BirdGuides

Like many folk, I watch birds but when I do I see so much more. I don’t just see a warm thing stuck through with feathers, I don’t just see the highly evolved dinosaur, I don’t even just see rarity or a name for my garden or world list. I see an entire eco-system, or at least the product of one – for every bird has had to come from somewhere. It’s pretty obvious when you think about it, but how many of us really do? Every bird represents an egg in a nest, in a place that can support that nest and provide the building materials, plus the resources tnot only to sustain the parent birds but also the development of this new bird and more often than not a host of garrulous siblings that go with it. At the Birdfair several years back a birder once told me, with a somewhat dismissive tone after hearing me wax lyrical about a ladybird, that ‘all bugs are good for is bird food’ – technically ladybirds are probably not, but not wanting to be a pedant I let that one slide (they’re toxic, you see, that’s what all that orange and red is about). Well, I guess part of that birder’s statement might be true: many invertebrates are bird food. They are certainly the perfect protein packets from which to build feathers, eggs and, of course, baby birds. It is a well-known fact that even granivorous birds, which would as adults feed on seeds, either switch entirely to feeding their chicks on insects or at least heavily supplement their plant-based diet with bug meat. As I write this, in timely fashion a house sparrow is clumsily murdering a garden carpet moth on my windowsill to take back to the chicks growing up behind my rotten weatherboards. I suppose I like to look at things the other way around, to take a different perspective from my birding buddy. While to some, insects and their allies are bird food, I see birds as piles of insect protein that have taken another step up the trophic ladder. Anyone who knows me, knows I like insects nearly as much as I like birds and I guess nearly as much as some birds like insects! It’s part of the interconnectivity of all things. When a swift disgorged a food ball into my hand while it was being ringed (an occasional, unfortunate and unavoidable bit of collateral damage) it left me with more than a sticky ball of bugs. It was both a challenge and a potential insight. I took the ball home and, while my wife was out at work, sat it upon the kitchen table and began to tease it apart with a cocktail stick. Over 815 midges, 257 aphids, 57 hoverflies, 84 spiders and half a wasp (plus numerous other unidentified flies and other parasitoid wasps). I Than the sum of parts By NICK BAKER NICK BAKER IS A well known natural history tv and radio broadcaster, author and advocate for the smallest of our living creatures. GREATER Image by Freepik was left with not only a headache but with a much better understanding of what it is that builds a swift. Whether birds or bugs or for that matter plants or fish are more important than each other is not the point. We’re all tied together. Each of our life-cycles whether midge, moth, pintail or person is a cog in a process. Like the mechanism of a miraculous big clock, each cycle interacts with others and the energy of the sun gets spun out along a multitude of pathways. That swift, while seemingly other worldly, zinging about the skies above our heads, never touching down other than to breed is tethered to the life-cycles of a multitude of insects and spiders which start here under our very feet. And when the bird in question is a citizen of the skies and a migrant like our swift, the workings of its energy cycle link continents together. Truly mind-blowing stuff when you use your imagination and try to follow the carbon molecules that make up that single bird. Oh, and I’ve not even covered the parasitic swift fly that is hitching a ride on those self-same swifts and living on their blood. The Global Birdfair is what it is called and it’s worth reflecting on that title with all this in mind. It could just as easily be called the Global Bugfair! Whatever it could be called, what it is about is something greater than the sum of its parts. It is a celebration of our collective love of all life, its diversity and those who are inspired by it, whether looking at it, painting it, sculpting it, writing about it, travelling for it, talking about it or saving it.