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An Indifference of Birds
Human history - from a bird's eye view.
History isn't so much about the passage of time as the study of change - how did we get from then to now, from there to here?
To write the history of birds and people, you can look at how they've changed us, or you can look at how we've changed them.
This book seeks to do the second thing; this is a book about our place in their history.
History isn't so much about the passage of time as the study of change - how did we get from then to now, from there to here?
To write the history of birds and people, you can look at how they've changed us, or you can look at how we've changed them.
This book seeks to do the second thing; this is a book about our place in their history.
112 pages, Paperback
First published February 14, 2020
2 people are currently reading
144 people want to read
About the author
Richard Smyth
38 books10 followersRichard Smyth is a writer, researcher and editor based in Bradford. He is a regular contributor to Bird Watching magazine, and reached the final of Mastermind with a specialist subject of British birds. He writes and reviews for The Times, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, New Statesman, BBC Wildlife, New Humanist, Illustration and New Scientist. He also writes novels and short fiction, and has written several books on English history.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
March 1, 2020
Smyth’s second nature book is an extended essay on the relationship between birds and humans. Birds have witnessed the whole of human history, sometimes profiting from our behavior – our waste products provide them with food, our buildings can be handy nesting and hunting platforms, and our unintentional wastelands and demilitarized zones turn into nature reserves – but more often suffering incidental damage. Shifting baseline syndrome explains why phenomena like species decline are slow processes that we hardly notice until it’s almost too late. Eighty percent of bird species are now endangered, and human action has forced changes in bird behavior. That’s not even considering our misguided species introductions and the extinctions we’ve precipitated, knowingly or not. For as minimal as the human fossil record will be, we have a lot to answer for.
From past to future, archaeology to reintroduction and de-extinction projects, this is an expansive work that still comes in at under 100 pages. It’s a valuable shift in perspective from human-centric to bird’s-eye view. The prose is not at all what I’ve come to expect from nature writing (earnest, deliberately lyrical, over-freighted with meaning); it’s more rhetorical and inventive, a bit arch but still passionate – David Foster Wallace meets Virginia Woolf? The last six paragraphs, especially, soar into sublimity. A bit of a niche book, but definitely recommended for bird-lovers.
Favorite lines:
“They must see us, watch us, from the same calculating perspective as they did two million years ago. We’re still galumphing heavy-footed through the edgelands, causing havoc, small life scattering wherever we tread.”
“Wild things lease these places from a capricious landlord. They’re yours, we say, until we need them back.”
From past to future, archaeology to reintroduction and de-extinction projects, this is an expansive work that still comes in at under 100 pages. It’s a valuable shift in perspective from human-centric to bird’s-eye view. The prose is not at all what I’ve come to expect from nature writing (earnest, deliberately lyrical, over-freighted with meaning); it’s more rhetorical and inventive, a bit arch but still passionate – David Foster Wallace meets Virginia Woolf? The last six paragraphs, especially, soar into sublimity. A bit of a niche book, but definitely recommended for bird-lovers.
Favorite lines:
“They must see us, watch us, from the same calculating perspective as they did two million years ago. We’re still galumphing heavy-footed through the edgelands, causing havoc, small life scattering wherever we tread.”
“Wild things lease these places from a capricious landlord. They’re yours, we say, until we need them back.”
May 27, 2020
I loved this short book. The writer has an encyclopaedic knowledge but writes in a lovely, conversational way. I learned new things about birds without feeling hit over head with facts. Highly recommend.
June 24, 2020
Mostly we think of birds in terms of how we see them, but this book turns the tables and imagines how birds see us. In only 100 pages, Richard Smyth takes us on a journey investigating how the human world affects birds.
Smyth looks at the ways in which we have changed things to favour some birds to the detriment of others. He considers how we look to birds, how they may value the food waste we leave and the accidental rockfaces that we create in our cities. He suggests that these artificial environments are just environments to the birds, if they can use these as they would another natural environment, then they will use them.
He tries to look at howa bird might feel if it is caught to be then reintroduced somewhere else, does the bird in fact accept this just as though this is what happens to every bird at some point in its life? We can't ever know whether this is true, but it's certainly an interesting perspective.
Red kites are once again thriving above British cities but, as Smyth points out, these cities now are very different environments than they used to be and how does that impact on the species? Do red kites have any sort of folk memory of how the city was for previous generations?
