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No more clear-cut criteria here. Instead, we've got a short list of bird species which are definitely not kosher. It would seem the matter is simple enough: if these few birds are not kosher, then all other kinds of birds must be good to eat, right? The trouble is that there's no certainty whether all of the bird species enumerated in the original Hebrew text have been correctly translated and identified. Rabbis, therefore, took it upon themselves to come up with their own criteria allowing to classify each bird as either kosher or treif.
They had no doubt about all birds of prey being unclean. When it came to other birds, they were looking at such characteristics traits as the presence of a backward-pointing toe, a kind of pouch in the gullet and a special sort of stomach lining. But in the end they decided that if Jews had always been consuming a particular species of bird, then this bird must have been kosher, and if they hadn't, then it wasn't. In practice, those birds which are commonly raised as poultry, such as chickens, ducks, geese, pigeons, etc., are all kosher. Turkey, which comes from North America, is a special case, because Jews only learned about its existence once the Spaniards discovered the New World, so there was no long-standing tradition of its consumption to speak of. But the rabbis figured the turkey was similar enough to well-known species of poultry that it's okay to eat it as well.
=== Creeping Things ===