The Bermuda Audubon Society celebrated its 60th anniversary with a dinner and special lecture by Dr Nigel Collar of BirdLife International.

He gave the broad-ranging talk that touched on the impact of birds in everything from Renaissance art to the modern environmental movement.

Dr Collar, the principal author on HBW/BirdLife, an illustrated checklist of the birds of the world, spoke to about 70 people who attended the celebratory dinner at Beau Rivage at the Newstead Belmont Hills Golf Resort & Spa, including Governor and Audubon Society patron George Fergusson.

During the lecture Dr Collar explained that the word ‘auspicious’ came from the word ‘auspices’, which in ancient Roman times was divination using birds either through bird song, or flight.

He showed that birds infiltrate many aspects of life, from money “birds are stamped on it”, to the Kookaburra, whose name is used in brands “for everything from cricket equipment to underwear”.

Dr Collar illustrated his lecture with dozens of slides and focused on ornithology as represented in the arts and science.

He pointed to Leonardo DaVinci included at least 750 pictures of birds in his works, as well as Roelant Savery who is famous for being a prolific illustrator of the now extinct dodo in the 1620s.

Composers such as Gustav Mahler described birds musically, Dr Collar told the audience. The first movement of Mahler’s Symphony No 1 in D major imitates the sound of a cuckoo, while Elvis Presley also referenced the class of fauna in his song: ‘I want to be free — like the bird in the tree’.

Feathers are the sign of tribes in some cultures, he noted, while pointing out that everything that Shakespeare wrote was inscribed with a feather pen.

In science, he said: “The pigeon was the fundamental driver of (Charles) Darwin’s understanding of natural evolution.”

Media owes an early method of news delivery to birds. The news agency Reuters “started by communicating everything by (carrier) pigeon,” he said.

For the natural world, the book and film Silent Spring had far-reaching consequences. The impetus for Silent Spring was the death of birds resulting from the aerial spraying of DDT. Chronicled by Rachel Carson in the early 1960s, it made her the mother of the modern environmental movement.

Dr Collar also described the abuse of birds, he said: “Bird flu — it had all to do with the appalling conditions we keep our domestic fowl,” and “a cloak for a Hawaiian King” drove a highly-prized bird species extinct. The Mamo’s orange feathers were used to create capes and hats used by royalty, and the famous yellow cloak of Kamehameha I is estimated to have taken the reigns of eight monarchs and the golden feathers of 80,000 birds to complete.

The society’s president Andrew Dobson explained that Dr Collar had worked in international conservation for 39 years, most of them spent with BirdLife International assessing the status and needs of bird species threatened with extinction.

He helped to develop the modern IUCN Red List criteria, which is intended to be an easily and widely understood system for classifying species at high risk of global extinction, and also co-authored several works including Threatened birds of Africa and related islands in 1985, Threatened birds of the Americas in 1992 and Threatened birds of Asia in 2001.

In the past decade, along with a team of doctorial students, he has focused on threatened birds, building scientific and conservation capacity in developing countries including Cambodia, Philippines, Ghana, Botswana, Ethiopia.

Dr Collar is also chairman of the IUCN Bustard Specialist Group, and an honorary professor of biology at the University of East Anglia.