Book excerpt: As the topic of this study embraces and entwines what is routinely divided into two separate categories, "nature" and "culture", the birds in the Iliad challenge modern scientific division and in some ways, our thinking. They are simultaneously birds, signs and symbols. The investigation aims at determining the various species of the birds in the Iliad as far as this is possible with the help of ornithological methods and tries through semiotics and hermeneutics to ascertain the symbolic.