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A highly acclaimed team including Mark Cocker (author), David Tipling (photographer), and Jonathan Elphick (researcher) is launching a major new project entitled Birds and People. This is also a ground-breaking joint venture between BirdLife International and Random House.
As we all know, birds are one of the most captivating life-forms on the planet. Today they often play the rôle of ambassador in our entire relationship with nature. Well-stocked bird tables and feeding stations have become a part of many peoples' daily lives right across the planet. For environmentalists they are collectively the miner's canary, their populations helping us to gauge the health of environments from the inner city to the remote Arctic tundra. In turn they have given rise to a global network involving millions of birdwatchers.
Yet birds had also been at the heart of human cultures for thousands of years before the advent of environmentalism. As images of our gods, as symbols of key human ideals such as political liberty or spiritual freedom, as emblems of almost any human product from lemonade (La Cigogne in Morocco) to the nation state (Bald Eagle in the USA), birds have been a limitless source of inspiration. They are on coins, bank notes, flags and stamps or in art, music, literature, television cartoons and myth. Our language is permeated with words derived from birds.
Reflect briefly, for example, on the range of symbolisms that attach to that most overlooked member of the global avifauna, the domestic chicken. It is a central motif of the Christian faith, and an icon for both the French nation and the Portuguese. Every day in African villages right across that vast continent, the chicken is a core part of animist traditions and ceremony. On a lighter note, chicken soup is supposedly regarded by Jewish mothers the world over as a panacea for most of its ills. While the poor female chicken is a metaphor for cowardice, the cock bird is a potent symbol of masculinity, recorded alike in the no-nonsense eroticism of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or the thinly veiled innuendo of Howling Wolf's classic blues song 'Little Red Rooster'. The list is almost endless, but finally consider the chicken's rôle as the most important source of protein for the world's human population.
Birds and People is being launched as a website forum where anyone interested in birds and their cultural importance can discuss and place on record their experiences and observations. Some BirdGuides customers will know Mark Cocker's previous book Birds Britannica (Chatto and Windus 2005; with Richard Mabey), which explored many of the same themes in the context of our national avifauna. Birds and People broadens the field, but welcomes public contributions in precisely the same way as the earlier book. Some of the contributions will be used in the text of an eventual book and all contributors will be acknowledged.
The information in this article was believed correct at the time of writing. BirdGuides Ltd accepts no responsibility for errors, or for any consequences of acting on information in the article. The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily shared by BirdGuides Ltd. |
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