Ian Parsons
Whittles Publishing, 2024, 160 pages
Papaerback £18.99 | ISBN 978-1-84995-574-4
Review by Barry Larking
What came first, the chicken or the egg? That hoary old paradox does make a sort of point. An apparently trivial puzzle sets us a profound problem. Despite a long quest that edges slowly toward a possible answer, ultimately I suspect we never will find one. Like much else in the story of evolution, it exposes the struggle we face with the implications of the passage of time at such scale, well beyond our human comprehension.
So it is in the relationship between birds, last of the dinosaurs, and trees, whose first meetings are shrouded in the kind of spectral mist that we presume hung over the swamps of an unimaginable distant antiquity. Knowing that both have been around for a long time is a cliche of no help at all. The dating is daunting to us. Tree species today around us are successors of those that grew before the continents we view from space were created. The earliest identifiable birds we suppose paired up with the great plants of a proto-planet and together became epic time travellers.
As if to catch us in our expectation of a pleasant ramble about our contemporary woods, parks and garden feeders, Ian Parsons starts at the beginning in his accessible account of this relationship. Such is the ease of his telling of this complex history, one reads only to discover the author has led his reader through something of a maze of detail without bludgeoning them into stupefaction. For he is as much the teller of stories as a researcher who has read widely in this particular neck of the woods. Parsons has a style which makes one see things differently.
His chapter headings are jocular rather than crushingly factual. For example, ‘Yew will be punished’ (after that, deservedly so) or ‘As dead as a Dodo’. Don’t be fooled. This is that adept teacher you met who could make any subject that more interesting by combining fact with humour and had the knack of coming across as a real human being with something interesting, puzzling and energising to convey. There is learning aplenty here, in footnotes amplifying background details and many references to learned peer reviewed papers underpinning some controversial ideas that have been conjectured by the sheer distance we present day humans have to cover in trying to define the outlines of ancient evidence – natural history C.S.I.
This match making has lasted because of mutual resilient benefit. Birds serve trees by assisting their reproduction; the trees offer them shelter and homes and then food on top. The birds scoff the berries and nuts (a.k.a. seeds) and by this some trees spread themselves. That very old lone oak on the edge of a field system was likely planted by a jay that forgot where it put its acorns. My sympathies to the Jay as a fellow sufferer in the memory department.
The relationship that has grown up between certain species of tree and bird have unintended consequences when not taken into consideration by humans. Our lovely native songster, the Blackbird, has had a beneficial role in spreading seeds, not least that of another fixture of our farmed landscapes, the Hawthorn. A great partnership. Then some bright spark took both to Australia and the result has been on the Himalayan Balsam or Japanese Knotweed scale of unwanted over here, thanks. Working together but not in a good way. Humans have much to answer for, admirers as we are of both trees and birds notwithstanding.
Parsons relates in his conversational style a story about that epitome of ‘not to be taken seriously’ serious ornithology, the hapless Dodo. Last century a learned paper suggested the indigenous Madagascan tambalacoque tree was dying out. Few specimens were less than three centuries old. The coincidence with the extinction of the flightless Dodo as clue that leapt into the crime lab for further investigation. That trees’ large seeds need to be abraded before they can germinate; speculation was, it was inside the Dodo that the necessary was done to the seeds and they then eventually popped out ready to go after sustaining the galumphing bird. An absence of dodos meant, therefore, that these trees are also booked for the exit door, was the unpromising conclusion. However, since we are today accosted on all sides by fact checkers, someone has come along to look over the ‘thinking’ and it turns out not to be quite as it seems … Spoiler alert. Birds and trees have ‘difficult’ relationship issues. Until I read this book I had no idea birds were keen drug takers. Apparently, it’s more like one over the eight, but some fruits are capable of altering consciousness and maybe even sought after deliberately by birds. Parson covers this in a chapter helpfully entitled ‘Flying high’. Please do not copy this sort of behaviour at home.
This is an engaging book. It isn’t for the purists, but they are already well served with trance inducing tables, charts and wavy line type things and prose that would stun an elephant. Of the Trees and the Birds would be an excellent read for the generalist like this reviewer yet has enough scholarly bite to make a good introduction for those taking their first steps in ecology. It would keep all but the most egregious swots happy. Oh, and there is a diagram to help you make your own bird box where trees cannot provide a hole.