September 2022
Editorial
We are Birds
Danilo Selvaggi, Director General
With the striking initiative titled ‘The Birdsong Project’, a variety of musicians and artists are celebrating our kinship with birds, and allied with conservation organisations and international bodies are calling for their protection, ‘It is time to raise the standing of environmental politics’, says LIPU, ‘and to put nature once and for all at the heart of everything’.
Autumn 2020. At the height of the second COVID quarantine, the musician and sound engineer Randall Poster, a noted figure in the Hollywood film community, discovered the music of birds. The silence that had fallen on his home city of New York as a result of the lockdown, a completely new situation in contrast to the usual all-pervasive noise, was like a natural amplifier for the singing performances of the birds. Which were singing flat out, never resting. Poster became captivated by them: Where had they been all this time, these little friends of ours? For that matter, where have I? He had heard birdsong before of course, without paying it that much attention, as often happens with us and the important things in life. They are here with us, alongside us, but we do not take it in. Following up on this epiphany, Poster began to take an interest in the conditions faced by wild birds across the world: the multiplying threats, the direct persecution, the loss of habitats, the risk of extinctions. Can it be right, he asked himself, that such wonderful beings are being treated in this way? How can we allow it? No, came the answer: it is not right, and it cannot be allowed. And he began to take action.
Read on with a download below …
Contents
- We are Birds
- Campaign in Cagliari
- BirdLife International Anniversary
- Annual Draw