Editorial - Birds

Hello, Dear Reader, and welcome to Issue 26 of Consilience.

This issue turns its attention to birds, the part of the world that is always overhead and always somewhere else. We share the air with them without ever quite sharing it. A bird crosses the garden and is gone before the sentence about it has finished. What stays is the song in the air, the feather in the gutter, the sense of something that did not wait for us.

We tend to think of birds as freedom. Wings, sky, the old dream of leaving. But most of what a bird does is fidelity. The swift finds the same crack in the same eave after most of a year on the wing. The albatross comes back to the one partner and the one ledge. A treecreeper may live out its whole life within reach of a single oak. Even the swallows that vanish each autumn were once imagined asleep beneath the ponds, because nobody could believe they had gone so far only to return. Flight is the least of it. What birds teach is the coming back.

Science has approached birds slowly and with humility. A spectrogram can split a wren's song into its syllables and still not say why the wren sings it that way. We know now that a falcon will carry a burning branch to dry grass to flush out its prey, that magpies gather over a dead companion, that a flock turns not because of a leader but because each bird watches its nearest neighbours and edges towards the middle. Every answer arrives holding another question. The pellet coughed up by an owl is a census of a field. The scratches on a fossil skull are the signature of an eagle. Birds keep records we are only beginning to read.

Poetry and art have never needed an excuse to look up. The bird is the oldest figure we have for what cannot be held: the soul, the message, the season turning. A poem is a bird in this sense too. It arrives, makes its noise, and leaves you holding a shape rather than a body. Art does not cage the bird. It gives you the afterimage of the wing.

Birds are also a question of what we owe. They live in the gaps we leave them: the eaves, the hedge, the strip of rough grass along the field edge, the few seconds between a hook entering the water and sinking out of reach. Seal the crack and the swift does not come home. Weight the fishing line and the albatross does not drown. Small decisions, made by people who will never see the bird, decide whether there is a bird at all.

This is also the last issue that Sam Illingworth has led as editor. He founded Consilience in the first spring of the pandemic and has steered it since, and from the next issue a committee takes his place while he stays on among the editors, still reading. Think of it less as a departure than a moult. Something is shed so that the flock/parliament/conspiracy can fly further.

So we invite you, Reader, to look up. The works in this issue do not tame their subjects or pretend to have understood them. They watch, and in that watching there is a kind of care. A bird is not ours. It is the evidence that the world carries on without us, and the promise that, if we leave the space, it will still come back.

The Consilience Team