changes in temperature. Birds navigate using celestial cues, the earth’s magnetic field, and landmarks.

Challenges and Adaptations

Migration is not without challenges. Birds face threats such as habitat destruction, climate change, and predation. To overcome these, they have evolved various adaptations. For instance, they accumulate fat reserves to fuel their long journeys and some species even sleep while flying.

Importance of Bird Migration

Bird migration has significant ecological implications. Migratory birds contribute to pollination, seed dispersal, and control of pests. Moreover, their migration patterns can indicate environmental changes, acting as bio-indicators.

Understanding bird migration is crucial for conservation efforts. As climate change disrupts migration patterns, studying and protecting these avian travelers becomes even more important. Indeed, bird migration is a testament to nature’s resilience and complexity, a spectacle that continues to captivate us.

500 Words Essay on Migration of Birds

Migration is a fascinating and complex behavior exhibited by many bird species. It’s a global phenomenon where birds travel thousands of miles, often crossing continents and oceans, to find the best ecological environments for feeding, breeding, and raising their young. This essay delves into the intricacies of bird migration, exploring the reasons, patterns, challenges, and implications of this remarkable behavior.

Birds migrate primarily for two interconnected reasons: food availability and breeding. Many birds feed on insects, nectar, or other food sources that are abundant in certain seasons but scarce in others. To survive, they must move to areas where food is plentiful. Similarly, birds often migrate to specific locations to breed, driven by factors such as food abundance for their offspring, fewer predators, and suitable nesting sites.

Patterns of Migration

Bird migration is not a random occurrence but follows specific patterns. These patterns are influenced by geographical features, weather conditions, and the Earth’s magnetic field. Birds generally migrate along established routes known as flyways, which include coastal routes, mountain passes, and river valleys. These routes provide the necessary resources such as food and resting spots for the birds during their journey.

Despite the evolutionary advantages, bird migration is fraught with numerous challenges. Birds face threats from predators, harsh weather conditions, and exhaustion. Additionally, human activities such as habitat destruction, climate change, and light pollution pose significant threats. Many birds die during their migratory journey, making it a high-risk, high-reward strategy from an evolutionary perspective.

The Science Behind Bird Migration

Bird migration is a complex behavior that is still not fully understood. However, scientists believe that birds use a combination of innate and learned behaviors to navigate during migration. They likely use the sun, stars, Earth’s magnetic field, and even their sense of smell to find their way. Recent research has also suggested that birds may be able to sense atmospheric pressure changes, providing them with information about favorable wind conditions for migration.

Implications of Bird Migration

Bird migration has significant ecological implications. Migratory birds can act as pollinators, seed dispersers, and even as a form of pest control. They also play a crucial role in the food chain. Additionally, bird migration has cultural and economic implications. Many societies celebrate the arrival and departure of migratory birds, and birdwatching is a popular and economically significant activity in many regions.

Bird migration is a remarkable phenomenon that illustrates the adaptability and resilience of nature. It is a testament to the intricate balance and interdependence of life on Earth. However, it’s under threat due to human activities, and its decline could have far-reaching implications. Therefore, understanding and conserving bird migration is not just about preserving a fascinating natural phenomenon, but also about maintaining the health and diversity of our ecosystems.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

  • Essay on Birds of a Feather Flock Together
  • Essay on Birds
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an essay about birds

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an essay about birds

Essay on Birds in English For Students & Children

We are Sharing an Essay on Birds in English for students and children. In this article, we have tried our best to provide a Short essay on Birds for Classes 4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 and Graduation in 200, 300, 400, 500, 800 words.

Essay on Birds in English For Students & Children

Birds Essay in English

Birds are among the most beautiful creatures created by God. The sight of birds assures us that the maker of the birds and the sky was the same. He gave wings to the birds because he knew that the sky and the atmosphere were there for them to fly.

Some birds, however, don’t have wings such as the ostrich, the penguin, the kiwi, etc. Even if these birds have wings, they are so short or inflexible that they cannot be used for flying.

There are several water birds such as the duck, the swan, the quail, the albatross, etc.

Some birds live in houses or inhabitations such as the sparrow, the pigeon, the crow, etc.

Some birds love trees and groves such as the peacock, the nightingale, the cuckoo, the parrot, etc.

Some birds are fond of singing such as the cuckoo, the nightingale, the swallow, the skylark, etc.

A peacock has the most beautiful feathers among all the birds. Birds like the peacock and the hen do not take a long flight. The hen lays eggs for us.

Most of the birds build their nests in trees. They like to sit in trees where they chirp, hum, sing and hop. We have sparrows of different hues and sizes. The dove is fond of cooing. It is considered a very innocent bird and is regarded as a symbol of peace.

We have some birds of prey also such as the hawk, the falcon, the eagle, the vulture, etc.

Some poor birds are killed for their meat, feathers, beaks, etc.

We should not be cruel to birds and animals. We should love them. Much of the beauty of the earth is because of them.

# Speech | Paragraph on Birds # Bird composition # Essay on Birds for class 6 | 2

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  • Parrot Essay

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Essay on Parrot

Parrots are amazing birds found in various parts of the world, from the lively jungles of South America to the busy streets of Mumbai. Their vibrant colors and playful personalities have fascinated humans for centuries. Apart from being colorful chatterboxes, parrots are intelligent creatures with a complex social life and unique adaptations. They play a crucial role in their ecosystems.

Scientifically known as Psittacines, parrots are tropical birds that thrive in warm environments. One of their remarkable abilities is the capacity to mimic human speech with practice. This skill sets them apart and adds to their uniqueness. Coming in various colors, parrots are truly captivating.

In this essay, we'll delve into the world of parrots, exploring their biology, behavior, intelligence, and the challenges they face in a changing environment. Let's learn more about these majestic birds and their fascinating characteristics, diet, and other aspects.

