A Bird in the Bush is Better Than a Bird Forced to Nest in Rubbish

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man pollution

 

 

There has been increasing concern over recent years about the fact that more and more species of birds are using rubbish as nest building material [1].

 

Obviously, one of the main reasons for this is necessity; uncontrolled human population growth and the associated spread of urban landscapes results in the destruction of natural spaces and the subsequent loss of natural nest building materials [2] and so birds - like other animals - have to adapt to survive.  

 

Unfortunately, not all bird species will be able to adapt to living in limited numbers in small isolated areas surrounded by people, cars, buildings, bright lights, etc. A big city lifestyle amongst the garbage isn't for everyone.  

 

But some birds are at least giving it a go and they constitute one of the most common groups of urban animals: 

 

"Their ability to fly allows them to move quickly between places to find refuge, food, or water inside cities. Additionally, several bird species are well adapted to urban areas because of their generalized diets (in other words, they can tolerate the majority of food resources available), large brains (allowing them to solve problems and use new resources), non-specific requirements for nesting places (can nest in the majority of available places), and small sizes (allowing larger populations to survive on small amounts of resources)." [3] 

 

However, whether using a diversity of waste materials - including plastic, wood, metal and rubber - as nesting material will prove to be beneficial or harmful to their survival in the long term remains to be seen. I suspect the latter [4]. For whilst there do seem to be some advantages to a nest constructed from artificial materials - for example, the nicotine found in fag ends is a known repellent against some parasitic insects - there are several negative consequences identified by researchers:    

 

"For example, one negative effect of the use of garbage for nest building could be an increase in the nest temperature when birds use plastic bags pieces, a situation that could negatively affect an egg's embryo development. Another negative effect may be an increase in nest predation if, by being more conspicuous, artificial materials make nests more easily detectable by visual predators. It is also possible to expect a decrease in chicks' survival because plastic or nylon ropes may attach and tangle around chicks in the nest, causing mortality." [5]

 

Let's just say that it isn't yet certain what the consequences will be of this new behaviour. But, having said that, I think we can agree that it makes the heart sink to read about baby birds reared amongst garbage and eating particles of microplastic.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Such behaviour isn't new - indeed, it has been observed since the early 19th-century - but it is rapidly increasing as the natural environment becomes ever-more shaped (and polluted) by humanity.

 

[2] As two researchers in the field of urban ecology write: "The reduction in abundance of natural materials for nest building is probably the force incentivizing species to use artificial materials, which are becoming more, not less, available as human activities increase." 

      See Josué Corrales and Luis Sandoval, 'Our Garbage, Their Homes: Artificial Material as Nesting Material' (December 2016). To read this text online, visit The Nature of Cities website: click here.

 

[3] Ibid.

 

[4] For a report by Anjit Naranjan in The Guardian (10 July 2023) on a newly published European study concerned with the safety of chicks being reared in nests constructed from rubbish, click here. 

[5] Josué Corrales and Luis Sandoval, 'Our Garbage, Their Homes: Artificial Material as Nesting Material', op. cit. 

 

 

For a follow up post to this one on crows and magpies ingeniously using human technology (anti-bird spikes) to protect their nests, click here.  

Anti-Human Reflections on the Red-Billed Leiothrix

Leiothrix lutea

 

 

I. 

 

In a country in which insect numbers have fallen a staggering 65% in the last twenty years and other factors, such as agricultural intensification and habitat destruction, are all making survival increasingly difficult for our feathered friends, it's surprising that any foreign bird species would decide to try its luck and make the move to England.

 

However, that's just what the red-billed leiothrix - known by some as the Pekin robin or the Japanese nightingale - has decided to do; much to the horror and outrage of those who fear this brightly-coloured subtropical songbird will colonise our gardens, threaten native bird populations, and change the dawn chorus for ever ...

 

It's a familiar tale: the same people who hate ring-necked parakeets hate these little birds. And they always justify their opposition to the invasive species on the same grounds; namely, a desire to safeguard the survival of native creatures, although they don't seem to have done a very good job of that over the last 50 years, during which time tens of millions of birds have disappeared from our skies.  

