The Ongoing Indifference of Birds
"Because of course, nothing is wrong as far as the birds are concerned."
In this piece, Richard Smyth looks back at his recent book and ruminates on how it might have looked if it was written during the time of coronavirus…
In my last book, I wrote about what it means for us when the birds stop singing. I wrote that a part of us—an old part, buried deep in our master circuitry—recognises danger in the sound of silence; that we know without having to be told that when the forest goes quiet, it’s because there’s a hawk passing through and from here we understand that a silent spring means something is amiss, something fundamental has been knocked off-beam.
That was in 2017. Now, weeks into coronavirus lockdown, I’m thinking about something else: what it means when we go quiet but the birds keep on singing—when, if anything, the birds seem to sing longer and more loudly than before.
My latest book is called An Indifference Of Birds. It was published just before the Covid-19 wave broke over us. Now the theme and title of the book feel almost painfully on the nose. I once joked on Twitter that it was going to be called Birds Do Not Give A Fuck About Your Shit and this is the message that’s brought home to me, over and over again, as I sit on the back step in the early morning, worrying about R numbers and school closures and shielding and social distancing, and see the local magpie pair stirring up shit as usual, and the chiffchaffs on the allotments still insistently two-stepping away, and the peregrine on the mill chimney looking down, superbly unbothered, and all the rest – goldfinches, woodpigeons, jackdaws, swifts – simply carrying on as if nothing was wrong. Because of course, nothing is wrong as far as the birds are concerned.
In some ways, it’s obvious that the birds aren’t bothered, in the main, by our human concerns. They don’t watch the news. They aren’t on Twitter. But there are, nevertheless, habits of thought that we often fall into when we think and write and talk about birds that don’t really tally with the lives—with the values, the priorities—of the birds themselves. Ideas as diverse as beauty, extinction, utility, dignity, foreign and native, urban and rural, wild and tame—they don’t mean much from a bird’s perspective. And yet, these are ideas that shape our thinking, frame our conversations about wildlife, landscape, biodiversity and the environment.
What I wanted to do with this book was tell the story of our species from a bird’s-eye view. Stripped of human intent, human interpretation, how might the things we’ve done—all the building and reorganising, the intrusion, the destruction, the relentless being there—look different? A city, the idea of what a city is, is transformed when you consider it from the perspective of a sparrow or a pigeon. Fundamental notions of life and death are reshaped by the zooming shifts in scale and scope. The world looks, apart from anything else, much more interesting.
Now lockdown—a withdrawal from the world on a vast scale, an epochal stepping-back—presents the underpinning ideas of my book in melodramatic contrast. There they are, singing, feeding, copulating on the roof-ridges, building nests, raising families. Here we are, stuck inside. Two different worlds; one might almost say two different cultures.
It isn’t exactly true to say that what we do doesn’t matter to the birds. We can (and do) raze habitats, wipe out populations, transform landscapes, disrupt the lives of birds in a million different ways.
The point is that what we think we’re doing is very often not the same as what they think we’re doing. In many ways, birds see through a clearer lens than we do. Their worldview is less cluttered, more immediate, improvisational, pragmatic and urgently reactive.
A gull—a lesser black-back, I think—flies over the house, headed south-east. It’s an effort to imagine what sort of world it sees sliding past below. To see things its way, their way, is not easy (shifts in perspective seldom are). But we, as a species, do have that capacity, that superpower of changing the lens, rolling the focus—of seeing ourselves, if only in glimpses, as others see us.
You can buy Richard Smyth’s book An Indifference of Birds at Uniformbooks.
Richard can be found on Twitter @RSmythFreelance.
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