Must we make even our nature programmes be about us?

Tweet of the Day is radio genius. A bird a day for Radio 4 listeners who may never have heard, say, a curlew, in their lives but in the course of 90 seconds are briefed about its home life, habits and song. It’s a kind of probiotic to help the urban listener cope with the 6am news.

At least, that was the original idea of the programme: straight ornithology, delivered by an expert, someone dispassionate and authoritative including – inevitably – David Attenborough. You might get a bit of folklore in the talk, which added to the charm, but it was essentially all about the bird.

Well, not any more. Tweet of the Day started to lose its original character when it went global, world birds rather than the humdrum native sorts – though obviously the natives include migrants (this programme is nothing if not inclusive). And more recently, it’s changed character again; it’s not so much a radio take on the Observer Book of British Birds as a series of reflections from assorted individuals about their encounters with birds. It’s billed as “the conversational voices of those who listen to and are inspired by birds. Building on the previous series, it is a more informal approach to learning alongside a renewed emphasis on encounter with nature and reflection on the natural world.”

Basically, then, it’s about people. Some of the episodes are charming: Frank Gardner on the little auk, say – as well as being a defence correspondent, he’s a birdwatching fanatic – or the actor Samuel West on listening for nightingales. Yesterday, there was Clare Jones, who joined the RSPB as a result of an encounter with the egret, a bird which “reminds us that something so small can completely change your outlook on life”. There is also a little girl who has added her might to the series.

Other broadcasts are downright egotistical; the nadir of the present series was the zoologist Tim Birkhead on the puffin, which, he complained was “just dead boring”. Even the mating happens in burrows, he said. “There’s no gossip or fighting: puffins have a rather dull life.” Well, the purpose of the bloody puffin isn’t to provide entertainment for onlookers with binoculars; they exist in and for themselves – though the mere sight of a puffin would cheer most of us up.

And that’s just the problem. The shift from birds to people is symptomatic of the culture; eventually, it’s all about us. The description of plumage, habitats, eggs, song and environmental threats could run to several episodes per bird, and there’s scope for a bit of folklore and history, but our tendency is to subjectivise creatures, to see them in terms of their emotional impact on us. Medieval bestiaries were at least sensational and morally useful: most of their descriptions of birds, which lost nothing in the telling, concluded with their lessons for us – the chaste doves that only take one mate for life, say, were an example to promiscuous humans. And there’s lots to be said about the relationship between men and birds, in fairy stories and folk tales.

There are just under 600 species of birds in Britain and Ireland; they could run forever on a loop, because we can never tire of them. Or we could just listen to them sometimes, rather than hear about them: 90 seconds of crows cawing would do it for me. Back to the birds, please.