One might have imagined, therefore, that they would welcome these newcomers, who have been recorded in several parts of the country. 

 

But not so: a tiny number of red-billed leiothrixes spotted in southern England and thought to have escaped from captivity - not flown here directly from China and not known to be successfully breeding - has got them worked up into a frenzy: Non-native species are never a good thing, sometimes they’re neutral, but they're never positive, as one expert put it.

 

II. 

 

Meanwhile, I heard today on the news that ten thousand human migrants have (illegally) crossed the Channel in small boats and set foot on British shores so far this year (after 28,500 arrived in 2021), ever increasing the UK human population and transforming England into the most overcrowded (and nature-depleted) large nation in Europe.   

 

Personally, I'd like to see far more birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and insects and far fewer people on these islands and would happily support an extensive programme of rewilding and depopulation in order to increase biodiversity. For frankly, the latter isn't going to happen without the former. 

 

Ultimately, I agree with Birkin, there's no thought more beautiful or cleaner than a world empty of people and full of birdsong.   

New Year's Eve 2020: Fireworks, Propaganda, and an Avian Mortality Event

 

Picture credits: BBC News / IOPA Facebook

 

 

I have already expressed my reservations regarding New Year's Eve fireworks in a post entitled Panem et Pyrotechnics - namely, that they make North Koreans of us all. 

 

This opinion was reinforced a few days ago, when that idiotic little weasel posing as the Mayor of London, Mr. Sadiq Khan, decided to light up the night sky above the Millennium Dome with a clenched fist symbol in support of Black Lives Matter. 

 

The locked down masses prohibited from attending the event in person - because of the virus - were, thanks to a complicit state broadcaster, able to enjoy the £1.5 million spectacle (described by some as a virtue signalling political stunt) live on TV and social media.    

 

Other highlights of the show included the turning of London's bridges blue and yellow with lasers on the eve that the Brexit transition period ended and the UK finally left the EU, and 300 drones forming the shape of a giant turtle with a map of Africa on its shell to express concern about the so-called climate crisis. 

 

As provocative and divisive as this was, it didn't have the heartbreaking horror of events in Rome, where a New Year's Eve firework display resulted in the deaths of hundreds of birds, mostly starlings, that were roosting nearby. 

 

Footage filmed from outside the city's main train station, showed the bodies of the birds littering the streets, as some reports insensitively described the scene, as if they were just feathered pieces of trash waiting to be swept away and their lives didn't matter.

 

A spokesperson for the Italian branch of the International Organisation for the Protection of Animals claimed that the poor things were essentially scared to death by the fireworks and although the RSPB claims that there is little evidence to suggest that fireworks present a grave danger to wild birds, I do not believe them and would challenge their record of protecting birds over the last 50 years when avian numbers have (in some cases dramatically) declined.

 

 

Synthetic Aesthetics: Notes on the Genius of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Illustration of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg from Dezeen 

the online architecture, interiors, and design magazine

dezeen.com

Is Daisy Ginsberg the most interesting artist working in the world today? She's certainly a strong contender for the title and would probably get my vote.

For the past decade she has explored and experimented with the possibilities of synthetic biology, creating works and curating exhibitions that critically examine the relationship between art, science and nature, whilst researching the human desire to enhance the world (her Ph.D. completed in 2017 was on how our dream of a better, brighter future materially shapes the present).

Curently resident at Somerset House Studios, Ginsberg's recent projects have included one on the possibility of wilding Mars for the benefit of new plant species (rather than terraforming it to the advantage of man); one on recreating the scent of extinct flowers from remnants of their DNA (whilst simutaneously resurrecting a notion of the sublime); and - opening at the end of this month - an installation entitled Machine Auguries that highlights the silencing of the natural world via the use of deepfake birdsong to create a synthetic dawn chorus.