Long Essay on Parrot

Parrots are a diverse group of birds found in tropical and subtropical regions around the world. Whether they're big scarlet macaws or small budgies, each species has its own unique physical traits. Their vibrant feathers help them blend in and communicate, and their strong beaks are useful for finding food. With two toes forward and two backward on their feet, they are great at climbing and handling things.

Parrots aren't just good at copying; they're smart birds. Their brains are larger compared to other birds, equipped with structures for learning and memory. This enables them to understand and mimic human speech, count, solve puzzles, and recognize colors and shapes. Some, like the African grey parrot, go beyond speech and mimic other sounds, showcasing a high level of thinking.

These social birds form strong bonds, communicating with each other using various sounds. They engage in complex courtship displays and playful behaviors that strengthen their sense of community. Parrots play a crucial role in ecosystems, aiding in the growth of plants by dropping seeds in their droppings. Some, like the kea of New Zealand, even help pollinate flowers while searching for nectar.

However, parrots face numerous challenges today. Deforestation, illegal wildlife trade, invasive species, and climate change threaten their homes and food sources. The demand for pet parrots also contributes to capturing them from the wild, putting their populations at risk.

Conservation is essential to protect these remarkable birds. Preserving their habitats, preventing illegal wildlife trade, and promoting responsible pet ownership are key actions. Research and education play a vital role in raising awareness about the importance of parrots in our environment.

Short Essay on Parrot

Parrots are fascinating tropical birds found in various countries like Australia and New Zealand. They are known for their vibrant appearance and high intelligence, excelling in mimicking human speech. These herbivorous birds consume a diet of fruits, including grapes, berries, and mangoes, as well as leaves, grains, and even cooked rice.

Pet parrots, especially those raised from a young age, can become skilled at imitating their owners. However, it's crucial to highlight the unfortunate treatment of these majestic birds by humans. Deforestation poses a threat to parrots' natural habitats, pushing them towards endangerment. Moreover, parrots are often subjected to captivity in small cages, leading to unhappiness and depression. These practices contribute to the endangerment of parrot species.

In light of these issues, it becomes imperative for us to protect these remarkable birds from extinction by addressing habitat destruction and promoting responsible treatment of parrots in captivity.

My Favourite Pet Parrot Essay in English

Hey everyone! I want to tell you about my favorite pet – my amazing parrot! His name is Sparky, and he's the coolest bird ever.

I got Sparky on my birthday, and it was the best surprise ever. He's so colorful, with bright green and blue feathers. When he spreads his wings, it's like a mini rainbow in my room.

Sparky is super smart. He can mimic sounds, and sometimes he even copies my laughter. It's hilarious! We play together a lot, and he loves when I talk to him. I swear he understands everything I say.

Feeding Sparky is fun too. He enjoys munching on seeds and fruits. I make sure to give him a balanced diet to keep him healthy and happy. Sometimes, he even joins me at the dinner table and tries to sneak a bite of whatever I'm eating.

One of the best things about Sparky is that he's a great companion. Whenever I feel a bit lonely, he's there to cheer me up. He loves sitting on my shoulder or head, and we watch TV together. He's like a feathery friend who never gets tired of hanging out.

Taking care of Sparky is a responsibility, but it's totally worth it. I clean his cage regularly, and we go on little adventures around the house. He has this funny way of hopping around and exploring everything.

I love my pet parrot, Sparky, with all my heart. He's not just a bird – he's my buddy, my entertainer, and the most awesome pet in the world!

Interesting Points about Parrots in English

Parrots are tropical birds with unique and attractive appearances.

They come in various colors such as green, yellow, red, and rainbow-colored.

Parrots live in the bills of trees and prefer warmer climates due to their tropical nature.

Their diet includes small grains, fruits like grapes and mangoes, berries, leaves, and crops.

Parrots are among the most intelligent birds and can mimic human speech.

There are three types of parrots: Cockatoos, True parrots, and New Zealand parrots, each with distinct appearances and behaviors.

Their bodies vary in size and shape, with the Indian parrot having a particularly gorgeous appearance.

A notable feature of parrots is their beautiful green wings, long feathery tail, black circle around the neck, and a thick, slightly bent red beak.

Parrots are intelligent and friendly, making them unique birds.

Emphasizing the importance of setting parrots free and not keeping them in cages for recreational purposes is crucial in discussing these birds.

How to Prepare for Parrot Essay for Students in English

Students can log onto Vedantu and then click on Parrot essay for students in English

They must go through this entirely.

It has all the elements of a proper essay and a lot of informative material on Parrots

Reading this will prep the students of junior classes in the right way

Try writing down everything that you have memorized so that they know how much they’ve actually absorbed

Writing practice and that too within a timeframe will assist learning

Try to pay attention to the facts about parrots instead of rote learning them

Observe how the introduction, body and conclusion have been written

Emulate the same by writing it down and then comparing it with the essay that’s on Vedantu

The students will really learn the tricks used and that will benefit them in their tests.

Conclusion:

Parrots are not just beautiful; they're intelligent, social, and essential for the environment. Their mimicry and playful nature have fascinated us, but it's our responsibility to protect them from habitat loss, climate change, and illegal trade. By preserving their habitats and raising awareness, we can ensure that these vibrant birds continue to enrich our world for future generations.

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FAQs on Parrot Essay

1. How long do Parrots live?

A parrot’s average lifespan ranges between fifty to ninety-five years.

2. How many species of Parrots exist?

There are approximately three hundred ninety-three recognized species of parrots in the world.

3. How do humans cause Parrots trouble?

Parrots have been exploited by humans by being kept in small cages and due to deforestation, parrots have become endangered. 

