Why Does Jared Diamond Find Birds Easiest to Study?

Jared Diamond says birds inform ornithologists about everything. Birds are the easiest of all animals to observe and to understand. Birds operate by sight and by sound, the same senses humans use. Mammals operate especially by smell.

People can watch antelopes, but they do not go around watching rats. Understanding rats takes a good sense of smell, and people catch them in trash. Birds can be watched. Most of what is known about ecology, evolutionary biology, biogeography, and behavior was learned first on birds and in the most detail about birds. The knowledge then applies to other animals.

Jared Diamond has written lots about ecology, lots about how birds divide ecological niches, and lots about evolution: how bird species evolve in New Guinea, and how to get new species in an uninterrupted mountain range. Biogeography, the distribution of plants and animals around the world, began especially with the distribution of birds and then mammals and other things.