Birds in Antwerp Cathedral - centre and universality in a Christian space?

Last week I spent a few days in Belgium, a journey which included a trip to Antwerp and its cathedral. As this was my first time in both the country and the city - and as the excursion to Antwerp was something I had not planned in advance - I was completely unprepared by the lavish decorations to be found within the church space. The cathedral is perhaps most famous for its marvellous paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, but I was even more struck by a pulpit situated in the nave, which probably dates to the seventeenth or early eighteenth century.  

The pulpit is made from wood, and it is a masterpiece of woodcraft, whose components are made to look like a living forest. While its most sumptuous side is the front, I first saw it from behind, and even that was enough to stop me in my tracks. What caught my attention most firmly was its array of birds in extremely lifelike details that perched along the pulpit like a guard of honour. More than the vivisimilitude, perhaps, I was also struck by the types of birds, which include an eagle, a peacock and - even more delightfully - a turkey.  

These birds might have had various functions in the decorative programme of the pulpit. Partly, they no doubt served to amaze its spectators and demonstrate the wealth of the cathedral - perhaps even of the bishop himself. But perhaps they also serve to make a point about the universality of Christianity and the place of Antwerp in this universal space. After all, eagles, peacocks and turkeys were exotic birds to seventeenth-century churchgoers in Flanders, and still are to this day. And while this exoticism might have been sufficient in and of itself to have them commissioned for this pulpit, it is nonetheless tempting to see these birds as signifiers of different parts of the world: The eagle in the far north, the peacock in Asia, and the turkey in the still relatively new world of the Americas. And in the middle of all this: Antwerp. If this orientational function of this wooden menagerie was not one of its original function, I very well imagine that it made several of the cathedral's congregants see themselves as part of a much wider world.