4. What should the students refer to if an essay on birds comes for their tests?

They can check out Parrot essays for students in English on Vedantu. It has a lot of study material on Parrots. Everything has been explained in a systematic manner and has all the pointers needed for students to know and then write about. An essay on any kind of bird will be quite simple as it will be descriptive in nature.  A descriptive manner has been used in this essay that’s available and so, students won’t face a problem when they sit for their tests and are asked to write an essay on the same.

5. How do students go about writing an essay on Parrots?

The students must know the manner in which an essay on such a topic needs to be written. This will help them in securing higher grades in your examinations. Go to Parrot essay for students in English which can be downloaded from this page. This essay is a prototype of the essay that they will need to write for their exams. The exact manner of approaching an essay has been shown here with the help of appropriate examples. They can read this and then practice on their own so that they do well in their tests. Just reading this won’t suffice, including all these pointers when they write an essay at home, would be the proper way to go about it.

6. How should the students prepare for an essay on their favourite pet?

Students can check out certain study material that’s on Vedantu to get an idea. 

They can read from Parrot essays for students in English.

7. How do students prepare for essays that come for tests?

Students can prepare for all essays if they know the manner in which they need to be written down. All essays follow a structure and a form without which scoring well in an essay is a lost cause. They can look at Parrot essays for students in English on Vedantu. This essay will shed light on how they need to be written. Not just parrots, an essay on any topic needs to be written in a proper manner and that has been explained here.  Students can look at these carefully and then feel reassured.

8. How do students score well in the essays that come for their school exams?

All students can score really well if they go through the Parrot essays for students in English. This is a model of how essays need to be so as to score well. A strategic manner of approaching essays ensures that the students only get the best of marks. If they go through this sample, they will learn how one needs to formulate one’s introduction, body and then conclusion. A haphazard manner of writing just anything that comes to mind is not an ideal way of writing essays and that needs to be kept in mind during tests. Vedantu offers free study material for all the students and so, one can be completely relieved before downloading them.

English Summary

Short Essay on Birds in English for Students and Children

Table of Contents

300-word essay on Bird

Birds are those living beings that can fly high in the sky. Birds have big feathers that help them to lift their bodies in the air. There are hundreds of types of birds on Earth and each of them is unique.

For example, the peacock has a magnificent tail made of beautiful feathers, the parrot is a bird that can learn to talk, crow is the smartest in bird kingdom, a hummingbird can sing, nightingale bird is also known for its melodious voice. Like this each bird is different in its abilities and looks.

They are a very important part of our ecosystem and the food chain. The carnivorous birds eat rodents, insects and even snakes, in this way they help in keeping check on their overpopulation. Birds also eat the corpses of other animals, by this, they help in keeping the nature clean of decaying matter.

The herbivorous birds which eat plants and animals both or the omnivorous birds which eat only plants and fruits, help to disperse seeds. This happens when the birds eat the whole fruit and leave back the seeds on the ground. These seeds grow into new plants. This helps the environment to spread beautifully.

Birds are beautiful and due to the greed of human beings, many birds are going extinct. Humans hunt exotic birds and cage them and even sell them. This is harmful to the environment and the bird’s kingdom.

Even man-made pesticides and pollution prove to be fatal to birds as bird’s breath the polluted air and eat the infected fruit. We need to protect birds and save the ecosystem from falling apart.

Questions on Birds

Why should we save birds.

The herbivorous birds which eat plants and animals both or the omnivorous birds which eat only plants and fruits, help to disperse seeds. They are a very important part of our ecosystem and the food chain.

How are birds important to the environment?

Birds disperse seeds. These seeds grow into new plants. This helps the environment to spread beautifully.

What are the characteristics of birds?

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an essay about birds

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If I Were A Bird Essay - 100, 200, 500 Words

  • Essay on if I Were a Bird -

If you asked me what my perfect afterlife would be, I would love to be a bird. I've always wished I could soar far into the air. I have always been in awe of the many beautiful bird species that soar above us. It is so wonderful to see birds flying over the sky in the sunlight. Here are a few sample essays on ‘If I were a bird’ .

100 Words Essay on if I Were a Bird

200 words essay on if i were a bird, 500 words essay on if i were a bird.

If I Were A Bird Essay - 100, 200, 500 Words

Everybody wants to live a life free of all limitations . At some point or another, we all desire to live peacefully and away from materialistic things. We are required to behave in accordance with social norms and uphold a social life because we are humans. While we are required to abide by certain social rules, birds are free. The best example of a creature that understands freedom is a bird. Because of this, the dove is a symbol of liberation. If I were a bird, I would enjoy soaring high until sunset so I could watch the sun sink into the water. I would adore jumping into the ocean, touching the water, and catching fish in rivers.

When I think about how amazing it is for birds to be able to fly so high into the sky, I sometimes think about how they must feel like as living entities, in this world. It would strike any human thinker, and it also strikes me that birds have a talent for communicating with one another and the capacity to comprehend weather changes. I do often consider what my actions and feelings would be if I were a bird. I occasionally ponder which bird I would like to be in the realms of fantasy.

One day, if I were a bird with two powerful wings, I could fly to the highest of the skies and see many strange things that I can't even begin to imagine right now. I would have travelled to a foreign country and migrated there for a few months along with other species of birds that are uncommon in my home country, just as an aeroplane flies to far-off places and migratory birds cross oceans and mountains every year to reach far-off lands to temporarily settle there. I can’t imagine how it would feel like—to have so much liberty that you can fly anywhere you want without having to think much. I have no doubt that I would have found that to be an odd but wonderful experience.

Birds are incredibly distinctive creatures with defining characteristics that they all share. They share features like two legs, wings, and feathers . Furthermore, all birds lay eggs and have warm blood. They are extremely significant to our environment and come in many different breeds.

Importance of Birds

Depending on the species, birds can range in size from 2 inches to 2.75 metres—take the smallest, the bee hummingbird, and the largest, the ostrich. Birds first appeared 160 million years ago . Birds come in many different varieties, each with its own special qualities. Penguins, for example, are unable to fly. Also, there are intelligent birds such as parrots and corvids .