Working with the sound designer Chris Timpson, Ginsberg has combined recordings of real birds with machine generated responses - the latter only being distinguishable from the former due to a deliberately inbuilt distortion. It's both a very beautiful and heartbreakingly depressing work that raises awareness of the fact that we have lost 40 million birds in the UK in just 50 years and that many once-familiar and much-loved species continue to be in decline.

There's no doubting that artificially intelligent machines can generate many fantastic images and sounds - things that are more real than real -  but, personally, I would hate to live in a virtual world without actual flowers, birdsong, or the sound of children playing.   

Notes

'Machine Auguries', by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, is part of the exhibition 24/7: A Wake-Up Call for Our Non-Stop World, at the Embankment Galleries, Somerset House, London, 31 October 2019 - 23 February 2020. Click here for more details.

Readers interested in knowing more about Ginsberg and her astonishing body of work, should visit her website: daisyginsberg.com

Tits and Beaks

Photo: Dennis van de Water

It is, I suppose, another sign of advancing middle-age when one starts to be more interested in tits and beaks than what the Americans crudely refer to as t and a.

Thus I was intrigued to hear that the British obsession with feeding birds seems to be causing a rapid evolution in the rostrums of certain species, including tits, as they physically adapt to the garden environment.      

In fact, researchers at Oxford who have been studying the great tit population in Wytham Woods for over 70 years, have found that the beaks of UK birds in comparison to their Continental cousins are up to 0.3 mm longer. This may not sound like a big deal, but it's actually an astonishing development and even such a tiny advantage can mean the difference between life and death.  

Further, in conjunction with colleagues in the Netherlands, they have also discovered that, due to natural selection, genes determining beak length are now significantly different in British tits; in other words, Dutch birds not only have shorter beaks, but different DNA sequences. 

Apparently, the British spend about £200 million each year feeding their feathered friends; that's twice as much as the rest of Europe. And they have been doing so for many years now. Thus, whilst researchers can't definitively say that bird feeders are responsible, it certainly seems reasonable to suggest that the longer beaks are a result of this interspecies generosity.

However, whilst it's interesting to note that the number of species of birds that now rely upon supplementary food supplied by householders has risen to around 130 (up from just 18 forty years ago), one does worry about dependency and what would happen if, for whatever reason, people decided to hang up less feeders and more anti-bird spikes in the trees - like those sons of bitches in Bristol worried about protecting their precious BMWs. 

Notes 

For further details, see 'British birds adapt their beaks to birdfeeders' (20 Oct 2017) on the Oxford University News and Events page: click here. Most of the factual information above was gleaned from this source. 

The actual study referred to - 'Recent natural selection causes adaptive evolution of an avian polygenic trait', by Mirte Bosse, Lewis G. Spurgin et al - was published in Science, Vol. 358, Issue 6361, (Oct 2017), pp. 365-68. 

The case of residents in Clifton - the affluent Bristol suburb - fixing spikes to trees in their neighbourhood in an attempt to prevent birds from perching and shitting on the expensive cars parked below, was widely reported in the press earlier this month. I refrained from commenting here on Torpedo the Ark, as I didn't want to be seen to be inciting vandalism in response to this grotesque act of selfish and spiteful stupidity. Click here to read a report in the local paper, the Bristol Post.   

Still Life

Stephen Alexander: Still Life (2017) 

Dead sparrow and dried red rose 
on lime green sponge cloth 

The term, still life (from the Dutch stilleven) isn't one I care for and would rather, as an object-oriented philosopher, it was simply called object art.

For that is what it is essentially; a genre in which one creates compositions using inanimate objects, be they natural or artificial, real or virtual, in order to produce a picture that might, at the very least, interest or amuse and at best tell us something important about things and the relationships between them as they exist in a zone of proximity and/or a flat ontological field. 

Unfortunately, however, I don't get to name things, so I suppose we'll have to stick with the given and widely accepted term - even if I insist on the right to read the word still not as an adjective meaning static, fixed, motionless, but in the adverbial sense of that which continues even now; i.e. death is still very much a vital part of life and not simply its silencing.

