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Birds have been a source of fascination for thousands of years. And people have long looked to birds to explain humans. For Aristotle, birds were one of the nonhuman species closest to us. The similarities are noted, however, en route to arguing that human beings are distinct, unique, and elevated over the rest of nature.
People constantly cherry-pick examples from nature to defend our behaviour or social arrangements as “natural,” and birds play a major role in this work of political and cultural self-justification.
In this episode I reflect on my own relationship with my local birds in the context of this centuries-old double logic, why we find birds both uncanny and appealing, and what it means to live in community with nonhuman animals.
Reading
Tim Burkhead. Birds and Us: A 12,000-Year History from Cave Art to Conservation.
William Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature.
Chris Elphing, John B. Dunning, and David Allan Sibley, eds. The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behaviour.
Bernd Heinrich. The Gifts of the Crow, The Homing Instinct, Mind of the Raven, The Nesting Season, Ravens in Winter.
Bart Kempenaers. “Mating systems in birds.” Current Biology, Volume 32, Issue 20, 2022, Pages R1115-R1121,ISSN 0960-9822, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.06.066.
Joan E. Strassmann. Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard.
Credits
Written, recorded, and produced by Steve McCullough.
The music is “Dirt Rhodes" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons - By Attribution 4.0.
The cover art features “Concentric squares forming a geometric maze pattern” by Cansu Sarp.