One of the most sobering insights in the book is the gradual (and therefore easily overlooked) nature of most of the damage that we are doing to the world. Sudden extinctions are rare, but gradual loss is all too common. How do birds see the gradual loss of greenspace that is happening across the world, moment by moment and tightening the world for many species of birds. We don't notice the loss of one or two house sparrows in our local area, how do the sparrows themselves see it? Will we continue making the world a more hostile place for most species of birds or will we find a new way forward to accomodate birds in our world?
I love how this book turns things around, away from a human centric view of birds to a bird centric view of humans (though obviously, given this is written by a human, it is only a reimagining of a birdcentric view).
"Better, perhaps to embrace the birds' indifference. To try to see that 'ours' is also 'theirs'. To watch kestrels hunt in the cathedral cloister and think not how wonderfully they set off the architecture, but rather how wonderful it is that this thing we call 'architecture' has within it a whole other meaning, a whole alternative reality, a whole bunch of alternative realities: the kestrels' reality, the pigeons' or sparrows' or herring gulls' reality, realities of shelter, airflow, altitude, prey, peace..."
Smyth looks at the ways in which we have changed things to favour some birds to the detriment of others. He considers how we look to birds, how they may value the food waste we leave and the accidental rockfaces that we create in our cities. He suggests that these artificial environments are just environments to the birds, if they can use these as they would another natural environment, then they will use them.
He tries to look at howa bird might feel if it is caught to be then reintroduced somewhere else, does the bird in fact accept this just as though this is what happens to every bird at some point in its life? We can't ever know whether this is true, but it's certainly an interesting perspective.
Red kites are once again thriving above British cities but, as Smyth points out, these cities now are very different environments than they used to be and how does that impact on the species? Do red kites have any sort of folk memory of how the city was for previous generations?
One of the most sobering insights in the book is the gradual (and therefore easily overlooked) nature of most of the damage that we are doing to the world. Sudden extinctions are rare, but gradual loss is all too common. How do birds see the gradual loss of greenspace that is happening across the world, moment by moment and tightening the world for many species of birds. We don't notice the loss of one or two house sparrows in our local area, how do the sparrows themselves see it? Will we continue making the world a more hostile place for most species of birds or will we find a new way forward to accomodate birds in our world?
I love how this book turns things around, away from a human centric view of birds to a bird centric view of humans (though obviously, given this is written by a human, it is only a reimagining of a birdcentric view).
"Better, perhaps to embrace the birds' indifference. To try to see that 'ours' is also 'theirs'. To watch kestrels hunt in the cathedral cloister and think not how wonderfully they set off the architecture, but rather how wonderful it is that this thing we call 'architecture' has within it a whole other meaning, a whole alternative reality, a whole bunch of alternative realities: the kestrels' reality, the pigeons' or sparrows' or herring gulls' reality, realities of shelter, airflow, altitude, prey, peace..."
April 12, 2020
Somewhere between natural history of birds and a deep history of humans. A fascinating read
March 19, 2020
A thoroughly enjoyable read about our shared history with birds, and how they fit within our world, and us in theirs. It explores how we have both altered the experiences of each, either knowingly or not. Richard writes with a beautiful, energetic style about a subject he is clearly very passionate about, and has the ability to make you often feel like you're experiencing moments of revelation. This is particularly true when turning part of our life around to be seen from the point of view of birds.
It's the perfect mix of observations, facts, experience, and – in some places – dry wit. It will be of equal interest to those who think a lot about birds, and those who have rarely done so.
It's the perfect mix of observations, facts, experience, and – in some places – dry wit. It will be of equal interest to those who think a lot about birds, and those who have rarely done so.
November 2, 2022
Left a little cold by this one. I really struggled to find any workable structure or purpose to most sections of the book, but perhaps those details were obscured under the surface a bit for my taste. Fabulous writing style, though; anyone who describes a murmuration of starlings as ‘throwing shapes against darkening skies, stippled auroras in shifting greyscale’ clearly knows their way around a sentence.
March 18, 2020
This one took me a long time to get through in relation to its size not because it bored me, but because it is a book to savour.
June 17, 2020
This book is great for anyone who loves birds, history, and/or nature. It's a well-written account of humanity's ties to avians-whether we like it or not-that hosts some brilliant ideas.
July 6, 2020
Pretty, lyrical book. Slightly unstructured to me, but will gladly look about from more from this author
June 3, 2020
Short, zippy, different, fascinating.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews