There is a problem in getting up close to birds in order to celebrate them. Warm-blooded, they support striking levels of energy and movement. They are social, active and dynamic – most of them fly, though there are significant species of flightless birds. Birds rarely stand still, especially near humans. That’s why the pioneering illustrators of the 19th century sought dead specimens to bring into the studio to paint. John James Audubon’s 1838 engraving of a shocking-pink, double-bent flamingo is one of America’s best-known images, but his career was as much about slaughtering birds – and encouraging a network of associates to do the same – as it was about illustrating them. (He was also a slave owner; some environmental groups are now dropping his name.)
In contrast to the Victorians’ skins and taxidermy specimens – often much-travelled, moth-eaten and peppered with lead shot – a new book by Tim Flach shows birds full of life and vigour. In “Birds”, he could not draw them closer. Flach’s photographs represent a kind of end-station or apotheosis of humans’ age-old and passionate quest to capture and possess the beauty of birds. Hyperreal and drenched in colour, the studio portraits of his avian subjects put him in a long and inspired tradition of artist-ornithologists.
Photography, says Flach, may allow the viewer a deeper experience of birds than observing them from a distance, in motion. The image, he writes, “invites us to examine and contemplate the bending of a feather caught in flight, the minute details of the vanes and barbules of plumage, the frozen moments of torpedo-like diving penguins, the painterly reflections of flamingos wading.” Few figurative depictions of birds have done anything quite like this.
These birds are glamour models or, in the case of the Andean condor or the Marabou stork, the avian equivalent of those weathered, granite-jawed men brought in to add a bit of grit to a fashion shoot. The parallels go further. Flach’s grey-crowned crane stares at the camera with the insolence of Kate Moss. His pouter pigeon poses with the arch insouciance of a Richard Avedon muse. And Flach’s supermodels even have agents, to ensure they are properly handled.
This approach may unsettle, as much as it inspires, those who love birds in the wild. What are we to think of birds that are put in the most confined of settings? It was delight in nature that fanned the evolving American and European crazes in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries for feathers as human adornment. Wearing dead birds on your head, as Adam Nicolson recounts in “The Seabird’s Cry”, was a mark of sensibility. Marie Antoinette started the fashion with ostrich feathers. The ladies of Versailles took to donning such towering confections of plumes that they had to kneel on the floor of their carriages on their way to balls.
The passenger pigeon was once the most abundant bird species. The last one died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914
The slaughter of seabirds abounded around the coasts of Britain, principally to serve the millinery and dress-making trades. On the sea cliffs of Lundy island in the Bristol Channel, 9,000 kittiwakes were shot in a fortnight. The slaughter of these wildest of gulls was the catalyst for Britain’s first-ever piece of environmental legislation, the Sea Birds Preservation Act of 1869. Two decades later, a movement led by women alarmed that the trade in exotic plumes was driving egrets, great-crested grebes and birds of paradise to extinction led to the foundation of the (now-Royal) Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). Lundy’s kittiwake population has yet to recover.
The rage for possession continues today, if with less emphasis on women’s headgear. An Indonesian soldier returning home from a posting on New Guinea will typically bring a rare bird of paradise, fruit pigeon or parakeet to sell through the pet trade – Jakarta’s huge bird market features hundreds of wild species, some on the verge of extinction. The sale of a single bird can equal a soldier’s annual pay, but the trade is stripping the wild of life. In Beijing, bird-lovers take their captive white-eyes and zebra finches to Ritan Park each day, hanging their small wooden cages in trees to let them “feel as if they’re in nature again”, as the owners put it. The birds, of course, are in anything but. Though pampered, caged birds typically lead short lives.
The history of possession usually goes badly for birds. But Flach sets out to turn possession on its head. Most of his subjects are not taken from the wild, but captive bred, often from aviaries involved in conservation work. There is no denying the contrived nature of the setting – even for the several domestic breeds photographed. But for Flach, engendering empathy for birds and encouraging support for conservation is a big part of the project.
Birds hold a special niche in our imagination, hovering between otherness and familiarity. Their ability to fly feeds our fantasies
The challenge of saving birds is enormous. They’re threatened by hunting, the pet trade, pollution, overfishing, changes in agricultural policy, a swift decline in insect numbers and, above all, the destruction of suitable nesting, breeding and feeding habitats. In six decades the worldwide population of seabirds has fallen by two-thirds. A new paper from the RSPB suggests that the European Union has lost 600m breeding birds since 1980; the population of the once-common house sparrow has declined by half.
Connecting people to the natural world has never been more urgent. As a poignant reminder of what has been lost, Flach has photographed the porcelain-pure egg of a passenger pigeon. This was once the most abundant bird species in the history of humankind, with 5bn of them once flitting around North America. The last one died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.
Birds hold a special niche in our imagination, hovering between otherness and familiarity, writes Richard Prum, an evolutionary ornithologist at Yale University, in the text that accompanies Flach’s images. Their ability to fly feeds our fantasies. But other aspects make them more familiar. Birds communicate via visual and acoustic signals, just like us. We find the plumages of birds gorgeous; but so, even more, do mates. And we recognise how birds’ bustling drive parallels our own busy-ness.
Lovers of wild birds in their wilderness may have their feathers ruffled by unashamedly anthropomorphic depictions of birds. Yet the ability to relate, says Prum, lies behind great advances not only in ornithology but in science generally. In the 20th century Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen pioneered the study of animal behaviour through observations of ducks and gulls. A deeper understanding of the neurobiology of learning has been gleaned from the study of songbirds than from that of any other animal, including humans. Perhaps, in the age of the Anthropocene, when no wilderness remains untouched, owning up to affinities is the best hope for conservation. We are all birds now. ■
Dominic Ziegler is Asia correspondent and Banyan columnist for The Economist
“Birds” by Tim Flach is out now. He is also author of “Equus”, “More Than Human” and “Endangered”, as well as other books. Previous shoots for 1843 magazine include “Why the long face? The language of equine emotions” and “Down payment: the secret economics of your winter coat”
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