I CAN hardly believe I’m doing this. I can feel the long, light bones in its wings, super-strong like girders; I can feel the muscles in its chest and the movement of the tiny heart that powers its flights; and I can feel its beak as it softly pecks at my fingers – a gentle protest at the indignity of being constrained by a human. I’ve never held a living bird in my hands before, but I did the other day and what a privilege it was. I’m never going to forget it.


But how would you feel if I told you that the bird I was holding was a pigeon? Might you experience a little bit of disgust at the idea? The man who owns the pigeon told me he’s seen grown men scream at his birds flapping and we certainly know that not everyone appreciates the pigeon. It’s why we put spikes on window sills to discourage them; it’s why interdicts are slapped on little old ladies who feed them; and it’s why some people call them flying rats. The sight of a bird might make my heart soar – and yours too hopefully – but others feel anger and disgust. Some, as we know, even reach for the gun, or the trap, or the bottle of poison.

We also know that the people who kill birds get furious if their right to do so is challenged. You probably saw the pictures the other day of dead crows hanging outside the home of the naturalist Chris Packham. No one knows yet exactly who put them there, but it happened after licences for controlling some species of birds were revoked in England following a challenge by Mr Packham’s Wild Justice group. Effectively, the dead bodies were an attempt to make a well-known broadcaster stop campaigning to change the law on the protection of birds. It’s the old technique of the criminal: blood on the doorstep.

In response, Mr Packham has said he will not be intimidated and thank goodness for that because the natural world needs its defenders. As the recent UN report on extinctions made clear, we now seem to be in a situation where we’re running Genesis backwards; we are un-creating the world and birds are suffering just as much as any other species. It’s a message from the skies and the sea and the fields – we’re going to have to learn new ways of living together.
 

Read more: Death threats sent to Chris Packham

But still the defenders of the right to kill crows don’t get it. They say the populations have hugely increased over the last 40 years, but corvids are not immune to the worrying shifts that are happening in the environment. In his beautiful book, Gods of the Morning, the naturalist John Lister-Kaye describes the effects an early spring followed by a frost had on the rookery near his home in the Highlands. “There should have been a cacophony of rook gossip and the gargling of strong chicks,” he wrote. “Instead: the leaden silence of emptiness. Nothing moved. Twenty-nine nests, and possibly as many as a hundred chicks. They had all starved.” This is what the environmental crisis can do.

So what’s the response of those who wish to continue to kill birds? Well, we got a glimpse of it in a piece in The Herald this week by Rory Kennedy, head of rural estates at Chiene and Tait. Mr Kennedy said the actions of Mr Packham’s group could impact on parallel schemes administered by Scottish Natural Heritage. What it effectively means is “pest” species such as crows and woodpigeons can no longer be freely shot and a new licensing system will have to be found. But what it doesn’t mean is a blanket ban and even Wild Justice says it accepts some birds need to be culled sometimes.

But we all know what’s really going on here. Mr Kennedy said in his piece that every week an army of sports shooters cull tens of thousands of woodpigeons. We also know that the vast majority of birds shot every year in Britain are pheasants and that to protect the birds, gamekeepers kill vast numbers of predators. It’s all happening for the most trivial of reasons – to allow rich people to kill pheasants – but pretty much all kinds of culling is for commercial reasons – protecting agriculture, or sports shooting, or housing or industrial development. What’s killing our birds? Money.

Mr Packham’s response to all of this is pretty simple: in Britain, it should be difficult to kill birds, not easy, and yet even birds with the highest protection can be killed with impunity as we’ve seen with hen harriers. Only the other day, a young female called Skylar, who was being monitored by the RSPB, disappeared in a part of South Lanarkshire that’s notorious for the lawless killing of birds. In 2014, two hen harriers vanished there. In 2015, another hen harrier was found shot dead. 2017: a hen harrier and a short-eared owl shot on a grouse moor. It’s heart-breaking and yet no one is ever caught.

I’d like to suggest, though, that the attitude of those tasked with protecting grouse moors is only part of a bigger problem, which is our hypocrisy over birds. The masters of grouse moors deny that hen harriers are killed to protect pheasants but where there is no driven grouse shooting, the hen harrier thrives so you can draw your own conclusion on that one. Essentially, birds are being killed to protect the right to kill birds.

But aren’t we all guilty of the same double standards? On the one hand, we spend millions on food for robins and chaffinches yet on the other we spend millions on measures to deter pigeons and seagulls. Except that there’s nothing inherently different about these species, only our reaction to them, and even that changes with time. In the 1950s, thousands of working men in Scotland kept pigeons and they were one of the country’s most beloved birds. Now, they are largely reviled for no good reason.

So, do you think we could use the Packham affair as a starting point for changing our attitudes, for ending speciesism? We certainly need to ban the shooting of birds for sport, but we also need to restrict the shooting of birds for commercial reasons. In effect, that was the point of the UN report and the Extinction Rebellion protests: at the moment, the order of priorities is commercial gain then the planet, but it needs to be the other way round: first the planet, then commercial gain. That way, the birds might have a chance. And if they do, maybe we do too.