We also have peacocks, which are elegant and represent rain and pleasant weather. Then there are the vultures and bats. Birds are highly intuitive and highly connected to their environment.

They can forecast weather, and some of them are kept close to coal mines to help prevent mine explosions. They enjoy singing and are very sociable. Birds like to fly around freely and without restrictions.

My Favourite Bird

The parrot is one of my favourite birds . It is a vibrant bird that can be found all over the world. It has a wide range of colours, sizes, and shapes. Vibrant colours make parrots a popular pet.

While some have a single, vivid colour, others have a rainbow of hues. The majority of what parrots eat are seeds, nuts, and fruits, and they are typically small to medium in size. The species of parrot determines how long they live.

While smaller birds like love birds only live for about 15 years, larger birds like cockatoos and macaws live for 80 years . Parrots are actually quite intelligent. Because of their capacity to mimic human speech, they are frequently kept as pets. As a result, they are the most sought-after species of bird for commercial use. People are making efforts to ensure that parrots receive good care all over the world. They are regarded as sacred in many cultures.

Because parrots are highly intelligent, it's best to let them live in the wild without being caged. My parrot, Shiro, was never caged when I was younger. It used to follow me everywhere I went and never flew off. I have fond memories with him.There is no other type of bird that I like more than a parrot.

Saving Birds

The ecological balance is being disrupted by hunting, poaching, and habitat destruction, which are causing many species of birds to go extinct. As a result of pollution and the advancement of science and technology, the number of aquatic birds like swans, ducks, and others is also drastically decreasing. Therefore, it is up to us all to take the necessary steps to help the birds survive and prevent their extinction. In addition, the government should also be aware of these and pass certain rules and regulations to protect birds from extinction. We all need to protect birds because they are essential to the health and balance of our ecosystem.

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an essay about birds

Don’t Let a Bird’s Feathers Fool You

From sibling murder to snakes for breakfast, birds’ lives may be darker than you imagine.

Credit... Matt Williams

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James Gorman

By James Gorman

  • May 26, 2024

I saw a couple of crows dining on roadkill the other day as I was driving by and wondered, Does this count as bird-watching?

I think it should. I know that birding is having a moment. It was something you could do outside without catching Covid at the height of the pandemic. And it offers the opportunity for being close to nature and spending money on fancy binoculars at the same time, a winning combination for 45 million Americans .

I’m in favor of this trend. I love birds. I have watched them, written about them and tried to remember their names and field marks. I even lived with one for a while. It was a small (captive-bred) parrot, a sun conure, that was supposed to be my daughter’s pet. But as a freelance writer, I was home all day long while she was at school, and the bird really, really wanted company.

I’m not an expert birder. I don’t have a life list, and I can’t tell one juvenile gull from another. But I know never to say sea gull (real birders will have your head). And I don’t just watch the birds that come to the feeder or land on a plate while I’m having lunch at an outdoor table.

I have gone to Nebraska, rising before dawn to watch male greater prairie chickens stomp and boom and promenade to get the attention of female greater prairie chickens.

On the same trip, my wife and I slept in a tiny concrete blind on the Platte River, with overnight temperatures in the 30s and a bucket for a bathroom, so that we could see flocks of migrating sandhill cranes at dusk and dawn.

Still, I would like us all to look beyond the painted buntings to the carrion-eating, sibling-killing, snake-eating side of our feathered friends. They are not just pretty bundles of plumage, nor are they always that friendly.

You probably haven’t heard of obligate siblicide unless you hang out with behavioral ecologists. Loosely translated, it means death to the weak. Kookaburras do it, boobies do it, even egrets and skuas do it.

Basically the parents lay an insurance egg so they have an heir and a spare. Then the bigger, tougher chick kills the weaker one. Facultative siblicide is even more common. That’s death to the weak, maybe.

I saw the murdering in progress once. I was on a cruise to Antarctica to write a coffee-table book about penguins. During one of the naturalist-led walks through a penguin colony, we watched one skua chick mercilessly, and I mean mercilessly, attack a smaller chick, while the parents looked the other way. I guess they were thinking, “Well, birds will be birds, time to go kill and eat a penguin baby.”

I once had a staring match with a raven in Yellowstone Park. The raven, which I remember as being the size of a velociraptor, was pecking away at a carcass as I approached. At the time I was writing a book about dinosaurs, and I was entranced by the fact that birds are the descendants of dinosaurs. I stared at the raven. The raven stared back. I moved closer. The raven didn’t budge. I backed off, humming that Kenny Rogers song about the gambler, “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em.” I told myself that the reason for my retreat was that it was ethically wrong and illegal to disturb wildlife in the park.

I had another staring encounter, this time with a bald eagle in the marshy reaches of southern New Jersey on the Delaware Bay. I was writing a profile of Pete Dunne, who founded the World Series of Birding and has written numerous books on birds. He spotted the eagle a football field away. I looked at it through a spotting scope and binoculars. The eagle looked back. Given the eyesight of eagles, I’m pretty sure it saw me, its gaze unwavering. I think it was sizing me up, noting that I was too big to eat, and wondering what a newbie like me was doing with Pete Dunne.

There are stares that don’t give an inch. Kaa in “The Jungle Book,” ravens, birds of prey. And the minds behind those stares are deeply different from our own. Don’t take my word for it. Read “H is for Hawk,” by Helen Macdonald, particularly the section where the goshawk she is trying to tame clenches its talons in hungry anticipation when it hears a human baby cry just outside her window.

There really are dinosaurs under those beautiful feathers. And the bird that looks the most like a dinosaur to me, so much that it sends me back to the Cretaceous in my mind, is the great blue heron. I have spent a lot of time watching herons stalk fish in ponds and on river banks. They move slowly, haltingly, on improbable stick legs, almost as if they were old-tech animatronic constructions. Then they strike with a blurringly fast stab of their snakelike neck and pickax bill and swallow you, I mean the minnow, whole.

