I talk about birds a lot at the moment. They've been somewhat of a pandemic obsession and form of relief. But it's more than that -- it's about connecting with nature and the other living beings with which we share our environments.
Someone asked me last week how I felt about the extent to which birds are just fundamentally unknowable. No matter what emotions or interiority we put onto them, those are just fragments of our own experience and identity we're projecting. No matter what form of relationship we cultivate with any animal, there's a fundamental barrier there that we cannot cross.
My answer was that, for me, that's of the interest. Yes, I feel that barrier, but sometimes, it feels thin -- in those shared moments of seeing, where you feel like you are looking and being looked back at. I've had this with both crows and pigeons -- the two birds I've spent most time around during the pandemic. It's been abundantly clear that they are observing and responding to your behaviour in complex ways, beyond the most common mode of interaction of flight (in both the evasive/aversive and airborne sense) in response to your presence.
James Bridle's new book, Ways of Being, talks about umwelt -- the interior, existential experience -- in reference to non-human intelligences. He describes the process of training his own self-driving car and, while the umwelt of that intelligence is fundamentally unknowable to us, through visualisation of data we can 'see', in a sense, a little of how it does, by virtue of rendering what elements of an image it has designated as 'significant'.
This struck me with relation to the question about birds. We can't know what's happening inside of their own experience -- their umwelt -- but there is still something to be gaining from finding those places where our experiences of the outside world connect with one another. The horn of a passing car spooks the crows; makes me jump, spikes my heart rate, triggers my tic. I feel the peanut between my fingers; the crows watch hungrily, open their mouths in anticipation -- perhaps in request? Is it for me, or for them? Regardless, it is something they do in front of me when I am there. I fluff the throw, the peanut doesn't leave my hand as I intend. They watch. I wonder if they think I'm toying with them, whether they recognise the error. I don't get to know. They don't seem to mind.