“What Next, Queenfishers and Jaqueline Snipes?”: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Birding Culture War
Have you heard? The world is going mad! The RSPB is more interested in political correctness than in advancing nature conservation! The sensible people have had enough of this woke tyranny and are leaving the organisation in droves. But what is the source of all this upheaval? Let me explain: last week, Mya-Rose Craig (a.k.a. @birdgirluk) posted a tweet — replete with laughing emoji — in which she pointed out a discrepancy on a poster in a hide at an RSPB reserve. It depicted the males of various duck species as much larger than their female counterparts, despite the fact that there is minimal, if any, size difference in most common duck species. In response, the RSPB pledged to review the posters and rectify the anomaly. The incident was picked up not only by the birding press but also by the Daily Mail. Reaction on twitter, facebook and the comment section of the birdguides website was overwhelmingly negative. The RSPB found itself accused of ‘losing the plot’, ‘another sign of the world going crazy’.
Relegating female birds to the background of bird illustrations has long been a problem: Bill Oddie even mocked it in his parody of a page from a typical field guide in his classic Little Black Bird Book from 1980. Indeed, the poster in question was misleading not only in its depiction of the various duck species: it also showed a “Buzzard” which looked suspiciously like a Rough-legged Buzzard. Coupled with the fact that lots of RSPB posters adopt a design aesthetic reminiscent of an educational children’s book from 1987, and the case for re-designing and updating them is pretty compelling.
So given that the actual facts of the case are pretty innocuous, how come it gave rise to such an almighty shitstorm? To answer this question, we need to zoom out a bit from the quirks of the birding community, and consider some recent developments within British politics and society at large. The past few years have seen an intensification of what are sometimes called “culture wars” in British public debate, and recently these have edged into birding.
But why have “culture wars” become so prevalent? In part it is down to some fundamental shifts in the strategy and ideology of British conservatism in the post-Cameron years. During the Thatcher era, British conservatism sustained itself in large part through a robust and sustained defence of the free market. But in this “post-austerity” era, bombastic endorsements of free-market capitalism carry less traction. So contemporary Conservatism has redirected its energies towards amplifying of a range of hitherto rather diffuse anxieties about the direction of social and cultural change. Right-wing politicians, journalists and pundits now spend much of their time identifying, and promising to tackle, a selection of groups and ideas that they accuse of destabilising the social fabric. These include, but are not limited to, woke students with their free speech-denying snowflakery, “citizens of nowhere” with their disdain for the flag, and trans rights activists with their supposedly outlandish ideas about gender fluidity. All these archetypes come to figure as what the sociologist Stan Cohen called “folk devils”, i.e. groups who, amidst a heightening moral panic, are cast as posing a deep threat to the moral order of British society. This strategy, despite being intellectually and morally bankrupt, has in fact been very successful politically. Testimony to its success is the fact that many people who may not consider themselves conservative or right-wing nonetheless often deploy classic right-wing culture war tropes: “do-gooders”, “woke mob”, “snowflakes”, “cancel culture”, “political correctness gone mad!”, or even “Cultural Marxism”, a term rooted in Anti-Semitic far right conspiracy theories.
However, to be a sustainable political strategy, it becomes necessary to keep identifying new battlefronts, or exaggerate of the scale and importance of existing ones. Culture war battlefields, in birding as elsewhere, are littered with minor or even non-existent incidents being talked up into existential threats. There is frequent talk, for example, of a “free speech crisis” in universities, despite the fact that the number of actual incidents of so-called “cancellation” or “no platforming” are miniscule. Consider also Dominic Mitchell’s measured discussion of the recent Thick-billed Longspur name change in America. The article’s narrow focus (a name change to a frankly rather obscure triumvirate of Neararctic passerines) was no obstacle to a veritable torrent of panic from some in the British birding community. On one occasion, it led to the grim spectacle of several prominent Norfolk birders on twitter whipping themselves into a bizarre pre-emptive rage at the prospect of not being allowed to call Circus pygargus Montagu’s Harrier, despite the fact that literally no-one had proposed such a thing. This was typical of the “whatever next?!” style fantasies that greeted Dominic’s article: “will we still be allowed to call them Blackbirds?” etc. There’s even a kind of perverse enjoyment — the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called it jouissance — from constantly inflating the scale of the threat posed by one’s antagonist. In the case of “postergate”, this manifested in a self-evidently minor issue being cast as indicative of the world going mad, while calls for a more balanced or even-handed response were met with rambling, spelling error-strewn protestations. Still others announced their imminent departure from the RSPB with a level of OTT drama that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in an episode of Gossip Girl.
All this mayhem should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the parameters of the so-called “culture wars”. The reactionary culture warrior imagines that they are always on the cusp of having their desires thwarted [“These days, you’ll be arrested and thrown in jail, just for saying “Montagu’s Harrier””]. And yet, these prohibitions (always deferred, the moment of actual prohibition never quite arrives) are fantasies sustained by the constant re-imagining of a puritanical, censorious figure who will police your desires (a “woke General”, as I was dubbed by one excitable commenter on birdguides!). The ultimate irony to all this is that in getting anxious and excited about largely imaginary prohibitions, the reactionary culture warrior ends up attributing to their opponents the very features that they themselves exemplify: insecurity, irrationality, looseness with facts, and gratuitous snowflakery.
So where do we go from here? The bad news is that the culture war-style framing of social and political debate is unlikely to go away any time soon. So I suspect we will see further instances within the birding community where even quite small measures aimed at rectifying forms of sexism or racism will be met with hyperbolic howls of rage from certain quarters. But how do we — by which I mean those committed to making birding more diverse and inclusive — respond? Some may say we should try to be more empathetic, and use the full force of our powers of persuasion. But, frankly, I think there is a constituency within the birding community (I would guess somewhere between 15 and 25% of birders) who are going to react to any and all attempts at making birding more inclusive with hysterical nonsense about woke mobs, cancel culture etc. These people can’t be won over. So frankly I think we are well within our rights to poke fun at their absurd claims and bad punctuation. I also think it’s important to bear in mind that this constituency is often over-represented in online reactions. So I don’t think we can assume that the comment section on the birdguides article about “postergate” represents the mainstream of birding opinion.
Indeed, the obvious point of contrast here is with the reaction to Lucy McRobert’s birdguides article from a few months ago about sexism in birding. Although there were some rumblings of discontent, for the most part the reaction to it was thoughtful and considered. Ironically I think that’s because it was directly speaking to a much bigger issue, and was an attempt at reflecting the more general experiences of women birders. This meant that, first, the seriousness of the matter could not plausibly be disputed and, second, there wasn’t really a specific thing that reactionary culture warriors could project their anxieties onto. This means that it clearly is possible for many in the birding community to have serious and even-handed discussions about issues of race, gender, equality, inclusion, diversity and so on. And it is imperative that those of us who are serious about these issues continue these discussions as best we can. And if, in so doing, we end up alienating a small cohort of reactionary snowflakes, so be it.
