![]() ![]() Greenland’s gyrfalcon settlements have been continuously inhabited for at least 2,700 years – about as long as there has been a city called Rome – while a penguin colony on Adelaide Island in Antarctica ‘was founded before Thebes, before Hebron, before Athens’.Īn Indifference of Birds is a book full of such dizzying perspectives. In some cases, they have been in one place, even at one nesting site, for astonishing lengths of time. They were there, in their earliest forms, when dinosaurs roamed the planet. But, as Richard Smyth points out in An Indifference of Birds, ‘the birds were always there’. People have been realising that birds are all around them, even in towns, and, with less noise from cars and planes, they have been hearing, as if for the first time, birdsong loud and clear and (mostly) beautiful. During the lockdown, our human world has been impinging rather less on theirs. ![]()
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