This is from The Guardian this weekend, by Natalie Kyriacou. The whole piece is worth reading. Written by someone who obviously is a birdwatcher and who gets why people do it, this paragraph is the essence of the issue, but there is much else that she says that is worth noting:
At its heart, birdwatching is an act of quiet rebellion. It is the gentle act of noticing – the willingness to see the world around you. And this simple act is, in itself, revolutionary. In a world that often teaches us to look past the natural world – to pave it over, cut it down or otherwise ignore it – birdwatching demands slowness and attention. It demands that we pause, that we listen, that we care, that we see.
Doing those things matters, as I have already noted elsewhere this morning.
I can think of nothing better for my mental health and awareness than birdwatching. The symbiotic relationship of caring about the world is rewarded by what feels like its care for me. And that matters.
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Lovely stuff, Richard, and well worth a read. I’ve been a bird watcher since I was 12, when I joined the RSPB’s ‘Young Ornithologist’s Club’ (YOC). In fact, my first ever research “paper” was published in the YOC magazine a couple of years later, based on my counting of the number and type of bird killed on a stretch of main road I had to cycle along every morning to deliver papers (Blackbirds were the most killed, for reasons that will be obvious if you’re a bird watcher).
For a period in my late teens and early twenties I lapsed (other interests), but otherwise I enjoy bird watching as much now as I did when I first started r. I’m also happy that my walking companion of many years is now also a convert. And we recently met with some old friends who’d spent some time in the Orkney’s earlier in the summer, where they’d been introduced to bird watching, and had to admit that they now understood the attraction (which they ribbed me about for years). My eldest grandson has also joined the ‘ranks’, having been at university in Bangor for a couple of years (though, he’s resisted my efforts to get him to learn to sail while he lives by the sea).
What I find particularly sad and worrying now, is that so many people – and not just young people, but those in their 30s and 40s – walk around glued to the screen on their phone. I visit or cycle through a country park not far from where I live and hardly see anyone not glued to their phone: dog walkers, completely ignoring their dogs; men and women with their kids, completely ignoring their kids. And all of them completely ignorant of the Kestrels hovering, Skylarks soaring and singing. Buzzards majestically circling. And all manner of smaller birds going about their business. Utter madness!
Anyway, thanks for the link to the article as I would have missed it. And enjoy your bird watching – though you can’t see much here just now as the fog’s very thick this morning.
Not birdwatching today.
And I too was in the YOC.
Our neighbour recently let his house while he was working overseas (in a tax haven ironically) to a woman with two cats and two kittens. During the ten years we have lived here so far my partner and I have fed the birds in our tiny garden which we rent from the nearby church (on a contract that requires us to provide water for birds). There are a pair of blackbirds who nest in the hedge every year, wrens, robins, goldfinches, sparrows, blue-tits, long-tailed tits, a dunnock, chaffinches and the occasional owl, and sparrow-hawk.
We asked our new neighbour if she would fit the cats with quick-release collars with bells so that the birds might get some warning of their presence. At first she refused saying that cats have been killed by their collars getting caught on tree branches but she then agreed on the basis that she didn’t want to upset neighbours and fitted the cats with collars and bells. However, another neighbour, a veterinary nurse, informed her that she was endangering her cats’ safety and she duly removed the collars.
The RSPB estimates that domestic cats (who in England but not Scotland have a ‘right to roam’ in law) kill 28 million birds every year.
I could not have a cat.