I lay awake in bed under a 15-tog duvet and the crushing weight of loneliness. It was nearly 2 a.m. The street outside was as quiet as it could get for a busy intersection in London. Downstairs, the rock bar was closing up for the night. As people made their way home, snatches of tipsy conversations and laughter drifted up to my first-floor window. The warmth of their banter made my miserable heart ache still more. I had woken up in the middle of the night and found myself unable to fall asleep again. Anxious thoughts wound around my chest, tightening my breath. “Why can’t I understand these academic papers? I don’t have it in me to write a good essay… I wish I could just go back home…why am I always so anxious to talk to people…”
Three months had gone by since I moved to London from southern India for my master’s degree. I knew where to buy my groceries, how to get around the city, and that ‘You alright?’ was not a question I was expected to answer but simply a British way of saying hello. Yet, I was far from settled. The sights, sounds, and smells of London were a universe away from what I knew in Bangalore, the city where I had lived, or my hometown in Kerala. The roads and footpaths here were abnormally orderly. Colours more sober. I heard many curious-sounding languages on the Big Red buses, but none of the familiar phonetics of Kannada or Malayalam. Even the sky looked different here without the tangled mess of phone and electricity cables framing my view of it. I was a lonely alien adrift in an alien land.
Only the year before, I had lost my father to a slow, painful struggle with pancreatic cancer. The months following his death had been a stifling, confusing haze of grief, anxiety, inexplicable anger, and depression. If I managed to stay afloat and functional enough to apply for a master’s degree, it was only with the love and support of my family, friends, and partner. But now they were far, far away on another planet, and I found myself drowning, too fragile on my own to keep my head above these unknown waters. My course was challenging—the dense, incomprehensible academic papers had me second-guessing my intellectual abilities. Making friends to face this challenge with was also hard. I was always introverted, but throw in mild depression and barriers of cultural difference, and even the attempt to socialise was emotionally exhausting. So there I was, catastrophising at 2 a.m. that night when a sound outside my window snapped me out of my spiral.
It was a European robin singing at the top of its voice! I couldn’t believe my ears. Why is this fellow singing in the dead of the night? In my village in Kerala, I was used to the bird sounds going quiet at dusk and frogs and crickets taking over the background score. I jumped out of bed in excitement and peered out the window. It was too dark to see anything, but soon my ears could make out that it was not one bird song. There were two of them, and they were singing to each other in turns. I stood there listening to their duet, enraptured. A quick search on the internet told me that robins often sing at night because they cannot hear each other over the city noise during the day. My heart melted into a warm, sticky puddle. I returned to bed smiling, imagining conversations among little Londoner robins – ‘You alright, mate?’ ‘I’m having midnight cravings again. Let’s pop over to the patch at The Nag’s Head for a bite?’ The weight lifted off my chest, and I finally fell asleep.
Birds were nowhere on my horizon until just weeks before I moved to London. On a farewell trip with my partner to a forest near Bangalore, a bright yellow bird descended from the treetops to sit beside my hammock. I watched in awe as it cocked its head at me, then took off in a burst of energy. It seemed to say, “Hey, doofus, do you even know we’re here?” The little birdie was inviting me to tune into the chorus in the canopy above; my instinct nudged me to accept. So I did, not knowing that I was in for an unexpectedly political awakening. What started as a curious fascination for their colours, their variety, and the thrill of spotting new species, slowly transformed into a deeper connection of kinship, forged in the loneliness of migration. As the lines between them and me blurred, birds challenged the limits of my compassion which, until then, had only sparingly extended to the non-human living world. They taught me an urgent lesson, one I had known about before but now felt viscerally. That if we want to tackle climate change, we cannot do it without fundamentally altering our relationship with all living beings we share this Earth with.
Not the lesson I was expecting to learn as I prepared to leave for London with a new pair of binoculars tucked among the books, clothes, and homemade pickles essential for my new life.
*****
Words cannot describe the dizzying feeling of being on a flight to an unknown place, where I knew no one, and yet, I had to imagine a new life. After a 20-hour journey, I reached my student accommodation late at night to silent hallways and felt the first pangs of loneliness. Everyone I wanted to tell about my safe arrival was fast asleep in a faraway part of the world. And it would stay that way for a while. It was September 2021. The world was still in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I had to quarantine in my room for a week. But I soon discovered there were acquaintances I could make without breaking social distancing norms. My window faced a giant sycamore tree across the street, and I spent my days looking out for bird activity. On my first morning in London, I spotted a pair of Carrion crows carrying out an inspection of the trash on the footpath. I was unimpressed – crows were aplenty in India. Then I spotted something new: crow-sized white-bellied birds with long blue-green tails hopping around on the rooftop next door. The Merlin Bird ID app, my trusty guide, identified them as Eurasian magpies! It was such a thrill to add a bird from a new continent to my humble lifelist of 10-15 species I’d seen around my home in India before leaving. For committed birders, the lifelist – a list of all bird species one has seen – is the ultimate quest, and I was beginning to understand why. I proudly watched my list grow with every new bird I spotted from my window.
