Bird watching for credits?!
By Iona MacLaren
November 2022
My flat mate received one of her first impressions of who she would be living with on a Tuesday morning in early September, as I bumped into her by the backdoor. She was in her pajamas, having emerged unsuspecting from a warm bed. As I closed the door behind me, our eyes met. Hers suddenly widened as she took in the remarkable sight: a rain-sodden, pink-cheeked, windswept person was standing in her hallway, a pair of binoculars hanging like a medal round their neck. This sight was of course me, having come back from a windy walk along East Sands. I said good morning brightly, as if I hadn’t just materialised out of a Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust magazine, and even managed to have half of a normal conversation with her before she asked me the inevitable question: ‘Iona, what have you been doing?’ I pause, choosing my words carefully. ‘Bird watching! Bird watching for credits.’
The VIP group this semester at Gaurdbridge on one of our famous birding adventures
I don’t expect my masters-level biochem flat mate to take my all-hours, all-weathers, birdwatching exploits seriously, nor do I expect her to fully understand why it is we’ve been doing what we have. But this lack of understanding actually illustrates just why the work of the biodiversity literacy VIP is so important. Generally, people living western, industrialised lifestyles act as though they’re separate from nature, viewing it as something which is nice for leisure time, or useful for resources, but engaging little with nature just for nature’s sake. By extension, we lose touch with the urgency of protecting and encouraging the world’s diverse ecology. It sometimes feels like real enthusiasm for the environment is the domain of scientists and hippies alone, as though caring about the natural world could be a fun personality trait to opt in and out of, rather than a global imperative. The biodiversity literacy VIP begins to address this gap between those who are deeply geeky about nature, and those who experience it more passively, encouraging people in the St Andrews University to connect with the natural world by learning how to identify the local species all around us. As I increasingly left the house with a pair of binoculars round my neck this semester, it slowly dawned on me how powerful this grass-roots endeavour could be in fostering greater sustainability.
Getting out and learning taxa identification in the field has had a big impact on me. Although I grew up nature-privileged and developed a connection to the outdoors early in my childhood, because of the busyness of this stage in life, I’d lost touch with it all a little. That quickly changed as I undertook the challenge of bird identification. The more I learnt about one bird species, the more that their presence around St Andrews came into my concern. Even when I was in the urban centre of town (which, granted, isn’t a world-renowned metropolis) I began to feel a greater connection to nature through observation – things like noticing, ‘oh look, there’s that robin chirping aggressively by the student union’, or ‘the rooks are about town today’. I remember one evening in particular when the autumn dusk had sprung on me by surprise, and I stood in a chilly field out behind DRA. I’d paused to decide whether to turn back from my bird walk or take the longer route home through the farmland. As I stood in my cold indecision, my attention was caught by the moon which was nearly full and incredibly bright. Then suddenly out of no-where the moon appeared as though it was right before my face, set with two huge black eyes. I started in fright, but quickly returned to calm as I saw the pale form of the barn owl which had just visited me departing silently into the woods. You can see how encounters with nature such as this become lit up by imagination, with my inner world and the natural environment finding a common ground as I anthropomorphise the robin, or imagine the owl as a spectre of the moon. That experience connected me to the seemingly empty field behind DRA, a space which has now been sold for development. I now have an opinion about this development decision, thanks to the connection I feel I have to that field, post owl-encounter, and the investment I have in the wildlife which might have lived, hunted, bred, and died in it. The point is, I now care a lot more about the nature I am seeing in and around St Andrews. And that care comes about because I understand it better, and have formed an emotional, imaginative relationship with it.
Our last bird walk along the scores in search of waxwings
There is a lot of theory and research in environmental literature on ‘nature connection’ – that is having a relationship with nature and caring about it regardless of any of its objective uses for humanity. This sort of connection is seen to improve wellbeing and make people more concerned about the ecological consequences of their actions. The literature also suggests that our ability to find joy in the natural world is an evolutionary adaptation which helped us survive in what were originally natural habitats (humanity having since shifted to majority urban existence). But this biophilia (as it’s called) is something that is largely learned through exposure, rather than being an innate behaviour encoded into our genome. So in other words, if you don’t learn to love and respect nature, you simply won’t. I remember my best friend at school saying she didn’t feel comfortable outdoors – her mum always made it seem like a fearful place. She had to do more than just go for a walk to connect with nature because she had never learnt how to love it, associating the outdoors instead with threat and anxiety. But interestingly I remember she wanted to turn that around. She wanted to feel comfortable and at home in natural environments, but just hadn’t been given the opportunity. Nature deficit disorder as a term sums up what she and so many children suffer from, and it encapsulates more generally the present lack of nature connection in modern society. In a moving Sustainable Development lecture on the subject, our class was shown a Persil advert whose big headline was that “on average, children now spend less time outdoors than a prison inmate” – that is less than two hours a day. This is a concerning statistic: if we don’t regularly spend time in nature like I had to for collecting my weekly bird list, how can we form any connection to it?
Screenshots from Persil’s advert, part of a campaign for more outdoor child play
The impacts of this nature deficit disorder are problematic, with nature knowledge seemingly drifting out of mainstream culture, and a general lethargy being widespread when it comes to preventing ecological damage. However, over the course of this semester, the VIP group have been turning these trends around, expanding our knowledge of bird and tree species, and reaching out to the wider St Andrews community through our social media, planning social events like beach cleans and workshops to make your own bird feeder (set to take place next semester). I’ve learnt that nature connection really is something you can learn, with something so simple as being a little curious about the birds around me helping to strengthen my relationship with the nature in my life. Based off my experience, if everyone takes part in these small activities, has better access to nature knowledge, and these kinds of emotional connections, I believe real social shifts could occur. Perhaps we would be more willing to sacrifice some modern conveniences for the benefit of sustainability, or have more inclusive discussions which take into account nature perspectives as well as economic ones, and thus it would be easier to make the policy and behavioural changes we need to achieve a more sustainable society.
For someone who is headed down the humanities route through university, I sometimes wonder how I can branch out my skills and efforts into the field of environmental protection. From this module I have realised that, whilst the discipline of natural science is extremely important – recording species and empirically measuring biodiversity (which we’ve also been working on throughout the semester) – it is not the whole story. Sowing the seeds of participation in our communities plays a really important role too, ensuring that more than just ‘scientists and hippies’ care about nature. Not everyone can be a scientist after all, but everyone can be a citizen scientist, can learn bird names and calls, and can form their own relationship with nature, given enough of an opportunity. This kind of nature connection which the biodiversity literacy VIP is helping to spread is so fundamental, because ultimately, if so many people don’t care about something, how can we ever hope to protect it?