Feathered Friends or Feathered Foes? The Impact of Emotional Narratives on Bird Conservation

A little birdie told me… that the ways we connect with birds impacts our desire to protect them. Chloe Moriarty explores the power of emotional attachment and story-telling in shaping the future of bird conservation.

It’s no secret in the conservation space that the ways in which we experience our natural world, and our subsequent perceptions of it, significantly influence our environmental stewardship. At a species level, we have readily conserved animals based on their value to humans, their ‘likeability’ as a species, their aesthetics; a marked display of anthropocentrism. This has resulted in the moral and financial prioritisation of more charming and charismatic mammals, such as elephants and giraffes, over less ‘desirable’ reptiles, amphibians, and insects.

Consequently, a burning problem for conservation has been created. Ranking animals in this way, with disregard for their ecological purposes and inherent roles within their complex ecosystems, will perpetually place critically important, but less favourable, species at the bottom of the list.

Charismatic species like elephants are much more likely to receive the public support and funding required to drive their conservation. Credits: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas via Wikimedia Commons.

Story-telling and media play a pivotal part in shaping our perceptions of certain species. The 1975 picture ‘Jaws’ provides one of the best illustrations of this point, with its dramatic depiction of shark attacks heightening public fear of these animals for decades. Meanwhile, heart-wrenching documentary portrayals of starving polar bears elicit the opposite response. Whilst media representations of the natural world have some objective truth to them, they are created with inherent subjectivity, and it’s important to not underestimate their impact in influencing the way in which we think and feel about species. Human emotion is intrinsically linked to our guardianship of species, and those that are most commonly feared - think snakes, spiders, and sharks - are not going to be ‘fan favourites’ for conservation.

So, where does this leave birds?

Evolving almost 140 million years ago, birds have been conquering the skies, land, and water, for substantially longer than humans have been on Earth. As we have grown to observe, study, and better understand birds, we have developed a fondness for certain species and a distaste for others, in part shaped by the emotionally-driven stories that we have associated with our feathered companions. In love, life, and death, we have sought to connect with birds; in drawing parallels between the lives of humans and animals, we have unconsciously cemented our own bird conservation priority list in our heads.

Penguin huddles are a vital way to keep the colony alive during harsh weather, but we also associate them with love and care. Credits: David Stanley via Wikimedia Commons.

Take penguins, for example. Most of us reading will have seen documentaries showing the excruciatingly long wait of a nesting penguin expecting their lifelong partner to come ‘home’ from sea. We project our own desperation through the TV screen for the penguins’ story to be one of love and not loss, feeling elation if the pair reunites, experiencing agony if it is revealed that the returning penguin has suffered ill-fate. Penguins’ monogamy, although less common than perhaps thought, their unhesitant adoption of abandoned chicks, and their huddling together in a snowstorm, resonate with us as forms of love, care, and selflessness, furthering our attachment to these flightless birds. All of this is communicated through the power of story-telling and human emotion.

We continue to look for love and comfort in birds through the hardest times of life, particularly in grief. Robins have been presented as bridging the gap between the living and the dead, crossing the impassable chasm between life and what comes after. Rising from Indigenous folklore and biblical tales, these tiny birds are cherished as messengers from our ancestors and those recently passed; in them we desperately look for signs of hope and connection that may help us endure insurmountable grief. It is a powerful statement that we look for birds in times of loss, for the security of a robin’s fleeting visit to our gardens. When the deep and uniquely vulnerable connection that we have formed with robins inevitably carries through to their conservation, it comes as no surprise.

The European Robin is a common sight in British gardens, but these birds also serve as symbols of hope during immense grief. Credits: Alexis Lours via Wikimedia Commons.

But in death, some birds are regarded very differently. Vultures, hailing from both the ‘New World’ and ‘Old World’, are often seen as the villains of the bird kingdom, notorious for their scavenging behaviours and consumption of carrion. Movies have regularly depicted them circling harsh terrains in search of their next victim, reminding a weary protagonist of the continuous danger that they are in. Whilst this is somewhat true, the framing of these birds as something to be feared instead of revered is misrepresentative of their behaviours.

Vultures are integral to the ecosystems in which they live- they are, in essence, nature’s ‘cleaning team’, removing potentially harmful carcasses from the environment and in turn keeping other animals safe from disease. Yet we often overlook this significance, feeling uncomfortable at the notion that some creatures may be able to embrace death in such a way. And so, vultures are tarred with the same brush as hyenas, simply because they evolved to depend on death- a feat unfathomable to humans.

But why is any of this truly important? Why does the way that we experience birds, or tell stories about them, bear any significance on their survival?

In honesty, I had never given bird conservation much thought before I stumbled across a video of a Hawaiian bird called the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō. Perched on a tree branch, the lone male sang a haunting call into the forest, awaiting a response. This response would never come - this male was unknowingly the only individual left and, having not been heard since 1987, in 2000 the species was declared extinct. Something about this video stuck with me, and I began to research more into bird extinction rates. I discovered that in the UK, over 25% of our birds are at threat of extinction. Even bleaker, almost half of the world’s total 11,000 bird species are experiencing some form of decline.

The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō (Moho braccatus) went extinct due to habitat destruction, a rise in predatory species, and disease. Credits: Hiart via Wikimedia Commons.

The fact is that all of our thoughts and perceptions of the world come from a mixture of direct experience and from things that have been told to us. Whether it be from documentaries, fictional films, ancestral stories, or old books, much of what we ‘know’ in life is dictated by the way that things are presented to us; there are multiple ways of shaping the truth in every story. We pass these anecdotes down through generations and share our teachings with others, influencing the way that we collectively view and understand species. We develop warm fondness or uncontrollable fear towards animals that we have never personally encountered; we create a mental order of the species that we would like to save in our heads. Attaching certain emotions to certain birds will likely manifest in those most appreciated or best understood being saved before others, and thus we leave birds behind, whose only crime is existing in a world where humans don’t understand them.

There is a quote by the great Sir David Attenborough that reads ‘If children don’t grow up knowing about nature, they won’t understand it. And if they don’t understand it, they won’t protect it. And if they don’t protect it, who will?’ If we don’t try to reframe the way that we think about certain birds, we don’t seek to discover more about their unique existence, we don’t attempt to disentangle the human emotions that we project onto species that are so different from us, we will never be able to shield them from the echoes of extinction.

I put this piece out as my own call into the empty forest, letting the words ring out, awaiting a response from the oblivion. I hope that this message provokes in the way that the desperate call of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō provoked me; I hope that we don’t release our feathered friends to the same fate. After all, if we don’t understand our birds, we won’t protect them. And if we don’t protect them, who will? 

About the Author: Chloe Moriarty is a second-year BSc Geography with Proficiency in Law student at the University of Exeter, with a keen interest in historic extinctions, human-wildlife conflicts, and environmental law. She runs an environmental campaign on campus, and volunteers weekly for an environmental education charity. You can find out more and connect with Chloe via her LinkedIn.