Birds & People; Man & Birds; Birds & Men. This is by no means the first book to investigate our relationship with avian life. But we know what to expect from those others, their roll-call of the impediments thrown into the life-path of birds by men, all that economic usage and abusage. Richard Smyth turns the perspective on its head, offering us a revolutionary take on the old relationship: he has taken it on himself to write the chapter titled Humankind in the annals of bird history. It is our story, from their point of view. And that point of view is, as Richard Smyth so ably demonstrates, “how little we matter to them but also… how much they matter to us”. Such is the indifference of birds.
That volte-face seems somehow to have liberated the author, to have allowed him a grand sweep of historic references from the siege of Tyre to Tudor-era military hardware to the M40; and a nature-doc liberty with globetrotting from South American savanna to Chernobyl via the Judaean Desert. The switches and turns are choreographed so smoothly that the writing has an effortless quality, testament to an author thrilled to discover the validity of his own thesis proven in its writing. I love this, for example: “The movements of bird populations around an emerging town might be likened to a hand reaching into a trap, seeking hesitantly to grab the bait without tripping the catch”.
The story begins with our ancient ancestors, the hominoids of a Namibia of around thirteen million years ago. They, and all their descendants ever since, were as Richard Smyth has it, “messy eaters”, whose leftovers were birds’ feasts. Birds 1, humanoids 0. Later came the explosion of pickings from arable farming, the disregarded verges, roadkill. And later still, the baring and bleaching of unproductive land, not to our benefit, nor to the birds’, but to some bland efficiency mantra: “wilderness is wastefulness”.
There is some fascinating detail about the wildernesses we never meant to create: Chernobyl; an earlier catastrophic explosion at the Mayak plutonium plant in Siberia; the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, all of them unpeopled, and consequently rebirded. But not just with an influx of bird refugees from inhospitable human civilizations: where humans have left so has agriculture, and the mix and proportions of bird populations taking up residency eerily reaches back to a world before humans, and forward to the same thing.
The relocation of birds has other, human, motivators: settlers in Australia imported the songs of the old country in the form of nightingales, blackbirds, thrushes and skylarks released into the wild. Only a small population of the skylarks survived. Eugene Schieffelin’s madcap project to establish in Manhattan every species mentioned in Shakespeare might have been forgotten today but for one factor: starlings. The descendants of the sixty starlings released in Central Park in 1890 number today perhaps two hundred million, “one of the costliest and most noxious birds on our continent”. We took it on ourselves to introduce, and then exterminate, the ruddy duck; and did the reverse for the red kite. We play God with little thought to the consequences. As Richard Smyth puts it “extinction means more to us than to the birds… and death means more to the birds than it does to us”.
We have introduced new – historically new – habitats in the form of the cliffs and ledges of tower blocks and cityscapes. Pigeons and jackdaws on our pavements and chimneys; black redstarts among rubble; kittiwakes on the Tyne Bridge: Richard Smyth puts it into perspective with his observation that while we talk about wild and tame as though they were opposites, “From a bird’s perspective… they’re both just matters of practical policy”.
In a case study of the house sparrow, the bird that has historically been more with us than any other, Richard Smyth makes the important point that the bird “had to learn to need us”. Not just to need us, but to use us, as we sowed and harvested and stored food for them, and built their shelters. The sparrow, in other words, took us in, made us part of the circle of imperatives governing its life, in a trade-off of dependence.
And what of the future? I recommend you to get a copy of this book and read the final chapter, “Things to Come”, for as balanced and realistic a forecast as any I have read, enabled by Richard Smyth having the most level-headed comprehension of what happens when birds and people try to live on the same planet at the same time.
An Indifference of Birds is published by Uniformbooks, and is as handsome and pristine as we have come to expect from this indispensable publishing house. It is not a huge book, but its 110 pages are rich with smart thinking and startling facts. It has challenged, rather than reinforced, what I think about the natural world, and I am grateful for that.
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Richard Smyth: An Indifference of Birds. 110pp, £12.00. Uniformbooks, 2020