This collection of essays anchors the emerging field of avian studies in spatial analyses. The useful introduction by Olga Petri describes the common thread in these essays as encounters between people and birds in shared worlds, “a global commons in which we only have ground-floor access” (p. 11). People have often invested strong meaning in their interactions with birds, perhaps because their flight leaves us behind. But, Petri explains, we intrude on them even as they evade us, and this other meaning of their “flight” draws attention to human responsibility.
The essays in this book are about movements that lead to ecological, social, and cultural encounters between people and birds across space, but also time. From a human point of view, flying is the most interesting way birds move, and so many authors in this volume work with flight as metaphor and meaning. The result is a thought-provoking commentary on birds and people and a sampler of many ways to conceive of their encounters.
The conceptualization of the book’s three sections is generative. The first section, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind, and Out of Place,” draws our attention to birds in unexpected places, or their absence where we might expect to find them. Dolly Jørgensen’s reflection on museum exhibitions of extinct birds emphasizes the double displacement of disappearance from their habitats and depiction in bare display settings. In the next chapter, Philip Howell looks to commentary and cultural production about the Windrush generation (immigrants from the Caribbean to England in the decades after World War II; “Windrush” was the ship that brought the first group) and London’s feral pigeons to comment on otherness in hostile environments. The migrating birds Andrew Whitehouse writes about in chapter 3 are not exactly in the wrong place, but his interesting consideration of the physical and ecological limits on four species gives him the opportunity to comment on how birds find their way through space and catastrophe. The last chapter in that section, by Paul Merchant, examines life history interviews on the late 20th century, to examine when and why British farmers noticed birds. It seems many farmers assumed the birds belonged somewhere else and only stopped by on their way to other places.
“Making Sense of Shared Space,” the second section of the book, foregrounds encounters in shared spaces. Sara Asu Schroer describes how the atmosphere—both the physical weather and the mood created through their interactions—conditions their interactions. As Patricia Jäggi describes it, birds inhabit air not only through flight but also through sound. Working in Iceland, Jäggi hears less birdsong than flight calls, wingbeats, and silence. The spaces of London, coastal England, and Rome become contact zones between humans and starlings in Andy Morris’s chapter. Biological interactions, technological innovation, and human ambivalence create a complex politics of space. Pigeons commuting on trains are not, in Shawn Bodden’s essay, just out of place, but are negotiating, with their human fellow passengers, a multispecies urban environment.
Titled “Flights of Fancy,” the third section of the book locates birds in human cultural imagination. Jeremy Mynott’s examination of the play The Birds by Aristophanes elaborates on what it is about birds that they serve as such important cultural symbols. Angels are featured in Roger Wotton’s discussion of Christian thinking about winged creatures. He concludes that as traditionally depicted, their design wouldn’t support flight. But as spiritual creatures, that doesn’t matter much. A chapter by Alex Lawrence uses the metaphor of flight to detail the toucan’s circulation through Early Modern European knowledge, social networks, and aesthetic sensibilities. The metaphor of flight also guides the following chapter, by William M. Adams, Adam Searle, and Jonathon Turnbull, on the peregrine. First, this species flew into near extinction, then it flowed into cities, and finally it flickers across the screens of digital media.
For a volume concerned with something as seemingly narrow as the spatial analyses of avian flight through human perceptions, this one is expansive in its coverage. The wide variety of theorists (from Deleuze and Guattari to Billy Graham), the broad conceptions of space, and the generous use of metaphor send the chapters in this book winging in many directions. The diversity of approaches provides a lot to learn and much to appreciate.
Published online: October 30, 2024
University of California Press