They don’t eat only minnows. From a boardwalk in Everglades National Park I once witnessed a battle between a great blue heron and a snake that I couldn’t identify. The heron had caught the snake and was trying to eat it. But the snake wasn’t dead and kept wrapping itself around the bird’s beak. The heron would drop the snake and stab it again with its beak. The snake, apparently not seriously wounded, would again wrap itself tightly around the heron’s beak. This happened several times over. I left after about 15 minutes, with the two creatures in a stalemate that showed no signs of resolving. I did feel a oneness with nature while watching this, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.

That’s what you may find watching birds, if you spend some time at it and pay attention. By all means watch birds. Don’t just identify them. Study them. And not just the pretty ones in their best moments. Absorb their alien presence. You’ll be the richer for it.

James Gorman is a science writer at large and the author of books on hypochondria, penguins, dinosaurs and the ocean around Antarctica. He writes about animals, viruses, archaeology and the evolution of dogs. More about James Gorman

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Lizabeth Roemer, Ph.D., and Susan M. Orsillo, Ph.D.

Birding Your Way to Well-Being

Four potential pathways from birding to mental health..

Updated May 23, 2024 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

  • Novel fascinating and pleasant environments can reduce stress and restore our attentional capacity.
  • Experiences of awe and social connection can help us feel more open, collaborative, and interconnected.
  • An experimental study found that looking for birds improves well-being and reduces distress.

Source: Josh Bartok/used with permission

Like many people during the height of the Covid pandemic, I discovered birding and have continued to grow my interest and enjoyment since 2020. Besides noticing mental health and mood benefits myself, others have regularly shared articles with me about the benefits of birding. Most recently, conservation biologist Nils Peterson and colleagues (2024) conducted an experimental study in which college students were randomly assigned to a control condition (receiving no specific instructions), a nature-walk condition (instructed to take a specific walk through nature at least once a week), or a birdwatching condition (take the same walk and notice how many birds you see using a phone app). Students who noticed birds on their walk reported significant increases in positive emotion and significant decreases in distress compared to the other two conditions. These findings indicate that there’s something specific about looking for birds (or at least looking for elements in nature) that leads to mental health improvements.

As Peterson and colleagues note, demonstrating that birding enhances mental health does not tell us why birding has this effect—and determining the underlying reasons could help us identify ways to interact with birds (or other aspects of nature) that can heighten this positive impact. The authors refer to environmental psychologist Melissa Marselle and colleagues’ (2021) conceptual model of how biodiversity may benefit human health to identify potential explanations for their findings. Several of these potential mechanisms resonate with my own experience and I hope my sharing them may help you to find ways of enhancing your well being.

Reducing stress

Environments that are interesting, pleasant, and calming can reduce our physiological arousal, and also enhance positive emotions. Walking in an area with plants, flowers, trees, and water with a focus on looking for birds is very different from my typical daily environment and activities. Although I can certainly feel sad, angry, or stressed while I’m out birding, I also notice that my breath slows down a bit and that I regularly experience moments of joy or calm as I notice a bird, or a flower, or a beautiful vista. The sounds of birds and smell of flowers also elicit positive emotions that can buffer any painful emotions I might be experiencing. For me, it’s important that I not try to get rid of any negative feelings or stress I have; I just allow the additional experiences from birding to add to those feelings, which naturally changes them or makes them less overwhelming.

Restoring attention

Our fast-paced, overstimulated daily lives challenge our attentional capacities. Many of us find ourselves easily distracted by external stimuli or by our own thoughts and feelings. Sustained attention is like strength in a muscle, with the same “use-it-or-lose-it” qualities. When we allow our attention to be continually pulled by internal or external stimuli, our attentional abilities weaken. Marselle and colleagues (2021) note that our attentional abilities can be restored both when we are away from our everyday tasks and demands and also when the environment attracts our attention without effort, which is known as fascination . When I am at a wildlife refuge, or even an urban park, with the goal of viewing and identifying birds, I find that sounds, sights, and movement naturally grab my attention and it is much easier for me to disengage from worries or rumination (and the pull of my phone). As I’ve stated in earlier posts, being able to bring attention and awareness to our experience is an essential part of recognizing distressing emotions , taking meaningful, rewarding actions , and being compassionate toward others . Restoring our attentional capacities while we look for birds may help us to use our attention more effectively and mindfully in the rest of our lives.

Transcendent experiences

When I spend time watching birds flutter, fly, swoop, hop, eat, dive, and interact, I often experience a sense of awe , and a sense of humility. In his book, Awe: The new science of wonder and how it can transform your life , psychologist Dacher Keltner explains that awe can transform us by “quieting the nagging, self-critical, overbearing, status-conscious voice of our self, or ego, and empowering us to collaborate, to open our minds to wonders, and to see the deep patterns of life.” This description resonates with my experience of birding: I feel smaller in some positive way, and less attached to some sense of my own importance, when I am in the midst of different habitats of birds, observing their behaviors. And I also feel more connected, more aware of how I am part of the larger whole of the world. When I’m able to carry that feeling back into my daily life, I am more able to let go of frustrations and irritations when they inevitably arise and notice moments of connectedness and joy.

Social connectedness

Although birding can be a solitary activity, birders (even solo birders) often encounter one another. This has been an unexpected benefit for me and an unexpected joy. When a rare bird has been sighted at a place we often visit, we will typically run into several individuals, pairs, or groups of people in search of the same bird, and we’ll often greet and check in with each other about it. And when we run into someone on a path who has seen something interesting, they are always eager to tell us about it and tell us how to find the unusual bird they just saw. Similarly, I also enjoy sharing an exciting sighting with others—such as when I unexpectedly discovered a nearby barred owl on a boardwalk path in Acadia National Park. I was overjoyed to quietly (and awedly) point it out to each person who came along, until there was a line of 12 people gazing through their binoculars, sharing in the experience of awe, without bothering the beautiful owl. The camaraderie of shared experience and genuine sympathetic joy in other people’s joy is a partial antidote to the sense of isolation and conflict that we often experience online or in other contexts. Reminders of shared humanity can feel restorative.

