Waiting for the bird apocalypse by Jasmine Donahaye
Below the Iron Age hill fort of Pen Dinas, the sea is silvery and still, as though waiting. Out west, towards Ireland, cumulus is massing on the horizon, but the great expanse of Cardigan Bay lies in a flat calm.
Pen Dinas is a good vantage point to see migrating birds, only there isn’t any vis mig, as dedicated birders call it. In fact there’s not a bird in sight – not even the resident herring gulls and black-headed gulls; no gannets further out to sea, diving; no rafts of Manx shearwaters heading back to Skomer Island. There aren’t even any of the usually ubiquitous upland pipits or stonechats. Three dark porpoises lazily break the surface of the water like turning wheels, but they are alone.
I know it’s almost certainly insignificant – the birds just happen to be elsewhere, and usually I would hardly notice it – but this empty sea and sky fills me with dread.
*
All summer the bad news worsened. The pathogenic strain of avian flu destroying seabird colonies was spreading down around the coast. Anecdotal evidence preceded scientific evidence, but it was stacking up. More feathers than usual were washing up on the shore; noisy coastal villages in Devon and Cornwall were falling silent; skies usually full of herring gulls emptied out. Soon bird flu seemed to be all around us in Britain – not just figuratively, but also geographically.
I didn’t trust all those reports of silence and masses of feathers that were being exchanged on social media. When you expect bad news, you often see evidence that reinforces your fears, and the bad news about avian flu was occurring in something of a social media bubble. Through the summer, the Ceredigion coast remained mercifully free of disease, but not far away, on the islands off Pembrokeshire, the tangible, documented losses grew, as did the sense of impending disaster.
Though I might on occasion see a bird hurt or ill – a chaffinch with trichomonosis, say, all puffed out and panting, trying and failing to swallow – I can’t remember ever seeing protracted or widespread suffering. Most sick birds take cover, and don’t last long. They quickly become prey, or, unable to keep weather-proofed, succumb rapidly to the combined harms of disease and hunger or cold. But over the summer, avian flu manifested in a highly visible way, affecting birds that are not usually prey species, or not in the way we might see predators and prey in our daily lives inland, in gardens and fields and woodlands, or town and city parks. Gannets and gulls, terns and skuas, some of the most aerodynamic birds of Britain’s shores and islands and seas, were the worst affected. And it didn’t kill them at first. In the winter there had been reports of barnacle geese falling from the sky on the Solway Firth, and over the summer, footage emerged from Scotland of gannets in mid-flight corkscrewing out of control. Because I was following conservation and birdwatching accounts on Twitter, I saw a repeating imagery of corpses – corpse-strewn islands and cliff ledges, corpses cheek by jowl with not-yet-fledged young left to starve or succumb. Later, as it came closer to human habitation, people began to share imagery or reports of sick and confused seabirds now grounded on sandy beaches, not far from children and dogs.
It created a new kind of doom scrolling, those summer months: there was always more of it; it was always getting worse, proliferating, appearing in new species, and coming closer. I could not bear to watch the footage of dying and dead birds, but I couldn’t keep away from the news of it.
I wondered about my anguish. If it was this difficult for me, at a great remove, what must it be like for those working in conservation who were having to deal with its reality? It hurt in a way I didn’t recognise and couldn’t quite identify, except, perhaps, that with most matters that distress you there are ways to channel that distress; there are people or forces to blame or hold accountable. So often how we deal with fear, or grief, is through anger, but here there was no one to be angry with. Perhaps that’s in part why the wider reporting of it was so sparse: it was a distress story without resolution or outlet. There was only anguish at what had happened, and dread of what was still to come.
We’re told ‘getting out in nature’ is good for us, and recent research has absurdly confirmed what was already self-evident – that birds and birdsong make us feel better. I don’t happen to think that birds are there to make me feel better, or that the natural world should provide respite from the distress of the human world, nor that its worth can be measured in terms of value to humans. Nevertheless it usually is a respite from distress, whatever I think about that characterisation. Not this year, though; as the summer moved into autumn, I found myself flinching against what I might encounter.
Dread is compulsive, and almost impossible to set aside. Some part of you wants the worst affirmed, because it provides a kind of resolution: at least that way you know. Otherwise what you dread can always still come to pass. And so, full of dread, steeling myself, I began to go to the coast repeatedly, compulsively, to see if my fears had been realised yet, like some kind of ambulance chaser, a nature disaster rubber-necker.
One sunny Friday in late September I drove south down the coast to Llangrannog. There were still some tourists present, filling the carpark, the café, and spread out on the beach. It was low tide, so Ynys Lochtyn, usually cut off by the sea, would be accessible. I’d been there regularly, to go climbing: there’s a scrambling rocky descent from the headland down to the stretch of fallen broken rock that the low tide exposes, and beyond it a crumbling path leads up from the island’s cliff base.
