Okay, cool.

Big and small we can, we can probably, you know, relatively agree on.

But, um, uh, g- um, the, the white-tailed eagle does have an eight-foot wingspan, but-- and when a-- the one that's over Flowmere at the lowest altitude did briefly block out the sun.

But yeah, mountains big, birds smaller.

Let's go with the comparative.

Birds always in motion, mountains always still.

No.

Yeah.

Oh.

Fear slithers up my spine and spills greasy down my throat.

Nothing for it but to follow, so I lie flat edge in headfirst.

The clearance above me is so tight that I again have to turn my skull sideways to proceed.

The clearance to the sides is so scant that my arms are nearly locked to my body.

Claustrophobia suddenly grips me like a full body vice pressing in on chest and lungs, squeezing breath hard, setting black stars exploding in my head.

Movement is a few inches at a time, a worm-like wriggle gaining purchase with shoulders and fingertips.

So how do you see that phenomenon in the Anthropocene? Is it fair to say that the Anthropocene hasn't just reshaped our world but also our own personhood?

Why?

Well, first, maybe I should gloss the wonders of bird, as it were, because the book, the book of birds, the field guide, as it were, is structured in many ways conventionally like a field guide.

In this case, there are 49 birds that joined by the fact that all of them are on red or amber lists of endangerment or conservation concern here in the UK.

And we wanted to recognize the slipping of birds from our consciousnesses, our stories, our tongues, and above all, the skies.

and the woods, and the land itself, and sort of summon back those that were slipping fastest.

But between those groups of birds, seven groups of seven, come the seven wonders of bird.

And we, Jackie, the artist with whom I worked on this, and I realised that this plain being we generalise as bird, is made of wonders.

I think it would be meaningful to see through your eyes the effects on birds in the lands right around where you live.

Doesn't like you.

Does not like it.

And I'm like, good.

This is, this is excellent I, I could give you an example of what Gra- as it were, Grammarly does not like.

So this, I, I sometimes, um, w- like to remove verbs from, from sentences, I- leaving them technically not sentences.

But this is, um, seeing this huge Canadian river for the first time from the sky.

Um, my first sight of the river itself catches my breath.

Hmm.

So when we sat down to chat, I asked him why he felt it was important.

I've become increasingly fascinated by this SBS, shifting baseline syndrome, generational amnesia it's sometimes also called.

And the kind of absolute numbers of the thinning are that around 600 million birds have gone from Europe since 1980, actually, and that's a, a BTO, RSPB, and a, a, a Czech collaboration on that shocking figure.

Three billion in North America, and this is simply the number of birds that are no longer present in our skies.

And so our dawns and springs are quieter, and our skies are thinner.

But we sort of don't notice.

I mean, birders do, scientists do, but shifting baseline syndrome is this enormously powerful, and I think very pernicious psychological mechanism whereby each new generation measures loss from the degraded baseline that it grew up into.

[laughs]

Now, just before we meet our authors, I'm thrilled to be able to say that we've got a small extract from the audiobook of The Book of Birds.

[birds chirping] [black-throated diver calling] Haunter of inland lochs and outer isles, hunter of dark waters and cold miles, your cry is the sound of the far north diver.

[black-throated diver calling] A fog-born ululation, a wild wail that reaches the ear from somewhere deep down and far back in time.

A voice speaking across eons, setting the spine tingling, speaking of gun-gray seas, wolf howls, and frost's lace.

Yes, your eerie eldritch call echoed off corrie headwall and glacier face long, long before humans walked this place.

[black-throated diver calling]

Yeah

... is the corn crake's call.

... and to codify the personhood of, of rivers, uh, and the whole rights of nature movement.

Yeah.

There's a movement to recognize in law and in imagination the rights of natural entities.

So rivers have become the most common focus.

So a river has and has always had in- inalienable rights.

This is law playing catch-up, right? It's, it's law that's getting pluralized by often Indigenous perceptions of river or community guardianship perceptions of river that are coursing into the arid terrain of Western legal structures and saying, "Stop being so anthropocentric.

Recognize that rivers can have rights as well." There are a couple of landmarks in this movement that is, is both young and old, again.

Yeah.

Mm.

They, they give us...

I sometimes think, like, we're given these, they give us compound eyes to look with, and they give us compound ears to hear with, and we suddenly find that we're part of a web of life that is busy and complex and ongoing and not always pretty, um, and sometimes and often awesome.

But it's easy to retreat into our, the busyness of our own humanness and forget that we are neighbors to a whole world of other species who are our neighbors, and, and we are theirs, and we participate in their lives.

So attention is a kind of action.

Um, and so there's a, there's a loving attention bestowed on these birds bec- and what a privilege-

... and seeing what's there to, to begin to engage with their wonder?

Yes.

[laughs]

Um, uh, you are right.

There is a little, it's called a refuge.

Um, it would- might also be called a bothy, uh, the Scots word for a simple shelter in open country.

Um, but, but this is technically a refuge, so, but it, it lives in a, in a, in a very remote, um, corrie in the Cairngorms called, uh, Garbh Corrie, which sits under Braeriach.

And, uh, the river Dee is born, uh, about 1,000 feet above this corrie, uh, at the wells of Dee, the springs at 4,000 feet, and they crash over the corrie wall and, and, and begin to grow into the, into the Dee.And there's this little refuge which is really looks like a heap of stones.

You would mistake it for a natural feature in the boulder field from a distance.

[laughs]

The first of them, INEC, What did you hear about this river system? What took you there? What did you find?

Yeah, well, you mentioned the rights of nature movement, as it's sometimes called, the recognition of rivers as living beings in certain versions of this, as having legal standing, that is to say the capacity to be represented and to represent themselves in court, and rights, the recognition that a river might have an inalienable permanent right for example the right to flow now in Ecuador this as it were legal dream this form of magical thinking took on extraordinary legislative force in 2008, when the Ecuadorian constitution was revised following the election of Rafael Correa in 2007.

And this turmoil of reimagining a country's fundamental governing principles happened between late 07 and and the autumn of 08.

And in that time, four articles were placed right at the heart of that new constitution.

And the first of them guarantees and recognises the rights of nature, rivers, forests, to exist, to flourish and to persist.

And the last of them makes the state the guarantor of those rights and allows any citizen really in Ecuador to bring a case on behalf of nature if nature's rights are being seen to be violated.

So it's an extraordinary legislative act of nature.

Robert, has that ruling, the constitutional change in Ecuador, inspired other countries? Has it been a source of law in other countries?

So again, what was the backstory? How did you travel to Chennai? How did you meet that remarkable young man?

Well, again, the combination of profound threat and radical imagination.

So the threat there in a way is already realized.

So the Los Cedros rivers were saved from annihilation and they still run clear watered for now.

But the rivers in Chennai, in a way, the damage has already happened.

So this is a case of almost resurrection from death that's being attempted in Chennai.

And the death there, just to give it a conventional biological name, is...

I would love to hear a little bit more, some of your reflections on that question.