The Birds of Glasgow

Bird by bird I have come to know the earth. Pablo Neruda

Ubi aves, ibi angeli. Thomas Aquinas




The pigeons of Walmer Crescent

       the starlings of Asda Ibrox

                the herring gulls of Govan Cross


are all primally Glaswegian -


   The Yoker swans

          the Kelvin herons

                 the blackbirds of those interstitial spaces -

are all fundamentally seasoned

by this west-coast air.


An understanding of these birds,

    the geese of Glasgow Green

           the falcons of Finnieston

                the crows of supermarket car-parks

the magpies!

is crucial to my understanding of Glasgow -


The visiting redwings

the elusive waxwings

the whooper swans

and pink-feeted geese

crucial

to my understanding of world -

The Soul of the Seagull

It often alarms me when it comes to nature the ignorance not just of the general public but of those who are in power and hold authority, a sort of general political authority that appears to give them another authority over nature. Speaking recently of the alleged aggressiveness of seagulls in Cornwall, David Cameron at least had the good sense to realize his limits when it comes to ecology, and dare I say it, compassion.

Cameron told BBC Radio Cornwall: “It is a dangerous one for the prime minister to dive in and come up with an instant answer with the issues of the protection of seagulls, whether there is a need for a cull, what should be done about eggs and nests. I think a big conversation needs to happen about this and frankly the people we need to listen to are people who really understand this issue in Cornwall, and the potential effects it is having. Reading the papers this morning about how aggressive the seagulls are now in St Ives, for instance, we do have a problem.”
 

A couple of years ago when cycling around Cowcaddens I saw a city council guy with a large bird of prey strapped to his arm. This was just outside Dundasvale high flats. I asked him what was up. He told me the gulls here were a pest and that the hen harrier he had was going to disturb them enough to make them move on. He seemed to take great pleasure in the fact that his bird had already maimed a few gulls and that he and his human cronies had removed eggs from rooftops. 

Just watching these gulls, the mother gull and the father gull, raising their two young on the rooftop opposite me for the past couple of months has made a huge impression on my already open mind regarding these incredible birds. I recall Wittgenstein once saying in one of his more lucid moments that to see the behaviour of a living thing was to see its soul. I could not disagree. And here, watching these birds, this family of sentient intelligent creatures, for these past several weeks has allowed me an insight into their lives that I would otherwise not have got from a book or eslewhere. I can see their communicating, their languaging, their learning; i can see the parent's exhaustion after working all week, day and night, to take care of their young, to find food and feed them 30 times a day if not more. I can see, furthermore, the young furball gulls, who appear more like furry little gremlins, clambering over that slippery slated rooftop balancing with a flap of their still tiny wings, preventing them presumably from slipping all the way down and off and onto the concrete floor 6 metres below. I can see the mother's trepidation in her movements, in the fluctuation of her calls. I can see all this and more, and I wonder why it has taken me 45 years to understand the soul of the seagull, why this hadn't been afforded to me when I was young, when I was at school. Surely, this is real education (teaching us about our living breathing earth, our wider and wiser Family), and not some phony education that sets us up for some future financial payoff, inevitably, at the cost of the earth and Family. Family with a capital F.

I pity the city council man who thinks these birds 'rats with wings'. Rats are actually, if you got to know them, very intelligent and capable creatures. But of course, it's blinding ignorance, and it's embarrassing when I hear it from my fellow man. When he actually had the gall to call them an invasive species, I suggested that he look in the mirror. Man, after all, is the most invasive of them all. 

Our schooling system needs to take into account the other life-forms we share our city with, our life with. The gulls of Govan as I remarked in a poem once are as much Glaswegian as we humans are. Surely, then, we should accord them similar rights? At the very least, allow them to live here, and be aware that it is us and our casual attitude to waste and litter who cause them to home in on our cities. To destroy them for something that is essentially our doing is just plain wrong when it isn't just plain diabolical.

I often think that when talking of culling: badgers, foxes, gannets et al. that man should perhaps begin with his own species. But of course, just mentioning this will raise a few eyebrows. But then, to not do so is to somehow presume that we are superior (one step beneath the angels), and that seagulls are simply expendable, and some kind of cartesian machine that doesn't have feelings. The reality, however, is quite different.

All in all, it seems a little rich for man to start berating the seagull for simply shitting on his car, or being tempted by overloaded wheelie bins. My advice is to watch these birds, and learn to understand them, learn to see the similarlities between you and them. And by watching I don't mean on your sofa in front of David Attenborough, I mean in the open, in the fresh wild air. For all that Attenborough has done for wildlife awareness, he has also managed, albeit inadvertently, to prevent this type of watching. Armchair ecologists abound, but you will never know a seagull by simply watching a programme (no matter how informed) about it. You can only know a seagull, as these events and others have shown me, by being with it in the open, and, as the cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock once wrote, by having a 'feeling for the organism'.

You cannot feel the seagull through a TV screen, or any other screen for that matter.