In the absence of sparrows (original) (raw)
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Weird birds and abandoned places: Pigeons’ role in post-industrial settings
Trace, 2024
This article examines the role of pigeons (Columba livia domestica) in post-industrial settings and presents a case study of an abandoned pulp mill silo in Meri-Toppila, Oulu, Finland. Pigeons and humans have a long-shared history, during which the former's role has changed from commodity to "nuisance" species. Using participant observation and perspectives from weirding and queer theory, this study explores the transformation of the human-bird relationship by observing a colony of pigeons at a culturally and historically significant site. In our urban cities, pigeons have found nesting places in attics, on building ledges and in nooks and abandoned structures. Even though we, as humans, avoid these abandoned places, these weird pigeons do not care about our dystopian images and instead thrive in places that we no longer consider valuable. Our everyday life could benefit from interaction with pigeons more than we might believe. Pigeons have become an integral part of our industrial heritage and could have a significant role to play in our daily lives if we were to only give them a chance.
Understanding place as \u27home\u27 and \u27away\u27 through practices of bird-watching
2014
Bird-watching is an increasingly popular leisure activity. Previous research has taken for granted the identity of people who watch birds, often categorised by their level of skilled practice as \u27dude\u27, \u27birder\u27 or \u27twitcher\u27. Feminist geographers encourage us to explore identity work as an outcome of the reciprocal relationships between practices and place. Our feminist approach illustrates that the practices of bird-watching are always much more than categorising birds as species. This paper illustrates how the practices of bird-watching are integral to the making and remaking of sense of place as \u27home\u27 and \u27away\u27, to sustain identities beyond accepted categories of \u27dude\u27, \u27birder\u27 and \u27twitcher\u27. The creation and application of different types of \u27bird-lists\u27 helps to explain the ways in which practices of bird-watching facilitate making sense of place as simultaneously \u27home\u27, \u27away\u27 and habitat, as well as the ...
The power of (dis)placement pigeons and urban regeneration in Trafalgar Square
The regeneration of Trafalgar Square was presented as a process of transforming a chaotic roundabout into a world-class square fit for a world-class city. This worldclassness revolved around enabling the square as a cultural space by altering the very materiality of the place: several human and nonhuman objects were added in order to encourage those cultural practices through which a world-class city-ness is performed. The proposal implied some exclusions too. Turning the square into a cultural place implied redefining the presence of nature within it. To be cultural the square had to be pigeon-free and achieving that goal, in turn, required some material objects being removed and some practices being proscribed. This paper examines the contested accounts of civility at play in this material remaking of Trafalgar Square and advances the wider theoretical claim that this dynamic interplay of placement and displacement of ontologically symmetrical humans and nonhumans is not blind to political imbalances. The paper suggests potential dialogues between relational, more-than-human and urban geographies and emerging political theories of the nonhuman, while contributing to a conceptualization of power in relational thinking. Downloaded from Escobar 3 that material objects, bodies, machines … help constitute the common worlds that we share and the dense fabric of relations with others in and through which we live', Braun and Whatmore set out to enquire about the politics of things in order to 'sketch out a more fully materialist theory of politics, one that allows a place for the force of things '. 9 Metaphors of placing and displacement are a favoured trope of geographical work on relationality and the more-than-human, 10 and in applying them to the case of pigeons in Trafalgar Square I make two further conceptual interventions at the interface of urban geography and relational, more-than-human geographies. In so doing, I reflect critically on debates about theorizations of power in relational thinking and on Braun and Whatmore's arguments about the politics of matter. 11 First, tracing the material (dis)placements articulated through the public controversy over pigeons in Trafalgar Square illustrates how the process of marginalization, so central to critical urban geographies, was materialized in practice. In this way the paper responds to Braun's complaint that urban geography's ongoing work on urban natures often fails to account for the 'larger economic, political and cultural processes' that shape them. 12
Toward an (Avian) Aesthetic of (Avian) Absence.
