The technical specs of birds (and animals and everything) sounds boring and is boring until it isn’t and you want to figure out “what a bird is,” that is, how it sits as a species among the 10,000-plus species.
I’ve been reading various books but the best and best-written one so far is Colin Tudge’s “The Secret Life of Birds.” I can’t pretend to have mastered any of the technicals but here is how a particular bird of interest, the Brolga (one of the fifteen crane species), is classified:
Kingdom: Animali
Phylum: Chordata (don’t know what this is and don’t care to learn)
Class: Aves (now we’ve got down to our feathered friends, the birds)
Order (there are 31, I think:) Gruiformes
Family: Gruidae (the family of fifteen crane species)
Genus: Antigone (this puzzles me because most people seem to use Grus or another genus name)
Species (my Brolga!): Antigone rubicunda
Amazing! I know something!