From sharing caves with swallows to suburban peanut dispensers and vulture restaurants, man has long given house room to birds. Mark Cocker examines an enduring relationship
We wear it now like the mark of Cain. Every piece of environmental news reinforces an underlying message that humans are the great destroyers of life on earth. There is no scope for complacency in our role as the planet's custodians, but perhaps we can afford occasionally to take time off from this guilt reflex to consider another part of the story.
The great American naturalist Edward O Wilson suggests that we also have an instinctual need to engage creatively with other living things. He calls it biophilia, literally a love of life, and argues that a default aspiration of humanity is to dwell in close proximity to nature. So, the rural cottage, the lakeside dacha, even the country estate and the rainforest village are all, in some ways, an expression of the same attachment to wild animals and wild places. We can destroy, we do destroy, but we also have an enormous capacity to create, provisioning many species with a home and living space for thousands of years.
One of the best illustrations of biophilia I can give is unfolding this spring. Thousands of millions of migrant birds are heading north in a great deluge of colour and song across the European continent. About 75 million birds among those vast flocks comprise just three species - the swallow, house martin and swift - and every single pair of this European trio will almost certainly build its nest and rear young on a structure made by us.
Swallows love our outhouses, barns, sheds, garages and greenhouses. House martins suspend a mud cup underneath the overhang of our house eaves, but swifts actually come inside our roof space, gaining access through gaps in the tiles. Yet it is remarkable to reflect that at the end of the last ice age all of these birds nested on natural equivalents - mountain- and sea-cliffs, rock-faces, caves and riverbanks. In fact, evidence for one of the oldest nests ever in Britain comes from a Derby-shire cave that was once used by swallows - and Palaeolithic hunters - 15,000 years ago.
It is tempting to suggest that swallows were among the first birds to give our ancestors pleasure, when they song-flighted around the cave entrance and announced the arrival of spring. But at some point in this developing relationship, possibly at the Euphrates-Tigris confluence (in modern-day Iraq) with the beginning of Eurasian civilisation in about 5000bc, the birds took the plunge and moved in, switching their nest sites from natural rock faces to house walls. The habit caught on and en masse swallows and house martins (known collectively as hirundines) became our lodgers. By the time of Shakespeare's England or - as he himself would have us believe in Macbeth - by the Scottish 11th century, the habit was almost universal. 'This guest of summer,' Banquo announces of the house martin, 'Does approve By his lov'd mansionry that the heaven's breath/ Smells wooingly here…/ Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed/ The air is delicate.'
As usual, Shakespeare tapped into something fundamental about this experience: we really enjoyed the company of swallows and martins. We also repaid the birds' trust with deep tolerance. The point is well made by the changing name given to our own British swallows. Over the centuries they have been known as the 'chimney', 'house' and, more recently, the 'barn' swallow - reflecting an evolving architectural choice for their nest location. The earlier names indicate a time when hirundines and humans actually shared the same domestic space. Medieval chimneys were wide enough for birds to descend to the ledges within, or the swallows swooped in through the ever-open door and, in effect, nested inside our ancestors' living-rooms.
Although some fussy people insist on knocking nests down because of the mess created below, today it is illegal to dislodge hirundines. Yet in the past we didn't need legislation. The rules against disturbing them were self-imposed. We draped the ecological closeness between swallows and ourselves with a narrative about mutual affection and shared good fortune. Or as the Bard and Banquo put it so beautifully, we came to believe that 'heaven's breath smells wooingly' wherever the birds slung their nests. They were thus guarded by strong taboos and, during the writing of my book Birds Britannica, I was amazed to find how they are still. Letters from contributors told me how swallows had an almost sacred status for them.
What is even more moving, since it implies the common origins of these individual responses, is the way our benign hirundine inclinations span millennia and cultures. The ancient Greeks loved them as harbingers of spring and counted it good luck for them to nest on their home. Muslims cherish them too. The name of one African species, the mosque swallow, even suggests an Islamic bias in the bird's choice of nest site. In Tanzania, as in so much of the continent, breeding swallows are valued as signs of prosperity, good luck and bringers of welcome rain.
However, the ultimate development in this human-hirundine symbiosis occurred in North America. There the whole process by which swallows transferred from natural rock crevices to house walls didn't take thousands of years, it was telescoped into the few centuries of white colonisation. Sometimes swallows even extended their range across the continent in close tandem with the spread of American railways, the birds following the tracks to new towns and settlements.
The most extraordinary of all the New World developments had its origins with a Native American practice. Indigenous peoples such as the Choctaw and Chickasaw were accustomed to put out hollow gourds around their homes to attract a nesting bird called the purple martin, which resembles a dark-blue swallow. White settlers soon picked up the gourd-suspending habit and ran with it. Today virtually all purple martins use structures erected by people. Some of these are veritable apartment blocks housing 200 pairs. It is, in many ways, a perfect expression of biophilia. An entire species nests in quarters that we have specifically provided for them, and in return we gain the pleasures of seeing and hearing this delightful bird.
