MEET THE AUTHOR Richard Smyth
The writer talks to us about the relationship between humans and birds.
Why do you think people are so fascinated by watching birds?
There are lots of reasons – as many as there are birdwatchers, really – but, these days, what I find most compelling about birds is the stories we can read in their behaviour. Epic stories, of migration, evolution, adaptation – all that in a backstreet magpie or a blue tit on the fatballs. In some ways, we’re tightly interconnected – we share Earth’s habitats, along with all the other living things. But birds have their own perspectives, their own values, their own senses of scale, of time and space, which can be very different to ours.
How has human activity caused birds to adapt their behaviour?
Humans are a very recent spanner in the works for birds, who lived in a humanless world for a terrifically long time. But once we did come along, we’ve changed how they feed, live, breed, move about – largely by changing landscapes and ecologies, but often through more direct means: clumsy relocations, unintended introductions, and, of course, straightforward butchery. Whilst some species have struggled to adapt to urban landscapes, it’s easy to lose sight of that when you see something as excitingly incongruous as a peregrine in a city centre. Many birds suffer directly from the concreting-over of habitats, but what’s more pernicious is what I call in the book ‘the tightening of the clamp’: as day by day, the lives of birds get that little bit more difficult.
How have humans helped birds?
Conservationists and campaigners have done an awful lot of good, where they’ve been able. What I find especially interesting, though, is the good we’ve done by accident – where birds have thrived because we haven’t been able to mess them up. And that can mean anything from the vacant lot by the old canal, grown over with wildflowers, to the unpeopled wildernesses of Chernobyl and the Korean DMZ. The flipside is that we’ve done a lot of harm with good intentions, too.
How much should we involve ourselves in the lives of birds?
The main thing, I think, is to accept that the non-human world has its own dynamics, and we can’t begin to get our heads around exactly how those work. We absolutely shouldn’t stop working on it. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained, as a species, by trying to shrink back into our shells and pretending we don’t exist, but we should remember that things often pan out quite differently – to say the least – to how we envisaged them in our blueprints. MS