The Indigenous Sediq-Truku of Taiwan use the tiny sisil bird as a nationalist symbol; and ethnologists have often studied its use as divination practices. In my research, based on participant observation with hunters and trappers, I re-examine practices of bird observation, not as ornithomancy, but as a bricolage of 4E cognition. Sediq-Truku cognition of birds is embodied because it happens as humans walk through mountainous terrain in which they may look down as well as up at birds. It is embedded in casual thinking with other beings in the immediate surroundings. It is extended because the birds become part of the hunters’ cognitive apparatus. Finally, it enacts a world, because as hunters plan for the outcome of their hunt in a spirit-filled forest, the bird becomes a life partner. This has superficial resonance with ways in which northern Indigenous peoples hunt with ravens. What is different is that the sisil are passerines who gain nothing immediately from the interactions. The relationship is even more an example of how, in the words of Eduardo Kohn, forests think.
It is only when the hunters return from the forests and tell stories, to anthropologists as well as to family and friends, that the bird becomes transformed into a symbol. The stories became more elaborate, and anthropologists made it into a trans-cultural category of divination. In further extended cognition, as the sisil becomes a political symbol and a marker of sovereignty in contested forests, the Sediq-Truku transform themselves into the people of the sisil. This paper also examines the political philosophy that emerges from the relationship that mountain people have with the birds and other non-humans in the landscape.