Perhaps the most famous of Europe's avian tenants is one of the continent's biggest species, the white stork. It has made a similar exchange in its breeding location from natural sites to manmade structures. In the stork's case it includes the roof of every kind of human dwelling, from state palaces to rural cottages, as well as cathedral domes, military towers, industrial chimneys and television masts. Some nests are ancient and may well involve a continuity of avian residence comparable with the human dynasty. One nest known to have been occupied in 1549 was still in use in 1930, and over the decades these stick tenements can become massive. A nest taken down from one cathedral weighed more than three quarters of a ton.
Once again it isn't just a case of a simple but passive tolerance towards storks. From Portugal in the west to Armenia in the east, the birds are encouraged to take up residence by placing old cartwheels and other platforms on the top of long poles. The storks' presence is then valued as a mixture of privilege, good luck charm and, of course, as Europe's quintessential emblem of fertility.
n return the storks construct the nest itself using a range of human products. Rags, plastic bags and bits of paper are highly favoured as nest linings, although these borrowings are modest by comparision with members of the kite family. In Britain the red kite, which has made a dramatic return to the Home Counties after a successful captive-release campaign, is notorious for its taste in human fabrics, including handkerchiefs, socks, gloves, hats and children's soft toys. The habit has long been known as it inspired a line from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale ('when the kite builds look to lesser linen') as well as a Henry Williamson short story, Flight of the Pale Pink Pyjamas.
Kite behaviour is little more than petty theft when compared with the grand larceny practised by an African species called the hamerkop. Its gargantuan domed stick nest is out of all proportion to the half-metre-tall bird, but it is the interior that has attracted most attention. In one structure a Zimbabwean naturalist recovered six bicycle tyres, two socks, a plastic cup, 45 rags, a plastic comb, a pair of underpants (male), a typewriter ribbon, 56 bits of tinfoil, foam rubber, hosepipe, asbestos, sandpaper, 11 miscellaneous bones including a T-bone, as well as 100kg of grass and sticks.
Few activities better illustrate the deep intimacies between birds and people than our habit of feeding them. The simple Franciscan tradition of providing for our feathered friends is universal, but we have come to think of it primarily in terms of the garden bird-table and peanut dispensers that are now at the heart of an industry worth £200 million in Britain. In America it has 50 million participants spending an annual $3.5 billion.
Yet elsewhere, to feed the birds is an activity with semi-religious connotations. One of the most extraordinary examples occurs in north-west India. The small Rajasthani town of Khichan has acquired worldwide fame for the practice of feeding cranes. The surrounding desert plains are visited in winter by thousands of demoiselle cranes, one of the most elegant species in an already elegant family. They are drawn by the region's shallow manmade lakes and daily handouts of sorghum grain. Some locals are adherents to the deeply pacific Jain faith and count the daily half-ton ration for their avian visitors as a blessing and fulfilment of their religious precepts. Many of the town's wealthiest merchants moved long ago to major cities such as Delhi and Karachi, but retain links with their traditional birthplace and vie for the privilege of feeding the Khichan cranes.
Another bird-feeding operation on the grand scale is now known as a 'vulture restaurant'. The concept was pioneered in South Africa in the 1960s, but they have since been established across the world from California to Cambodia. As large wild mammals decline and farmers improve methods of stock-rearing, vultures have been squeezed out from vast areas of their former range. The restaurants fill a hole in the birds' diet by providing meat at regular managed locations. Normally the fare is unsaleable carcases (although a record for pricey vulture titbits was a racehorse worth tens of thousands of pounds that died of a brain haemorrhage). As these magnificent birds of prey shed their ghoulish connotations, the restaurants present their managers with unforeseen tourist and commercial possibilities.
They are now a critical part of feeding operations in France and Spain for one of Europe's rarest birds of prey, the lammergeier, a magnificent vulture species and one of the largest winged birds in the world. Despite the lamb-thieving associations of their name, these birds mainly eat bones, which means that the restaurant 'menu' is a relatively simple affair. Yet the implications of vulture restaurants are profound and may ultimately lead to a repeat of the situation with America's purple martins. Ultimately the fate of the entire species or the whole vulture family may be directly dependent on human kindness.
These feeding stations seem an innovation to meet a modern conservation need, but they also carry resonances from our ancient past. The dokhmas or 'towers of silence' in the fashionable suburbs of Bombay are tall open-roofed buildings where India's Parsi community lay out their dead to be consumed by birds. The tradition is dwindling because of evolving cultural norms among the Parsis, and also because the vultures themselves have recently suffered a catastrophic 99 per cent decline in India. Yet the towers of silence are a living expression of funereal rites that go back 8,000 years, to Neolithic practices in the Near East from where the first Parsis emigrated.
This most visceral of connections between birds and humans illuminates one of the fundamental reasons that we have been so captivated by them. In consuming the bodies laid out by their Parsi relatives in the towers of silence, the vultures will metaphorically carry the souls of the departed aloft. Like all of their kind, these birds move between the earth and the heavens. In doing so they embody some of our most cherished ideals about life. Throughout history we have found ways to repay birds for this transaction with our gods. That instinctual attachment - surely - is a sign of hope in a beleaguered world.
Mark Cocker and the photographer David Tipling are working on a book exploring the cultural interactions between humans and birds, and wish to hear from anyone who has experiences from around the world that shed light on this subject. Many contributions will be used in the book with a full acknowledgement to all contributors. See birdsandpeople.org or write to Birds and People, Jonathan Cape, Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA