The Bird-Watcher

2009

Coming out of the University of Zululand's 2008 Literature & Ecology Colloquium at Twinstreams Environmental Education Centre, this special issue of Alternation is devoted to articles about birds, in and out of literature. The birds under discussion range from the symbolic to the literal, the mythological to the real, and the local to the cosmopolitan. The twelve articles, book review, and two review articles contribute in multiple and compelling ways to ecological literary criticism (ecocriticism) in South Africa and beyond, while the section titled 'Recently Reviewed South African Life Writing Publications VI' continues a regular feature in Alternation.

Danilo Verde and Ante Labahan (eds.) Networks of Metaphors in the Hebrew Bible BETL 309, Leuven-Paris-Bristol: Peeters, 2020

The sages used bird metaphors. to express the spread of a curse and linked it to their communication theme regarding a careful choice of words and of when to utter them, for “walls have ears!”. We have also seen how mysterious to human beings are the paths of birds, when it comes to migration and other habits. Clearly, more is known nowadays about birds than at the time when the sages were writing down their wisdom, however there is always a sense of mystery and wonder when human beings look at the created world around them. These observations remind us that God is in charge and that through wisdom he knows the intricate patterns of every one of his creatures. Finally, we explored ideas of the ephemerality of life, as also denoted by the swift passage of a bird – life is short and so we are all exhorted to make of it the best we can. When a bird flies through the air, we too are reminded of our transitory path through this world: “a generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever” (Qoh 1,4).

Anglia

Amongst the numerous poets who have taken interest in birds, Ponge and Perse share a similar ambition : to achieve, though multiple sketches and various approaches — empirical observation, anatomy, erudition, and language — the transcription not only of the bird's efect on man, but also that of the essence of the bird, starting from his phenomenal appearances. Poetry thus stands as a way to total the whole collection of the bird's modes of appearance to restore its living content — both in intensity and complexity. We would like to demonstrate how the poets claim to aesthetically reconstruct the bird by dints of writing, but also how they collide with the limits of man's understanding of the animal when trying to transcend the barrier that Jacob Von Uexküll saw between animal worlds and human world. « This is too rough. The bird's state of mind must be very diferent » (Francis Ponge, The rage for expression).

This paper examines the three primary sources of the Common Raven, Common Nightingale, and Common Kestrel from ornithological observation and applies these observations to an understanding of Poe's "The Raven," Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," and Hopkin's "The Windhover." Central to the analysis is the idea of consilience, the unity of knowledge connecting science and the humanities, first put forth by William Whewell and expanded by the scientist E.O. Wilson.

Animal Studies Journal, 2019

Why, one could ask, does such a high proportion of the very best works of recently published literary and creative prose, which choose to engage with climate change, environmental shock, biodiversity crises, and extinction risks – the existential threats we face as a global multispecies population – all tell stories with and of nonhuman animals? My theory, one shared by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement (although with differing conclusions) is that the very nature of the threats we face is a reckoning with our alienation from the nonhuman world. It is a reckoning we need to have, without ‘hiding’ away from our accountabilities. The argument here is that literature, poetry, and creative writings can help us have that reckoning by leading us to explore our storied relations with the nonhuman, especially animals. Ghosh, however, believes that the realist novel – and by implication the ‘highest’ forms of literature – has failed us in this need. This is because the novel has become a bourgeois vassal of numbing entertainments, and in such a form has wholly betrayed us, because it is not capable of coming to terms with the evidence of climate change: that, in simple terms, we are no longer connected to or a part of ‘nature’. That is, the realist bourgeois novel cannot admit we are, and always have been, ‘animals’ dependent on our very real environment.

Kunapipi, 2014

A few kilometres outside Kimberley in South Africa is a pan called Kamfers Dam which is home to the largest population of flamingoes in the country. When I first saw them, stopping the car on the side of the N7 highway to Johannesburg and getting out to look, the multitude of birds seemed like an affirmation of joy and wildness after the grey dust of the diamond city. Wading, chattering, flying, the pink flowering of a myriad flamingoes was something wonderful-a glimpse of liveliness and continuity before, or perhaps beyond, the troubled history of the mines and the world that they made possible.

Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 2020

Theory and Society, 2013

It is almost a truism that nature is social, but by what means is nature made social at the level of the interactional encounter? While the transformation of society/nature relationships is often approached through the problematic of distance, and at the scale of macro-historical transformation, this article uses a conflict between American birdwatchers and ornithologists over scientific "collecting" (literally, the killing of birds) to examine the processes through which individuals come to know nature, and come to know it so differently. With John Dewey's (1958 [1925]) "experience" as the unit of analysis, I trace changes in each group's experience with birds over the past century; the phenomenology of the resulting encounters; and the understanding that emerges from each in order to understand (1) how, empirically, these two very different loves of birds are formed, and (2) knowledge of nature as an affective sensibility shaped by experiences of closeness.