So, is there something you can do in the next week to reduce your stress, enhance your attention, elicit a sense of awe, or promote social connection? Perhaps take a walk and look for birds!

With thanks to Josh Bartok for editing help.

Peterson,M.N., Larson, L.R., Hipp, A., Beall, J.M., Lerose, C., Desrochers, H., Lauder, S.,Torres, S., Tarr, N.A., Stukes, K., Stevenson, K., & Martin, K. L. (2024). Birdwatching linked to increased psychological well-being on college campuses: A pilot-scale experimental study, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 96 , https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102306 .

Marselle, M.R., Hartig, T., Cox, D.T.C., de Bell, S., Knapp, S., Lindley, S., Triguero-Mas,M., Böhning-Gaese, K., Braubach, M., Cook, P.A., de Vries, S., Heintz-Buschart, A., Hofmann, M., Irvine, K.N., Kabisch, N., Kolek, F., Kraemer, K., Markevych, I., Martens, D., ... Bonn, A. (2021). Pathways linking biodiversity to human health: A conceptual framework. Environment International, 150 , https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2021.106420 .

Keltner, D. (2023). Awe: The new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your lif e. New York: Penguin Press.

Lizabeth Roemer, Ph.D., and Susan M. Orsillo, Ph.D.

Lizabeth Roemer, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she is actively involved in research and clinical training of doctoral students in clinical psychology.

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At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.

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How do birds communicate? Northeastern network science models are opening up new possibilities for experts

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Iacopo Iacopini has been working closely with behavioral ecologists to help provide “new insights” into vocal communication among birds by mapping out how flock dynamics play out.

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A flock of geese flying over a body of water.

LONDON — Nature-lovers will know the scene well. A flurry of birdsong, a shake of a tree and out pops a flock of birds flying away in unison together.

But how is it that the quick chatter of song among those birds led to that communal flight? A network scientist at Northeastern University in London has been helping experts to shed light on that question by mapping out how birds communicate when in groups.

Iacopo Iacopini , an assistant professor in the Network Science Institute , has been working closely with behavioral ecologists to provide “new insights” into vocal communication made by animals.

The research has been set out in Iacopini’s paper, “Not your private tête-à-tête: leveraging the power of higher-order networks to study animal communication,” published May 20 in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Behavioral ecologists have for decades studied how one songbird is heard by another and then use that understanding to deduce how the one-to-one relationship functions — what is known as a dyadic interaction.

But experts knew that looking at it from that angle was overly simplistic when it is clear that a chirping bird will be heard by several birds in the surrounding vicinity.

Iacopini, along with colleagues from across the world, worked on modeling how birds interact with two or more others in theirs or rival flocks at the same time — what are referred to as higher-order networks.

Headshot of Lacopo Lacopini.

The network scientists applied hypergraphs — a mathematical diagram showing how objects can have multiple connections simultaneously while in a group scenario — to better understand how light-bellied brent geese coordinate a group takeoff through increased squawks among the gaggle.

The scientists also did similar studies of the North American black-capped chickadees, creating a network to simulate the dawn chorus among what is a territorial family of birds in a bid to illustrate what interactions are occurring during that moment.

According to the five authors of the paper, mapping how these social structures play out has the potential to “reveal how vocal communication contributes to complex behavioral contagions within groups.”

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an essay about birds

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Iacopini said the trend among network scientists recently has been to focus on human interactions.

But he explained that the case studies he and his colleagues looked at for the paper in terms of non-human animal communication gave him a different kind of “playground” in which to map higher-order networks.

“Animals are another super important domain,” Iacopini said. “Network scientists are already doing a lot of stuff on animal behavior but, in my opinion, not as much as for human interactions.

“I think that the non-human animal world represents another incredibly good playground for these approaches, because you can ask a lot of questions, you can track them, you can record their vocalization, you can track their movements.”

Iacopini hopes that this paper and his experience collaborating with real-world wildlife data will encourage more partnerships between ecologists and network scientists.

“I personally would take this as a potential starting point for a lot of more research and projects on this leveraging,” he said.

“It is also a call for attention from my side, to the network science community. I feel it might be the same for the animal behavior and ecology worlds — to bring the two worlds together to do better science, combining all the strengths of the two different teams now that we can have really good data-collection experiments.”

Co-author Elizabeth Derryberry, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Tennessee who studies birdsong, agreed that the interdisciplinary project had wielded results and opened up “exciting” new possibilities.

She explained that the tools produced by the squad of network-mappers, which also included Nina Fefferman from the University of Tennessee and Matthew Silk from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, allows those working in the field to identify patterns and make predictions about animal behavior.

Iacopini said he and the team of modelers enjoyed having their equations brought to life by ecologists.

“From our perspective, I think it is nice to see that some of the things that we do may actually go out in the field, instead of remaining on papers and publications online, and that is it,” he said.

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an essay about birds

'A sense of calm': Amy Tan's writing and illustrations soar in new book about birds

M ost of the drawings in Amy Tan's unusual and rewarding new book, "The Backyard Bird Chronicles," are of birds: birds at play, birds nibbling. Her book pulls from six years of journal entries about watching and studying birds in her backyard in Sausalito. But one of the drawings is not like the others.

It is a pencil sketch of Tan's own face, peering through binoculars. In front of her eyes are two big black lenses. "What birds see: owl eyes = death," she writes in all caps, as a caption to her self-portrait. It is a clever perspective shift in a book full of such reversals.

