Men-fauna relations: drought and bad omen in the northeastern backlands
International Journal of Development Research
Men-fauna relations: drought and bad omen in the northeastern backlands
Received 10th February, 2019; Received in revised form 27th March, 2019; Accepted 02nd April, 2019; Published online 29th May, 2019
Copyright © 2019, Adriana Anadirdos Santos and Carlos Alberto Batista Santos. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The man of the backlands in his daily experiences establishes a relationship with the wild fauna and flora, and in this relationship, he interprets the natural phenomena, as well as the behaviors of the animals, amongst them, the sounds emitted mainly the vocalization of birds. This paper records the influence of the beliefs associated with the birds amongst the dwellers at FazendaFervente, in the municipality of Ribeira do Amparo, state of Bahia, northeastern Brazil. Data have been collected from November 2014 to June 2015 through semi-structured interviews, as well as informal chats with fifty residents who indicated the Acauã (Laughing falcon) and the Rasga-Mortalha (American barn owl) as the most popular birds in the belief and imagination of the people dwelling in the semi-arid northeastern. The results show that the perception of the respondents concerning the birds mentioned above generates the distancing between dwellers and birds of these species, which in a certain way contributes to the conservation of them and protection of the environment.
