The photo is of a sparrow hawk which flew into our patio doors and knocked itself out. It flew away a minute or two later with a headache, but posed long enough for a selfie!
In Scotland this week a gamekeeper was convicted and jailed for trapping and killing a goshawk. Wildlife crime is a significant threat to a number of rare and protected species in Scotland, often committed by estate workers trying to protect stocks of game birds, or by those stealing eggs or young birds for the black market in hawks and falcons. Now it seems Dundee University have developed a forensic technique for recovering human fingerprints from flight feathers. One further weapon against those who persecute and threaten the viability of some of Scotland's finest and rarest wildlife.
In a separate news item the house sparrow, the starling and a cluster of field and garden birds are in serious decline across the country. I remember on the farms in childhood the common sight of starlings congregating on trees or under eaves to roost, preceded by the dusk starling flight ballet which is one of the wonders of bird watching. And the noise of a clutter of several dozen house sparrows in the hay shed was regular background music. But it seems modern houses are too green now; there aren't as many gaps and holes, fewer undisturbed outbuildings, there is much less noise free and menace free space and spaces.
In a piece of badly stretched eisegesis I hear the words of Jesus, "Consider the birds of the air", and wonder what we are doing to our world. There is an entire multi-million pound industry in wild bird food, evident enough at garden centres and supermarkets, so obviously some people consider the birds. We've just had the annual garden birdwatch and await statistics which help us understand what's happening to bird populations. The onward trend has been downwards year on year On the radio yesterday a Professor of Environmental Studies who specialises in the impact on the environment of wildlife populations and species extinction raised concerns that human beings seem oblivious to, or wilfully ignore the fact, that in destroying living space and pushing species to extinction we are permanently impoverishing the biosphere that is our planet.
So what would Scotland be like without starlings, sparrows, blackbirds, chaffinches, greenfinches, robins, blue, great, coal and long tailed tits, wrens, yellowhammers, thrushes, siskins? And in the fields curlews, lapwings, partridges, skylarks, snipes, wheatear? "Consider the birds of the air" - there's a sermon in those words that goes deeper than not worrying about clothes and food. Because here's the irony. In the Palestine of Jesus' time birds weren't threatened with extinction - otherwise Jesus wee illustration wouldn't have worked very well as an anxiety reducing image. "Consider the birds of the air, how the starlings have fallen by 90% in four decades....." No. Doesn't work as reassurance.
My lifelong interest in birds goes back to earliest childhood, so my own perspective is now over 6 decades. I still thrill to the cry of a curlew, my favourite Scottish bird call, but it's a sound heard now only rarely, and in special places. In Ayrshire in the late 50's and 60's it was part of the usual accompaniment of a walk in a field. My inner life is still smiling from memories of roosting starlings, squabbling sparrows, diving lapwings by the score, soaring skylarks several to a field, and in every farm I lived on, 8 in 16 years, there were also pied wagtails, on several farms yellow wagtails, and in the burn, dippers.
It's hard to see the bird population ever recover from the human footprints trampled all over the countryside. So Jesus' words are increasingly difficult to take at face value in a world where we cheerfully or carelessly consider only ourselves. They need to be heard in a new context, as a reminder of creation care, stewardship of life, and human wisdom. Ornithology as natural theology, a theology of nature, ornitheology.
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