Tan is always wondering what the birds are seeing, feeling, thinking — about the world, about one another and about her, the quiet giant who feeds them and is always watching.

This is the book's signature blend: ardent and undying curiosity, mixed with equal parts wit, courage and respect for her (flighty) subjects.

It may also be also some of Tan's. The first of her seven novels, "The Joy Luck Club," hit a nerve with readers for its unflinching portrayal of the lives of two generations of women living and dying in two continents — and became an international bestseller. She's since written a screenplay, children's books, more novels, several nonfiction books and has a novel in progress.

"The Backyard Bird Chronicles" is an unusual book because it's sui generis — it's Amy Tan's unique take on drawing birds and reflecting on nature, survival and the state of the world. It's made up of vignettes, a page or two long, plus her animal sketches and drawings, which improve astoundingly over the six years.

In someone else's hands, this roughly 300-page book might have been a field guide or birding companion: workhorses for the serious hobbyist. But in Tan's, it's lithe, funny and never predictable.

There's rivalry and loyalty. Love triangles and scheming. Ingenues, divas and towering villains. Even a burnt out mom. The cast: hummingbirds, owls, juncos, finches, crows, a menacing hawk, cheeky rodents and more.

The wider world also filters in: the COVID-19 pandemic and the isolation it wrought, plus wildfires, anti-Asian racism and the death of a friend.

This book was not meant for us. In an interview last week, Tan explained that she started journaling "really for myself, to find a sense of calm at a time that was very divisive in our country, and that really was upsetting — to the point it occupied my mind a lot. And I decided I needed to do something to reset my brain."

It only became a book because her editor at Knopf, Daniel Halpern, coaxed her. "I said, 'No, you don't know what this really is. It's messy. It's, it's got misspellings, you know, it's all over the place.' And he said, 'No, I think we can do that, and the mess is authentic,' " Tan said.

It's actually happened once before: Halpern also convinced her to write "Where the Past Begins," a memoir that poet and essayist Mary Carr compared to Vladimir Nabokov's "Speak, Memory." Tan told a reporter in 2017, "I wrote this in a fugue state, not realizing what I was writing. It wasn't until I was done that I became a little distressed and thought, wait a minute, this is going to be published?"

Even here, writing just for herself, Tan uses her writer's eye to find dramas in every cranny of her leafy backyard. She's not counting species and checking names off a list. The drawings aren't all formal studies — quite the opposite. The sketches are cartoonish. And the birds are full-fledged characters.

Some of this was inspired by her nature journaling teacher, John Muir Laws, one of the people named in the book's dedication. He taught her to "feel the life force of the bird," Tan said.

"I took it a step further, being a fiction writer, and it was to 'be the bird.' And that way I would experience — try to experience — in my imagination, what it's like to be a bird. Because everything that birds do, practically everything, is geared towards survival. ... And so I get to see it through their eyes what they need to do."

Tan knows she is not a scientist, and in the book she often jokes about how she's doing things in a non-science way. She gives the birds human attributes. She talks to them. She answers for them. She loves them.

Did being a writer and embracing that part of her — imagination, humor and emotion — help her ask better questions or tune in better or differently?

"Absolutely," Tan answered.

Some of what she wonders: "Has anyone followed one-legged migratory birds for a year to see if they survive?" "What kind of cognitive skills would a crow possess to experience embarrassment?" and "At what point do fledglings learn they are not the center of the world?"

This isn't just the story of birds. It's also the story of what can happen when you open your eyes and start noticing what's around you.

In a dense but brief interview — her voice was worn out from talking on a book and birding tour — Tan said she hopes the book will inspire readers to do the same.

"I think that many, many people are seeking some kind of peace within themselves or they need to de-stress. They need to feel they are in control of their lives when things are falling apart. And nature offers that place where they can find themselves, be restored, or find refuge from stress. It's there and it's free," she said.

She also hopes readers will "get into conservation somehow, whether it is making sure that window collisions don't happen, or advocating that outdoor cats be brought indoors, and maybe even getting involved with a conservation organization devoted to birds."

Asked if Tan has changed over the decades, her longtime agent, Sandra Dijkstra, who has represented the author since "The Joy Luck Club," replied in an email: "Not in my view! Amy has just grown wiser over the years, even as she has maintained her wicked sense of humor and fun, too."

Dijkstra added: "What is truly unique and powerful for me in Amy's new book, 'Backyard Bird Chronicles,' is that it offers us a novelist's perspective on the avian world: As Amy sees and interacts with them each, these birds become like 'characters' in her novels. And, at its heart, 'Backyard' is a book about love, which we sorely need in today's crazy world."

Tan doesn't know if nature journaling and bird watching will filter into her creative writing.

"I've spent so many years now, thousands and thousands of hours on this. I think to myself, Well, how could it not seep in, you know? And then I would have the excuse to continue to watch birds every day."

Tan described fiction writing, as she does it, as much more vulnerable than the type of personal, narrative nonfiction that appears in her journals.

"There are parts of myself that are very deep, that I only find through writing fiction. And it makes me vulnerable also, when it's about to be published, and now this very private side of me is going to be shared," Tan said. "People reading the book would not recognize that that is a discovery in myself. They will just see it as part of the story or part of the character. However, I dig very, very deep in emotions in my novels."

Journaling, you can keep doing and doing. Fiction feels more fragile.

"The recognition, the realizations that happen in fiction can be so shocking and so gratifying that you want to keep doing it," she said. "But at the same time, you're afraid you're going to lose it — whatever it is that enables you to write fiction. So, this skill, this focus, this ability to create a story might suddenly abandon you: it is the fear of, I think, almost every writer."

Has Tan ever felt that way?

"I feel that way at the end of writing a book. I'm completely drained. And then when I have to start again, I feel that maybe I don't have it in me anymore. And then I begin. I have to get over that, and then I just start. So get over yourself. Just begin," she said.

