With Thanksgiving approaching, the time has come to distinguish between birds and fowl. Your fine feathered friends outside the window are birds, whereas the 40-pound behemoth you and yours are planning to devour is fowl. Note that it’s not “a fowl,” as the word “fowl” is a non-count plural noun that refers to a class of bird kept or hunted for its meat or eggs. All fowl are birds, but not all birds are fowl. The wild varieties include landfowl (like pheasants and quail) and waterfowl (like ducks and geese). Roosters and hens are landfowl, but with the distinction of being raised, which also makes them domestic or barnyard fowl. What makes a bird? You need five things: lungs, legs, wings, warm blood and eggs. Bats’ egglessness renders them winged mammals, and egg-laying reptiles miss the classification by being cold-blooded (though most lizards prefer ectothermic as being both more descriptive and less prone to stigma). Your wings don’t have to fly and your legs don’t have to be able to do a Texas two-step either, but if you want to claim to be a bird, you need to hit this list five for five. If in addition to all of this you are a candidate to be eaten, you are fowl.