Science, broadly defined, seeks to bring humans epistemologically closer to the physical world by empirical means; philosophy and history of science remind that the apparatuses deployed by scientists (scientific method; mathematical formulae; language) always already maintain a distance. Certain literary/artistic endeavours do not fundamentally differ in their attempts to bring humans closer to the world via language/symbolism. After laying a framework for negotiating the shifting tensions between distance and proximity when contemplating literature's place in ecological thinking, I offer in this essay a series of comparative readings of bird poems complemented by an analysis of a book for young readers. Informing my readings of texts by British, Canadian, and South African writers is a thought experiment: what happens when we consider birds as works of art? For the first half of my argument, I offer readings of poems that sound an alarm regarding humans' carelessness and that posit faulty birdwatchers as exemplars of respectful poetic attention. For the remainder of the essay, I focus on texts about penguins as a critical case study for the first half's thought experiment. The texts that privilege distance and absence as preferable modes of engaging with birds also enable an understanding of birds as works of art independent of human designs.
A flock of sparrows in the city of Ghent: a multidisciplinary case study
This article elaborates on the deployment of multipurpose, aesthetic smart objects, called 'The Sparrows' in the city of Ghent (Belgium, Europe). The goals of the integration of the sparrows in the city were twofold (1) augmenting the social engagement of citizens using a playful aesthetic smart artifact, and (2) exploring the ambient interaction zones with smart artifacts in a city context. In this article we present the case study carried out on the integration of the smart artifacts in the city and we describe the experiences of the involved citizens with the sparrows and the embedded ambient interactions.
Crossing Worlds in Buildings: Caring for Swifts in Brussels
Crossing Worlds in Buildings Caring for Swifts in Brussels, 2023
Holes in the houses of Brussels, as in other buildings across Europe, have long been the preferred nesting sites of the common swift (Apus apus), a bird famous for its fast flight and for spending most of its life on the wing. For several decades, however, urban construction and renovation has led to the destruction of swifts’ breeding sites, contributing significantly to their disappearance, and have prompted amateur naturalists to spatial interventions in ways that they hope the birds will accept. This essay explores this form of care that is forging a new path through the more-than-human city. It starts with an account of how swifts “story” the cavities they inhabit, and then describes the engagement of a devoted swift caretaker with the birds’ astute knowledge of buildings and their meaningful worlds. Moving across sites in Brussels, the essay articulates how an attentiveness takes shape between swifts, their storied-places, and the human caretakers who learn about them, as well as the tensions and contradictions that arise. Such a care practice involves noticing and experiential learning, it requires conveying importance to unfamiliar interlocutors, and leads both to the reactivation of architectural heritages and pleasure at aesthetic encounters with the birds. In some cases, the employment of nest boxes and other technologies may also risk greenwashing ecologically harmful operations. Caring for swifts, the essay concludes, involves a reciprocal co-becoming at specific architectural interfaces, through attentive and imaginative practices. These modes of attention and of imagination enable material interventions in buildings with a fuller appreciation of swifts’ storied worlds.
Journal of Ornithology, 2008
The House Sparrow Passer domesticus is traditionally associated with human habitation. However, the species has undergone dramatic declines in many urban areas in north-western Europe. There are many theories as to why this decline has occurred, but the lack of data on House Sparrow numbers prior to their decline has hampered efforts to investigate these theories in detail. This review summarises the demographic changes in urban House Sparrow populations since the 1970s, and considers evidence that the current distribution of House Sparrows may reflect changes in urban habitats caused by socioeconomic change. Evidence is mounting that, within urban landscapes, House Sparrows appear to be more prevalent in areas with a relatively low human socioeconomic status. Here, we present evidence to suggest that House Sparrows may have disappeared predominantly from more affluent areas, and that these areas are more likely to have undergone changes to habitat structure. We also show how these changes in habitat could influence House Sparrow populations via impacts upon nesting success, foraging and predation risk.
The case of the Disappearing House Sparrow (Passer domesticus indicus)
Veterinary World
The fluffy brown sparrows are 15cm in length and distributed all over India up to 4000m in the Himalayas. The disappearance of sparrows has been widely reported in India. The sparrow population in Andhra Pradesh alone had dropped by 80 per cent, and in other states like ...