"The Backyard Book Chronicles" by Amy Tan (Knopf, 2024; 320 pages)

Warwick's and the University of San Diego present Amy Tan

When: 7 p.m. Wednesday

Where: IPJ Theatre, Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, USD, 5555 Marian Way, San Diego

Tickets: $40.66 (includes signed copy of book)

Online: warwicks.com/event/tan-2024

[email protected]

This story originally appeared in San Diego Union-Tribune .

©2024 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Visit sandiegouniontribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

an essay about birds

Exploring the F-word in religion at the intersection of scholarship, activism, and community.

an essay about birds

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Bird Watching and Geology in the Body of Goddess

The notion of the earth as the body of Goddess has taken on deeper meaning for me in recent years.  I have felt connected to nature all of my life.  Yet often, though not always, I have related to nature in general rather than in specific ways. Some years ago, after reading Hartshorne’s essay “Do Birds Love Singing?” I stopped for the first time in the wetlands of Kalloni, Lesbos, to see the flamingoes that live in the salt pans there.

Flamingo's-Kalloni3-Saltpan

One thing led to another, and I met someone with whom I spent the next six weeks visiting every pool and puddle where birds were stopping in Lesbos that spring.  I would have said that I had always loved birds, but I had not studied them or even paid any particular attention to their differences or habits.  Over the next several years I spent countless hours in bird habitats and pouring over books, during which time I learned to identify over 300 species of birds that live in or migrate through Lesbos. I also learned that Lesbos has a wetland ecosystem that is an important resting place for birds flying all the way from Africa to Europe in the spring.  Bird watching can be and is for me a practice of meditation on the beauty of the world, in specific form. To find birds you must learn something about their habits and habitat. But you must also look closely and wait patiently for them to appear.  To be able to watch a an elegant and shy black stork fish in a seasonal river, you must also be lucky, for black storks generally fly off as soon as they see people. 

blackstork-ciconianigra

Part of the magic of bird watching is that just when you feel disappointed in not finding a bird you have been looking for, a bird you were not looking for flies into a puddle right in front of your car. It may be a common and familiar bird, like this European greenfinch, but watching it bathe in a puddle is magical. This for me is the grace of life.

greenfinch in puddle

Through bird watching I learned that if I love Mother Earth, I would do well not just to admire sunsets, but to learn more about the varieties of life that make up her body.  Sadly, as I became intimate with specific birds and the places they loved, I also became intimate with the degradation of wildlife habitats in Lesbos.  For over ten years now, I have been engaged with others in the struggle to protect the wetlands of Lesbos for the birds. I spent more than a year of my life writing a detailed Complaint to the European Commission concerning the failures of the Greek governmental authorities to protect the wetlands of Lesbos as required by the European law Natura 2000.  The more intimately you love the world, the more you suffer when it is violated. Now when I see degraded wetlands, I feel that parts of my own body have been harmed.  I now know that when Alice Walker’s Shug said, “if I cut a tree, my arm will bleed,” this was not hyperbole but an accurate description of feelings in the body.  Because of my environmental work, I have been given the great honor of having been asked to run for office on the Green Party ticket in the regional and national elections in Greece. This is one of the ways I am giving back to the earth and to the Greek people who have given me so much.

At the time I began to learn about birds, a geologist came on the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete.  She spoke to our group about the great upheavals in the earth that pushed the mountains of Crete (and the Alps) up from the sea floor over 200 million years ago, beginning to shape the continent of Europe as we know it today. 

crete mountains 2

Until then, I had imagined that Crete and Lesbos had similar geological histories. After all, they were both Greek islands.  Visiting the Museum of Natural History in Sigri, Lesbos, for the first time, I was surprised—astonished really—to discover that Crete and Lesbos have very different histories. While one of Lesbos’s mountains arose from the sea at the time of Crete’s mountain formation, the others were shaped by massive volcanic action between 22 and 16 million years ago, that created the Aegean Sea in which I swim on summer days.  My eyes were opened to the differences between the porous volcanic rocks of which my village is built and the smoother, denser, marl or marble-like bedrock of Crete that was formed from plankton under the sea.  For the first time, I noticed that the stones of the houses and streets and walls of my village are not uniformly “grey,” but that some are purplish, some are pinkish, some are greenish, and there are many other shades 0f grey. 

Molivos arch

The word, ge-ology comes from “ge” which is the ancient Greek word for earth.  Learning about the evolution of the earth and about the geology of the islands I love is a way of learning to know and love our mother earth more deeply and more intimately.  Now I see her history in the crevices of her body every day.  

lepetimnos

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Author: Legacy of Carol P. Christ

We at FAR were fortunate to work along side Carol Christ for many years. She died from cancer in July, 2021. Her work continues through her non-profit foundation, the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual and the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete. To honor her legacy and to allow as many people as possible to read her thought-provoking and important blogs, we are pleased to offer this new column to highlight her work. We will be picking out special blogs for reposting, making note of their original publication date. View all posts by Legacy of Carol P. Christ

4 thoughts on “Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Bird Watching and Geology in the Body of Goddess”

I love this! It is no wonder that the Greek women wove the birds into their stories and artwork. Birdwatching is a beautiful way to connect with spirit and goddess!

Like Liked by 1 person

When you speak of earth as the body of the goddess are you referring to Gaia? Let me know, cheers, Cate

one way of seeing the earth

“The notion of the earth as the body of Goddess has taken on deeper meaning for me in recent years. I have felt connected to nature all of my life.” Ah Carol learned… and understood the sanctity that is earth…As she said she loved nature all her life but her way in was through birds.. some through plants – animals – it doesn’t;t matter – falling in love with the creatures on earth brings us joys and anguish – both – but as a lifetime naturalist who is always learning I can never get enough though the tears are many. Bless you Carol.

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