Fly With Me: A Celebration of Birds through Pictures, Poems, and Stories
6 BLUE-AND-YELLOW MACAW
is what a bird What makes a bird different from other living creatures 7
What defines a bird There are many definitions A creature with feathers and wings usually able to fly Cambridge Academic Dictionary distinguished by the possession of feathers wings A warm-blooded egg-laying vertebrate and a beak and typically by being able to fly Oxford English Dictionary 8
feathers with two wings for flying and a hard pointed mouth called a beak or a bill Birds build nests An animal covered in in which female birds lay eggs Macmillan Dictionary Defining a bird is complicated Lots of people have tried to do it But the characteristics being used to define birds don’t always distinguish them from other species For example birds are warm-blooded But so are mammals and that includes humans And we are not birds Most birds can fly but so can bats and bees Birds have bills But duck-billed platypuses have bills too Birds lay eggs but so do snakes To come up with the perfect definition of a bird and only a bird it is important to think about all birds from the tiniest hummingbird to the largest ostrich from waddling penguins to soaring eagles Then we should ask what they have in common with one another That means looking at each part of a bird and noting which other animals share each particular feature What is the one thing that only birds have Feathers No other living creatures on Earth have feathers Scientific Names Binomial nomenclature is a system of categorizing categorizing all living things In Latin binomial binomial refers to two and nomenclature to naming So when we speak of birds by their Latin or Greek scientific names we use two names genus and species Genus is a group of related living things that includes one or more species Animals or plants in the same genus share one or more common characteristics characteristics Species is a group of related animals or plants that share related genes and can produce young animals or plants This system was first used back in the mid-1700s Today it is international so every known animal bird plant and other organism can be identified even if their common names are different in each language The genus always begins with a capital letter and the species with lowercase These names are also known as scientific names and are always written written in italics In this book you will see the scientific names of birds in facts lists and in the Saving Our Birds chapter The scientific scientific names of all other birds appear on page 188 EUROPEAN BEE-EATER 9