Out of quarantine, London was exciting at first. The buses where you could simply ‘tap’ to pay, the abundant green spaces, people from all over the world, and buildings that looked straight out of picture books. But when the novelty wore off, the cold settled in. People were polite, smiling, and friendly, but always guarded with their time and space. It was not the easy warmth shared in India, where strangers are quick to welcome you into their lives. As Autumn turned to Winter, the cold and grey gloom became inescapable. It seeped through layers of protective clothing into my bones and my spirit. The sun, a dependable presence in the tropics, became a stranger to me in this foreign sky. It arrived late, set by 3 pm, and played a frustrating game of hide-and-seek behind the clouds. It was in these morose times that Britain’s favourite bird became much more than an item on a checklist to me.
Although the government never declared it as such, the European robin was voted the UK’s national bird in an unofficial 2015 poll. If you’ve ever seen a robin, you’ll know why. These songbirds are tiny, light brown with a bib-like chest of orange and button black eyes. People love them for their melodious songs, which they sing year-round, even in the cold, gloomy winter, to mark their territory and attract mates. For me, the robin song became a lifeline, a source of instant dopamine. When I walked outside in a lonely, sad stupor, a few notes of robin song would pull me out of the gloomy depths and into the present. A bird-like vigour would take over my sluggish body as I looked around for the source of the song. There were robins living in the trees outside my university library. After hours spent inside the building poring over dense academic texts, when I stepped into the dark evening, battered, I’d find the robins singing their symphonies in full volume. It became my ritual to sit on the benches outside for a few minutes, letting the beauty of their song restore me.
While robins became my friends, magpies became the London family I did not have. For international students, having a relative in the new country, no matter how distantly related, can be a lifeline. For me, that relative was the Eurasian magpie. The magpie’s rattle-like “chak-chak-chak” reminded me of the Rufous treepies who lived in our farm back home. These crow-like birds with their rust-brown and white plumage hung around in the coconut trees, gossiping “ke-ke-ke-ke-ke” loudly in the mornings. I often heard them cackling in the background when I called my mother. It turned out that my treepies were distant cousins of the magpies, so I too had relatives out here! Magpies have a naturally avuncular appearance – they wear smartly-tailored black-and-white suits with blue-green coattails that swing up and down restlessly. It was easy to imagine them as stern but polite middle-aged uncles who always dressed in well-ironed clothes. My British flatmate introduced me to the local superstition that, to ward off bad luck, one must be respectful to magpies and salute them when you see them. So I made it a point to greet every Uncle and Aunty magpie I passed on the way to the university. “Hello Mr or Mrs Magpie, how are you? I’ve had my breakfast, thank you.” On days when I didn’t have classes scheduled, speaking to my mother on the phone and greeting magpies on walks were sometimes the only social interactions I had.
I tried to use my love for birds to make friends, hoping the shared interest and an organised activity might help me get past the social anxiety. I found a local birding group and showed up for a bird walk with my binoculars, a notebook, and high hopes of leaving with a new (human) friend in the neighbourhood. As the group assembled in the park, I realised I was the only young, Brown person among mostly retired White British men and women. I was awkward, but at least we had something in common to talk about. As we set off into the park, one of the women spoke to me, asking what I did and about my interest in birds. When I said I was from India, she immediately exclaimed, “Oh, your birds must be exotic!” I laughed and said, “Yes, they are beautiful.” I didn’t think much of it until the next person, and the next one, and the one after that gave me the same reaction. “Birds in India are so exotic! I’m afraid our British birds are quite dull by comparison.” “What kind of exotic birds have you seen?” I know they were well-meaning and only trying to make conversation, but the word, with all its colonial baggage of objectification and Eurocentrism, left me feeling alienated and annoyed. I wanted to yell, “No, my birds are NOT exotic! They are exactly the kind of birds you find in that part of the world.” It almost felt like they were calling me exotic, strange, foreign. I spent the rest of the walk feeling indignant on behalf of all birds, British and Indian.
I never went back to that birding group, but I kept returning in my mind to that unsettling term, “exotic”. Yes, it is true that birds in the tropics are more colourful – 30% more, according to one study – than their counterparts nearer the poles. It’s true that it was these vibrant colours that first caught my attention back in India. Yet in this place, far away from anything I knew as home, I had found belonging and connection through these ‘dull’ British birds. They made me feel less alone. My relationship with them had evolved from the impersonal distance of a curious observer to the loving closeness of kinship, one-sided though it may be. “Exotic” sullied this bond, forcing us apart – me, the Indian birds, the British birds – putting us in different little boxes and denying us the possibility of a shared sense of being. Somewhere along the way, the hard boundaries that had separated my world from theirs had become permeable, so I started to see a little bit of myself in them and them in me.
