Post by Clare Brooke PhD

This is a truly devastating loss 💔🐦‍⬛ Described as ‘the great thinning of the skies’ by Robert MacFarlane & Jackie Morris in their exquisite ‘the book of birds’. They go on to so eloquently describe our inability to comprehend this loss - ‘Absence is harder to track and feel than presence. The ghosts of gone birds fade quickly from memory. Shifting baseline syndrome habituates us to sparser skies’ I try my very best to learn from the wisdom they also share: ‘we will not save what we do not love, and we rarely love what we cannot name. Noticing is the first step to naming; naming the first step to knowing both things and the relations between things. Knowledge may lead to wonder, wonder to care, care to action, action to change.’ 🪶 My son said to me today that he knows and loves so many birds, particularly my favourites, swifts, as I talk to him about them all the time - notice them, know them, talk about them - then we might have the will to save them 🪶💚

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