Whilst its origins can be traced back at least as far as the Classical era, still life was first recognised as a distinct genre in Western art during the 16th century (i.e. the early-modern period) and it has remained popular ever since, with painters and members of the viewing public. Anthropocentric art critics, however, continue to rank it as an inferior form within their precious hierarchy of genres - below even landscape - due to its lack of a human subject.*

As indicated earlier, the Dutch were pioneers of the form and remain for many the great masters, although, personally, I prefer late modern (and postmodern) works that produce less cluttered canvases and which challenge still life conventions by using mixed media and a wider, more random selection of mundane objects.

That said, you can't in the end beat dead birds, beasts and flowers (still life has always had an obvious affinity with zoological and botanical illustration). And thus, in my own attempt at a still life above, I've used very traditional elements, though arranged on a more contemporary background drawn from the world of consumer culture and domestic life.

The aim, in part, was to offer the super absorbent, lime green kitchen sponge as a fascinating (and rather lovely) object in its own right, rather than merely a pleasing aesthetic background. The sparrow and the dried red rose are not to be privileged over the Spontex cloth, which, made as it is from cellulose and cotton is just as organic in nature (and as biodegradable) as the other objects, despite being manufactured (this for those who worry about such things).

And, obviously, none of these things are meant to symbolise anything, or possess some kind of mythological meaning. They should be appreciated as real objects made glamorous only by the play of sunlight and shadow, art and death ...        


* In 1667, for example, the influential French art historian André Félibien famously declared:  

"He who produces perfect landscapes is superior to those who only depict fruit, flowers or seafood. Similarly, he who paints living animals is more commendable than those who only represent inanimate dead objects. And as man is the most perfect work of God on earth, it's also certain that he who imitates God by representing human figures, excels beyond all others ..."

On the Art of Necro-Ornithology

Poor Dead Sparrow 

(on plastic orange background) 
Stephen Alexander (2017) 

As regular readers will know, I have had a persistent love for birds from early childhood; from cheeky house sparrows to menacing black crows. I love to watch them and I love to listen to them. 

I agree entirely with Luce Irigaray: Birds are our friends. They accompany us throughout our life, making happy and bringing comfort in times of crisis. Angels, one might suggest, not only have mighty wings, they also have sharp beaks.   

People who don't like birds, or would do them harm, obviously have something wrong with them. But, I have no objections to those individuals who find the dead bodies of birds an opportunity for art and lovingly transform feathered corpses into aesthetic objects of morbid curiosity.

Because whilst for birds, as for flowers, beasts and man, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive, the second best thing is to leave behind a beautiful corpse, or a fascinating image. 

Knowing nothing about taxidermy, however, and unable to draw for toffee, the best I can do is try to take an interesting snap with my iphone when encountering a poor dead sparrow lying on the front garden path (before gently wrapping the little body in kitchen paper and placing it in the bin). 

Note: readers interested in birds might like to see the earlier posts related to this one: Feathered Friends, On the Whistling of Birds at Midnight, and Necro-Ornithology (Study of a Dead Baby Bird).

Feathered Friends

Luce Irigaray writes some very lovely lines concerning the precious and mysterious assistance she has received in her life and work directly from birds:

"Birds are our friends. But also our guides, our scouts. Our angels in some respect. They accompany persons who are alone, comfort them, restoring their health and their courage. Birds do more. Birds lead one's becoming. The birds' song heals many a useless word ... restores silence, delivers silence. The bird consoles, gives back to life, but not to inertia."

                                                               

      - 'Animal Compassion', trans. Marilyn Gaddis Rose, in Animal Philosophy, (Continuum, 2004), p. 197.

All of this is true. Which is why feeding the pair of pigeons who have set up home on my balcony - and even cleaning up the mess they make - is never a chore, but always a source of happiness. I like the fact that they live their lives on one side of the glass and I live mine on the other and that we have, over the years, become familiar and established a bond of trust and affection. 

People who don't like birds, or who are unkind to them - who call pigeons vermin and argue for their removal from our public spaces - have something wrong with them I think. To close your ears to birdsong is ultimately to close your heart to love.