Why Birds Why

From the window of the office where I should maybe be getting on with the work I am paid to do, a number of birds are visible. Through a given day, I’ll see wood pigeons, jackdaws, blackbirds, tits, crows, a robin. At the moment I can see a squirrel outside, who is, if the scientists are to be taken at their word, not a bird.

There are a few phobic people who are disconcerted by birds, but speaking personally, and to a certain extent making a sweeping generalisation, it’s nice to see birds. If the other scientists are to be taken at their word, humans are hardwired to be comforted by the sounds and sights of birds, who signal a setting of biodiversity and relative abundance. This makes sense, but I am inclined to think a touch more romantically, so I am interested in why it’s nice to see birds, but not necessarily interested in finding out a definitive answer as to why.

Birds are always popping up in literature, and maybe in poetry in particular, and I’m not the first person to think on why that might be. Many clever critical essays and articles have been written on the subject and at the moment I don’t have the research time or inclination to try and compete with them. I would love if Mary Ruefle had written something on it, in a similar way to how she has written on the lyric moon, but as far as I know she hasn’t.

So why birds then, I ask, having set expectations very low as to any kind of answer. I’ve definitely written about a few and will no doubt write about at least a few more. I have just agreed to collaborate on a critical-poetic work on the language of chickens, so maybe I should have some better ideas. I’ve had a brief search around to see what other people have to say about it, and I am inclined to think a touch less romantically than a lot of them. I don’t think birds are aspirational, and I don’t think birds are otherworldly, and I don’t think birds are poems in themselves. Birds are there, nearby. Sometimes they fly and sometimes they shit on me and sometimes they die and sometimes I am friends with a bird or two in particular.

And maybe that’s all there is to it. Birds appear in poems for the same reason people appear in poems, because we encounter them so regularly. They get around! The only difference is the ease of empathy. There’s probably something to say here about Othering more generally, whether it’s birds, animals, or people, but I do not have the time or space or energy for the depth of that thinking here. Instead, an anecdote: some years ago, when my partner and I lived in Birmingham city centre on a third floor flat, we had the windows open during a heatwave, and a blue tit flew from one side of the building to the other and perched on a chairback right in front of the sofa where I was slouched. So, the felt effects of climate change, a colourful bird, the city, me thinking ‘Wow, so beautiful and special’, you’ve got all these layers of symbolism you might read into it. But realistically, the bird was thinking something like, ‘ah where the fuck am I how do I get back outside away from this large ape’, except the bird would be thinking this in a different language, one I don’t have direct access to.

So we end then as promised exactly where we started, distant from conclusive insight. Here we have a newsletter that offers no material benefit or harm to you, just appearing in your window doing its own thing like a bird. It’s good though, at least I think it’s good, to have these encounters with birds in a way that moves us to an emotion, or an understanding of ourselves or the world, an understanding which was close at hand for so long. An understanding in the hand is worth two in the bush, as they say.

Without wading too far into less pleasant meditations, it’s fair to say these fruitful encounters are becoming more challenging in an atomised and polluted world. And this seems reason enough to cherish and sit with them for as long as possible. I hope you come close to plenty of other lives, birds and otherwise, this week and forever.

I don’t have a writing prompt, but I would love to read your favourite bird poems, and I use ‘bird’ here in a way which includes squirrels.