Migration waits for no one

The expansive implications of this PhD paper have become the underlying strata of the ringing experience.

But the advancing day demands resolve: we have work to do. In silence, we follow each other through the reeds in single file, without torchlight so as to minimise disturbance. Marsh frogs; meandering; forwards momentum.

–Migration waits for no one. Nets must be set, clipboards snapped into readiness. To handle a sedge warbler (Acrocephalus schoenobaenus) that has flown here from the reedbeds of Norway is to tap into something almost too large to comprehend – a kind of worldly inevitability, a restlessness. The actual moment of physical contact with a wild bird resists the baggage of dizzying environmental destruction. The bird in my hands diverges absolutely from any general classification – it possesses what the philosopher Jacques Derrida calls an “unsubstantial singularity”. “In the moment of encounter”, he writes, the animal presents as an “absolute divergence or separation from anything other than itself”. The bird in my hands is perpetually resistant to conflation with the colossal narrative of collective species decline. It hums, discrete, between my fingers.

It is precisely this singularity that becomes, for the human, a steadying antidote to the reality of extinction and the erasure of nature. The French theorist Jacques Lacan borrows a word from Aristotle: tuché, he says, to designate “an encounter … to which we are always called with a real that eludes us”. The meeting with the wild bird is like this tuché We are called up to it by an urgent need to monitor avian populations, to act in unison with conservation measures implemented by the International Species Action Plan for the Aquatic Warbler. And yet, as wings, legs and bills are held against rulers - quantified - the full gravity of catastrophic species decline becomes an impossibly elusive concept.

Like Lacan’s tuché, this layer of the real is (momentarily) lost: the captured wild bird monopolises the human consciousness to such an extent that the ringer can do nothing other than feel its rapid pulse or catch for a second its blood-black eye – feel a kind of terror so profound it presents as serenity.

Seed dispersal networks highlight how intrinsically linked the natural world is, and how the loss of trees can have far-reaching consequences.

This momentary liberation must be savoured. A nine-gram body becomes, for a matter of minutes, a site of human refuge. And then the bird is released. It shoots off back into the morning light to settle and continue its journey to Senegal, Mauritania, Mali. In the moments that follow this encounter, Lacan’s tuché comes full circle: we lose the single bird in the reeds, but we re-realise, again, that we are also losing other individuals of the same species at an alarming rate, too. Collectively. As part of a trend. Each piece of biometric data we collect from the birds is added to a database; expansive databases enable the large-scale modelling of population trends that quantify the scale of extinction events. In this way, bird ringers literally construct the scientific reality that surrounds the highly charged experience of handling a wild bird. The measurements we take enable the visualisation of population dynamics and the ability to situate individual animals within a larger environmental narrative. Bird ringing – this simple meeting of two bodies – is a confluence between the immense and the minute. –Walking, again. Mid-morning. Above, martins and swallows (Hirundines) reel southwards. Migratory crakes (Porzana spp.) flush from clumps of grass. A distant hen harrier (Circus cyaneus) flies decidedly. We are deeply privileged to be working in The Seine Estuary Nature Reserve, the second largest reserve in France. It is a crucial stopover point for millions of migrating birds every year, with over 300 species recorded here. There are also over 500 species of plants, 50 species of mammals and 70 of fish. It stands as a prime example of stakeholder collaboration: farmers and fisherman work in areas managed by the reserve; permitted hunters stake out many of the muddy pools that line the river mouth. Its existence is also a reminder of the fragility of such unifying agreements. Even here, the sometimes-divergent interests of the different players mean that the priorities for land-use are often contested.

This is a recurrent pattern in conservation. The single biggest driver of the biodiversity crisis is land-use change, the loss or conversion of natural habitats for human use. For instance, Emma’s research explains that large, charismatic, fruit-eating bird species, with unique bill shapes, such as the toucans (Rhamphastidae) and hornbills (Bucerotidae), as well as other megafaunal species such as tapirs (Tapiridae) and elephants (Elephantidae), thrive in large tracts of undisturbed, intact forest, and are often threatened by deforestation, habitat fragmentation and, consequently, poaching. These frugivores have mutualistic relationships with many tree species. The fleshy fruits provide the animals with sustenance and the trees rely on them to disperse their seeds - so called ‘zoochory’. In fact, between 70-94% of tree species rely on vertebrates to disperse their seeds in tropical rainforests. The loss of these organisms can therefore disrupt the recruitment of new trees into the forest. For example, several tree species in West-Central African forests are facing dramatic declines because of the loss of African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) to ivory poaching. The trees rely upon the elephants to disperse their seeds.

Migration waits for no one. Nets must be set, clipboards snapped into readiness. To handle a sedge warbler that has flown here from the reedbeds of Norway is to tap into something almost too large to comprehend – a kind of worldly inevitability, a restlessness.

The loss of large-bodied seed dispersers can also have additional, less obvious, consequences. Large-seeded plant species tend to have higher wood density than smaller seeded species; only the largest bodied frugivores can disperse these seeds, and so their loss leads to a reduction in tree biomass and therefore carbon storage in defaunated forests. Seed dispersal networks highlight how intrinsically linked the natural world is, and how the loss of trees can have far-reaching consequences.

– ecosystems. By afforesting land and thereby preserving the potential for morphologically distinct species to thrive in new areas, the Foundation improves ecosystems’ resilience to future environmental change. When habitat is created and reclaimed – and a wide range of stakeholders included – large, distinct species can survive. In the summer of 2020, white storks (Ciconia ciconia) bred in Britain for the first time in over 600 years following the rewilding of the Knepp Estate in Sussex. The potential for ecosystems to recover from exploitation over relatively short time periods holds a slice of hope for the future of morphological diversity and the extinction crisis more generally.

Still, the physical act of planting a tree also speaks to something more psychological than the global imperative for environmental action. It is, like the handling of a wild bird, an ultimate instance of tuché. The planter works in view of a hoped-for future – an ecologically richer future – that (by nature) eludes the contemporary moment, the seedling that has not yet grown. As a simple, physical gesture, planting trees can create habitat corridors, counter ecological collapse and connect communities at local and international levels. But it also links the internal self to the material quality of passing time and sensitizes us to our desire to touch and manipulate the kernel of a wilder reality.

In light of this research, writing for the International Tree Foundation’s journal feels particularly important. Restoring forests and creating habitat networks is directly linked to preserving the morphological diversity of

Dan Paling is a student in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. His work is inspired by the ways that humans interact with and are connected to nature. Dr Emma Hughes is an ecologist in the School of Biosciences at the University of Sheffield. Her work focuses on the impacts of the extinction crisis on bird biodiversity.