Then the ornithologist Jennifer Ackerman’s book The Genius of Birds gave me an insight into the fascinating lives of my new feathered friends. The world’s smartest bird, the New Caledonian Crow, makes tools from pandanus leaves to extract worms from holes in trees and wood. In 1921, Great tits in southern England learned how to open milk bottles on people’s doorsteps and then passed on this knowledge to their mates in other parts of the UK so that tits were opening milk bottles all over England, Wales and Ireland by the 1950s. I learned that crows like to ski for fun and that some birds were observed comforting their partners after seeing them in distress. Like me, they too experience grief, and like me, some individual birds are introverts. I also discovered that they have forms of intelligence I could only envy. Birds can find their way across continents by sensing the Earth’s magnetic field, while I would be lost within miles of my home without Google Maps.
Birdwatching is often described as a “gateway drug” to environmental consciousness; perhaps an apt analogy for the mind-expanding and profound experience it was for me. Getting to know birds did what no amount of environmental education in the past had done for me. The ‘environment’ – that inert, distant thing which I knew to be in need of ‘rescuing’ from human excesses – came alive to me in all its glorious vitality. On walks in my North London neighbourhood, I noticed the different kinds of trees, the shapes and colours of their leaves and the grey squirrels who lived in them. I began to see each of them as my fellow beings, as individuals with rich lives of their own. My life became less anthropocentric and all the better for it.
Anthropocentrism, or the worldview that human needs matter above all else and everything is ours for the taking, is a fundamental reason for the climate crisis we are in today. Many environmentalists and philosophers argue that our anthropocentric relationship with nature was cemented in the colonial period. Enlightenment-era ideas of rationality projected humans, particularly Europeans, as superior to all non-human beings because they could use their minds to methodically study nature and manipulate it to meet their needs. Anything close to or within the sphere of nature was thus seen as primitive and backward. In an essay on decolonising our relationship with nature, the philosopher Val Plumwood argues that exaggerating the differences between the coloniser and the colonised, and between humans and non-human nature, served a strategic advantage. If nature and non-European people could be viewed as inferior beings, then ideas about ethics and morality didn’t extend to them, and they could be exploited as resources for economic profit and scientific progress. There were other ways of being in and knowing nature, including in the European world, which were more respectful of other lifeforms. But power was on the side of the ‘rational’ ideology because of the economic interests it served, and these ideas took root across the world through colonial knowledge production and policies. This human-centric view is now on steroids in a neoliberal capitalist society in which we are told that greed is good for the economy and our self-centred consumption will lead our nations to greatness.
This is the understanding of our estrangement with nature I arrived at from writing an essay about the legacies of colonialism for my Global Affairs class. Meanwhile, the lesson birds taught me was that a different way of being was still within reach; all it takes is some curiosity and an open mind. Perhaps the ease with which the received boundaries between humans and non-humans dissolved in my case is a testament to how intrinsic and natural such a connection to our fellow living beings really is.
It is hard not to feel disheartened and helpless about the trajectory of our planet and the heavy losses of lives, livelihoods, and homes we are already experiencing. In the face of the entrenched power of capital and the unwillingness of governments to act, it feels like there’s little we can do as individuals to make the big, radical changes needed to tackle the vast complexities of the climate crisis. But can we afford to lose hope? To lose the impetus to even try to move in a different direction?
My own journey makes me wonder if, perhaps, the first step towards big, radical change is the small act of noticing. Of simply paying attention to the many life forms we share a space with, learning who they are and how they live. Knowing develops into kinship, and kinship is a powerful force for change. Meat had always been a part of my diet; in fact, I’d begun to defend my diet more fiercely in an increasingly Hindu nationalist India where the Brahminical casteist ideology looks down upon meat eaters as ‘impure’. But when I started treating birds as my friends, I couldn’t justify my choice to myself anymore. I couldn’t eat chicken for lunch, and then greet a passing Wood pigeon on the street without a guilty conscience. I’ve made other changes, too, in my shopping and consumption choices. None of this is to say I am holier than thou. Rather, I’m trying to draw attention to how the kinship I now feel with birds, squirrels, foxes, and trees is powerful enough that it’s impossible to go on living aloof and indifferent as I did before.
I said goodbye to London in December 2024, leaving behind the many beloved human friends I eventually made, and several feathered friends such as the Great tits, Wood pigeons, crows, and the occasional robins who visited my backyard feeder for nibbles. They have surely moved on to other food sources and don’t spare a thought for the human who used to live in that house behind Turnpike Lane. But I still carry in me the companionship and joy they brought to my life as I reacquaint myself with their distant kin, the birds in Bangalore and Kerala.