When I reached the headland, three young women were taking selfies, stepping backwards dangerously close to the edge. They seemed oblivious to what was happening out of frame beyond them, on Ynys Lochtyn. Usually there are a few fulmars skimming by on stiff wings, and occasionally a gannet or two, but now, unusually, the whole island was a restlessly swirling white cloud of gulls. Preening and squabbling, they lined the rocky ridge, and the shelves of rock on its south side, where you can easily scramble down to the long sloping ledge at sea level. Hundreds of gulls were arriving and departing in a continuous roiling mass of movement. I found it impossible to follow the path of any one bird to see what that great chaos of white plumage meant – was there a shoal of fish, a feast at sea? But the movement was over the island, not over the water.
Down at sea level birds were heading north and south along the coast – great black-backed gulls, herring gulls, black-headed gulls, a young kittiwake, and others that I could not identify. Tangled in one of the rafts of brown weed on the water I thought I could discern a white body, but when I scrambled down to the foot of the cliff path to see what the receding tide had left, there was nothing but a single black fishing reel– no beached weed, no plastic, no dead birds.
There’s a strange sense of anticlimax when you’ve been preparing yourself for something awful and it doesn’t happen. Perhaps it wasn’t so bad, I thought; perhaps it really wasn’t taking hold here, despite its presence just beyond the southern arm of the bay. It was the end of the breeding season; now that their young had fledged, seabirds were no longer packed in tightly together on ledges and guano-thick rocks. Perhaps my fears were nothing but melodrama.
It was the same a few days later when I walked along the coastal path south of Aberaeron. Uneasily I checked the sea, the shore. There were very few birds over the water, but the mass of gulls at Ynys Lochtyn made me doubt that this signified any kind of trouble. Certainly there were no corpses that I could see down below me on the shingle. Perhaps others who had reported dead or strangely behaving birds further south were doing what I was doing: expecting the worst, and therefore seeing and misinterpreting the evidence. Again I should have felt relief, but still all I felt was dread only temporarily suspended, and I began to wonder at myself: what did this response mean? Did I want disaster? Did I want to be part of something awful, the way that many people in California, when I lived there in 2001, had seemed to want in on the trauma of 9/11, emphasising how it was San Francisco and LA-bound jets that were hijacked? But it wasn’t the same: I wanted the waiting to be over, because some part of me felt certain – isn’t that how dread works? – that it was only a matter of time.
I gave myself a talking to up on the coastal path. I tried to pay attention to where I was, instead of this anxious projection into a doom-laden future. It was clear, sunny, and where the gorse grew tall and dense between the path and the cliff edge, there were pockets of intense trapped heat. All along the way stonechats ticked at me and each other from their lookouts. A small flight of swallows passed, starting their long migration south. On my way back, I hesitated over a couple of parasol mushrooms but decided they were past their best, and then, before heading into the town, I turned off the path and went down to the beach.
The first dead guillemot was on its back, plump and shining, its white breast and belly glossy and wet. It had been newly deposited by the sea. The second, bedraggled and limp, was higher up, nearer the tide-line. The third corpse had been dead a while: all that was left was the intact skeleton with a few wing feathers attached, and an aureole of feathers around it on the shingle, as though it had been eaten by ants. Closer to the harbour two gannets lay stretched out, one after the other, pointing north.
It was like looking for orchids in a wildflower meadow. At first you see nothing but the overall impression of long grass studded with clumps of reed. There are no purple orchids. Then, when you crouch down and try to look differently, the first one emerges, and then you see another beyond it, and then many, and you stand up and see them all around you. It amazed me that I could have missed them: the dead birds were everywhere, and had been there all along, some of them for a long time. What I had dreaded was coming to pass.
*
I know they’re down there on the beach, the corpses, though they’re invisible from up here on Pen Dinas.
The Iron Age people who built this fort chose their vantage point wisely. There is a 360-degree view of the surrounding territory. Any human threat by land or sea or river would have been immediately visible, and there would have been time to man their defences.
We have not been wise. In the rote media reporting of flu outbreaks in domestic birds, the devastion of wild birds is not mentioned. Instead they are blamed as the vector of disease, even though this pathogenic strain they’re dying from emerged in intensive poultry farming. At the moment almost every report signs off with an assurance from officials that ‘The risk to humans is low,’ as though the threat to our cheap source of food and the risk to our health were unrelated, when they are cause and effect.
Far below me on the beach, dogs are running off the lead, unmonitored, in close contact with birds dead from avian flu. It seems inevitable that the risk to humans will soon change. Afterwards, when it’s too late, there will be only a very short hop from inconvenience to threat, and an implacable trajectory from ‘control’ to ‘cull’. Then to hell with the natural world being good for us; to hell with birdsong making us feel better.
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Jasmine Donahaye is a prize-winning writer. Her book Birdsplaining: A Natural History, will be published by New Welsh Rarebyte in January 2023, and may be preordered here.