Magpies will stop stealing from bird feeders if you place one simple object in the garden
This piece from the Daily Express is just the kind of lazy, sensationalist, clickbait journalism about wildlife that drives me up the wall. If it’s not corvids, it’s Squirrels, Red Kites, Foxes, Gulls, Adders or Ragwort being demonised. It is ironic that people love to categorise animal lovers as anthropomorphists, but here is a national newspaper attributing human values, or the lack of them, to a songbird. I can assure them that birds do not have a sense of property rights. The Great Spotted Woodpecker who was visiting the garden regularly has disappeared. She was blind in one eye and I suspect has not survived. Other, smaller birds would hang back until she had finished feeding. I have watched them wait their turn this morning in deference to a Nuthatch. Are they also ‘stealing’? They are all just trying to survive. And there is plenty to go round. The Dunnocks are back now too and yesterday a female Greenfinch with her beautiful flash of vivid yellow.
Pliny thought that Magpies could not just imitate humans words but also ponder their meaning. Their association with bad luck came from Christianised Europe. They are no more attracted to shiny things than other birds either. In China they are seen as “messengers of love and joy” (from Sally Coulthard’s Bird Lore, passim).
Gulls and Pigeons are, absurdly, characterised as greedy. How is this measured? Are they greedier than, say, Blue Tits?
Lo and behold, in the Nature Notebook section of yesterday’s Times we have a piece by John Lewis-Stempel headlined “Herring gull thieves are choosier than you’d think”. Gull populations, like those of many other seabirds, are in serious decline and this kind of journalism is completely irresponsible. He suggests that Herring Gulls, who are red-listed, “have largely given up the fishing of the fish from which it garners its name.” I wonder if that has anything to do with a decline in availabilty. In any case they are and have always been omnivorous and opportunistic. And in any case they are not herring specialists – the name more likely derives from their colouring. So having got the etymology wrong for one part of their name, Lewis-Stempel goes onto compound the offence. The verb to ‘gull’ he says, meaning to fool someone, dates back to at least the sixteenth century. I think that is correct but it has nothing to do with the birds whose name derives quite differently from Celtic roots going back to the early 1400s.
I have now finished reading A.A. Gill Is Further Away helping with enquiries and mostly it did not disappoint. His pieces about travels abroad are never what you expect with the exception of one about the Danube which did read like any other routine travelogue. I was pleased to see an index. In the paperback edition at least though, the grainy black-and-white photographs are printed so badly that it would have been better to have left them out altogether.
I certainly don’t agree with Gill about everything. They say it is never good to meet you heroes and if you are a Gill aficionado it is best not to watch this debacle unfolding:
Bourdain and Gill on Animal Cruelty and Worker Rights
Anthony Bourdain makes my skin crawl at the best of times. Here they both freely admit not caring about cruelty to animals. Gill dismisses the cruelty involved in the production of foie gras as a “bullshit issue” and Bourdain adds, “I also don’t really care if animals suffer if I’m perfectly honest I don’t give a shit… once you’ve heard one pig scream … the second one’s easier.” Their arguments in favour of foie gras are so specious as to be risible were it not for the seriousness of the subject. Gill compares the plight of the force-fed birds to the treatment in kitchens of Ghanaian dishwashers, suggesting that because they are treated badly the lesser crime is perfectly acceptable. Bourdain argues that taste would suffer if there was any actual cruelty involved.
Gill comes across as a smug, sneering bully, even in the way he treats the interviewer whom he makes it so obvious he regards as his intellectual inferior.
In 2009 Gill shot a baboon in Tanzania. Culling, he said, was just “a veil for naughty fun” and that he real reason he had done it was because he wanted to know what it felt like to kill a human being. That is seriously messed up.
This is the normalisation of cruelty to animals, as typified by the fake survivalist Bear Grylls and factory farm apologist Jeremy Clarkson.
A sad little update on Trindledown Farm where I began my animal rescue volunteering which is the main subject of my first book, Animal Trust. A local pub is hosting a dog show (can’t stand them but never mind) at the end of the month and the manager asked me if I thought that they might be interested not in sponsoring it but receiving the proceeds. I am not sure I was completely believed, understandably, but I said that although it was surely worth asking I would expect her to come up against resistance and inertia. It does sound absurd. She rang and left messages with whoever answered the phone three times over three weeks and has not had even the courtesy of a reply. I am reliably informed that there are no field animals there at all any more, just domestic ‘pets’. This was predictable. New management saw the field animals as merely economically unviable, blind to the numbers of visitors and donors they attracted. It is the sad ruination of what was once a very special place and I still find it pretty heart breaking. The website now makes it look sterile and the ‘Meet the Team’ section includes only the centre manager and, bizarrely, the centre manager for Cornwall. If I didn’t leave at the right time it is just that I stayed too long in the face of ever increasing disillusionment. I carried on for the sake of the animals, especially the ones who knew me, but when they started to suffer it had to be time to go. It was like watching the proverbial train wreck. Places like these obviously need careful and prudent financial management but as with so many other institutions, as soon as you put people who only care about money in charge, their very nature and purpose get lost.
The picture at the head of this post is of my favourite sheep and dear friend Hamish. How much I miss the sheep was recently brought home by the movie The Sheep Detectives. It’s a lot of fun and it seemed to me that the behaviour of the CGI sheep must have been the result of close observation and knowledge – it is absolutely spot on.
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