I have defined myself as a ‘birder’ for more than forty years. Not much else mattered to me for a long time. From the kid who devoured the AA Book of British Birds after being stopped in his tracks by a Yellowhammer at the age of seven, to the teen who started twitching with an American Redstart at Gibraltar Point in 1982, and the adult who joined an airline as cabin crew so I could go around the world to see birds, “I am a birder”.
I wrote that last sentence and then wondered in my typically insecure way whether other birders would even count me as a birder anymore. I don’t go actively birding much these days, but I am constantly aware of the birds around me, so I think I probably still am. Does it matter? We routinely put each other in boxes (in life as well as in birding) that attempt to define who we are and what we are, and birders are as tribal as any other group of obsessives. I’ve always felt the need to ‘fit’ but right now those categories simply don’t matter, no: whether we’re birder, twitcher, data gatherer, or charity member who does or even doesn’t own a pair of binoculars what matters is that we care about birds and that birds need us.
Most of us are aware now that there has been a serious, countrywide, decline in the numbers of many birds. Blunderbuss UK land usage and agriculture policies have overseen a net loss of around 560 million birds between 1980 and 2017. Woodland breeding birds are down 46% since 1970. Once common species like Swifts, Tree Sparrows, and Lapwings have almost disappeared. Few young people have ever heard a Cuckoo. One species has increased dramatically: it’s a non-native, it’s bred and released in vast numbers, and while I don’t have figures to prove this I have no doubt more people would recognise it than they would a Turtle Dove, Curlew, or Skylark. Which one? It’s big, it’s glossy, it gets shot a lot…yes, that one.
There are many ways we’re already stepping up to help our beleaguered and battered birdlife of course. Everything from working for conservation organisations to paying membership subs, protesting in the street, talking to our family and colleagues, making choices about where we travel, what we eat, how we garden.
We’re more aware, more informed. Most of us know that we’re losing the biodiversity that underpins the ecosystems we all depend on. Many of us are already thinking about what we can do to help. Can I offer one more? Rethink the way we talk and write about wildlife.
Because how we describe birds (and of course other wildlife) wildlife is hugely important. Language encodes and externalises our thoughts. The way we use it – verbally and in print – expresses externally what our society and culture thinks about the person, animal or object we are describing.
Sadly we’ve inherited a grubby pile of loaded, value-laden terms that we now use almost unthinkingly – or, at least, without really thinking about why we use them and who has handed them down to us. Words we have disconnected ourselves from entirely and accept almost unquestioningly like ‘pest’ and ‘vermin’, ‘cull’ ‘control’ and ‘manage’. We need to start questioning them all, but I want to focus here on a term that especially rankles me: ‘gamebird’. Because as I’ve stated elsewhere in the past, in this birder’s opinion the term ‘gamebird’ has absolutely no place in birding, in birding magazines, or in identification books.
‘Gamebird’ is a term that wouldn’t exist were it not for shooting and hunting. Historically it was used solely to ringfence a handful of species of bird that Kings and wealthy landowners took for themselves. Red Grouse, Black Grouse, Ptarmigan, partridges and pheasants. ‘Gamebird’ says ‘these are ours’. It is about property and ownership, not nature or science. The laws made centuries ago in an effort to try to prevent anyone from hunting grouse and partridges unless they had freeholds of at least £100 a year, or long leaseholds valued at £150 (an absolute fortune in those days) would eventually lead to the same species not given full protection under the RSPB’s 1904 Charter and left without the full protection of the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981.
It has led to ‘seasons’ where anyone can go and kill these species for a giggle on a day out. To mass releases of so many farmed pheasants and partridges that cumulatively they weigh more than all the other birds in Britain and have been described as an ‘ecological assault‘.
There is still no basis in biology that justifies ‘gamebirds’ being hived off on behalf of so-called ‘sportsmen’. There is no reason that the shooting industry should be allowed to justify slaughtering huge numbers of them under a false distinction that these are ‘game’ and therefore killing them for fun is somehow okay. It’s not okay, no matter what language you use to try and justify it.
‘Gamebird’ is a shorthand for cruelty, the persecution of raptors on shooting estates, the deaths of millions of predators in traps and snares, the seasonal slaughter of millions of birds. It also allows shooters to be incredibly lazy with identification: if everything is a ‘gamebird’ why bother learning the distinction between a Red Grouse and a Ptarmigan, a protected Brent Goose from a non-native Canada Goose, or a Woodcock from a Snipe. They’re just a ‘thing you shoot’ after all.
I can’t think of a single reason why we birders should buy into this archaic terminology and warped thinking. Or why articles in birding magazines or sections in identification books should use it either. Yes, it will take authors a fraction longer to write out the specific names of the birds they’re referring to, but I’ve never seen a birder’s day or trip list with ‘gamebird’ on it. We’re used to identifying species, used to writing down their names. We don’t see birds as ‘brace’ or ‘bags’, we already see individuals anyway. And if we do need to group these birds together, it takes seconds to write ‘Galliformes‘ instead…
I suppose if authors are writing about gamekeepers or the shooting industry they may need to use the terms that are common coinage in those circles – but they should make it clear when they’re doing that. And try not to use it all when they’re writing about the countryside, the environment, or birders and birdwatching. Isolate the term so its history and continued usage by the shooting industry – and no one other than the shooting industry - is clearly understood.
We’re birders. These are birds. Not ‘gamebirds’, just birds. When we use the term – and most of us do because it’s something we’ve grown up with and never questioned before – we are colluding with history and colluding with shooting. We can do better than that.
Language usage may seem like a very small thing, unimportant when stacked up against climate change and the sixth extinction, but it’s not. Language matters and how we use it really can make a huge difference to our wildlife. And that in turn will help in our efforts to tackle the ‘big’ problems that we all face.
I will say it again, in this birder’s opinion the term ‘gamebird’ has absolutely no place in birding, in birding magazines, or in identification books. Fellow birders, fellow writers, and fellow activists let’s please pledge not to use it anymore.
See also Simon Mustoe ‘Animal Impacts Blog’ Conservation, preservation or protection? Which is it?