What birds would they have had in mind? [[mallory-adams-d2006]] When speaking about the PIE fauna terminology J. P. Mallory notes that: > "In Proto-Indo-European we can manage just about 20 names of birds (a number of which are certainly questionable due to onomatopoeia) while the indefatigable D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1895) could list over 500 bird names in Greek (admittedly many twittering away in Hesychian obscurity) and against about ten Proto-Indo-European fish and shell-fish names, Thompson (1947) could set about 570 Greek fish names. Even such damaged goods as the 802 entries in the Elbing Vocabulary of Old Prussian can produce over three times the number of bird names (67) as we can reconstruct for Proto-Indo-European and far more names of fish (25).9 The number of bird species indicated in early Irish is of a similar order of magnitude (around 65) with multiple terms for the same species in many instances and there are about 24 bird names. [[mallory2019]]p52 Does this mean there were less birds back then? Of course not, rather: > It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that some if not all of the semantic spheres that we reconstruct to Proto-Indo-European or other proto-languages can only be small fractions of the original lexicon." [[mallory2019]]p52 Never the less we will attempt to give a picture, even if it is one that is doomed to be partial.