In the Company of Birds: Reconnecting with Nature Through Technology
Entrance to VanDusen’s rose garden.
It’s a bright Saturday afternoon as I roam through VanDusen Botanical garden, cell phone in hand, on the lookout for birds. I pilgrimage monthly to this 55-acre refuge snuggled between Oak and Granville Street, just before they merge into my nemesis Highway 99.
Previously the garden was a golf course owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway. Later, it was purchased by lumber magnate Whitford Julian VanDusen who funded its transformation into a botanical garden, opened to the public in 1975. I discovered its beauty during the pandemic, when late-afternoon strolls (replacing happy hours) became a vital escape from apartment isolation. In time, the garden would evolve into a personal laboratory of mine where encounters with non-human life began to take on a growing seriousness. Prior to this, I hardly gave plants a thought, could barely identify even the most common flora aside from those packaged into splashy flower arrangements or Christmas wreaths.
An adorable photo of a bushtit up in my friend Lorna’s kitchen.
Birding is my latest hobby adventure made possible through the capabilities of a Merlin Bird ID created by the good folks at Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Powered by a global community of over 5,000 birders, the app uses real-time audio recognition to identify local bird calls, then offers detailed insights into each species—from physical traits and vocalizations to migratory paths.
“Bushtit - Psaltriparus Minimus - A tiny, long tailed, fluffy gray ball of a bird. Distinctly drab brownish-gray with a stubby dark bill…..Constantly in motion; active twittering flocks move quickly through bushes and trees. Listen for their high-pitched scratchy call.”
Many of the apps’ descriptions possess this sweet, nutritious attention to detail. Often, I’ve thrust my phone toward the treetops, hoping to learn something about the creature chattering above. And while the software certainly satisfies a growing curiosity in the more-than-human world, I’ve come to see its greater value in being a tool to mend our disconnect from nature.
I became acutely aware of this disconnect while walking through a neighbourhood park when I witnessed a man snuff out his cigarette on the bark of a beech tree. The image stayed with me —so casually cruel, so emblematic of our collective indifference to the living world around us. On a later visit to the garden, a desire to bridge this disconnect moved me to share news with a fellow visitor that the sound we’d just heard was a Cooper’s Hawk. She lit up at the information. And though our exchange was brief, I felt a quiet enchantment settle over us as we both turned our ears to the world and listened, newly attuned to what unseen life might reveal itself next.
“If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.”
Raymond Williams at home in Hardwick, Cambridgeshire, 1969.
As a relationship with birds and plants has deepened, I’ve grown increasingly curious about the roots of this estrangement. What had driven it? Had it always been this way? That question led me to the theories of renowned Welsh critic Raymond Williams.
In his essay Ideas of Nature, Williams locates the roots of this divide in the developmental legacy of human consciousness. According to Williams, consciousness took “the multiplicity of things, and of living processes” and mentally organized it “around a single essence or principle: a nature” (68). While Williams acknowledges this as a “major advancement in consciousness”—a point at which humans began to conceive of themselves as emergent subjects arising from natura, the “essential constitution of the world” (69)—it also inadvertently committed us to a sense of separateness: the belief that we had risen above, or conquered, a more primitive condition.
The most immediate outcome of this shift in thinking, Williams reveals, was the conceptualization of Nature as an abstract principle—one that stood both in opposition to, and in service of, other emerging notions. In religious contexts, for instance, Nature was cast as the “minister of God” (71). This allowed humans to treat nature as an object, to observe and describe its processes in either a passive or active way. Active observation, as Williams notes, involved experimentation—“conscious intervention for human purposes” (77)—which laid the groundwork for agricultural innovation and the eventual rise of industrialization. While this development undoubtedly supported human survival, particularly as populations and societies grew, it also instrumentalized nature. It affirmed the view that nature was “all that was not man,” and even more troublingly, “all that was not touched by man, spoilt by man” (77)—in other words, unutilized.
Photo by Annie Spratt.
Once Man’s embeddedness in natura/nature was forgotten, a profound alienation began to grow and spurred what was to follow: humanity’s transformation into a producer-consumer species with nature becoming the raw material for this enterprise. As history demonstrates, the practise of rampant exploitation would not be too far down the path, bringing us to our current environmental crisis: a breaking point defined by unchecked imperialist logic, ecological plunder, and runaway consumerism, all of which now threaten human and non-human communities alike.
The human–nature divide has led us down a destructive path, but can modern technology help guide us back? Merlin rekindles human curiosity about birdlife through the simple pleasure of learning. From this small spark, a richer, more layered portrait of these animals begins to emerge, initiating a new kind of world-building, one that re-integrates non-human life into the larger picture. A thin awareness of local biodiversity narrows our worldview, allowing the spectacle of consumer culture to monopolize both our attention and our sense of value. Technology and science can assist us in reconnecting with the non-human world again, provided we’re willing to take a walk to discover it. (I’ll talk about walking later)
Since discovering Merlin, I’ve also downloaded apps to identify insects, plants—even rocks. In many ways, the process of reconnecting begins with curiosity: an act of liberating Earth’s diverse forms, both animate and inanimate, from the flattening construct of “Nature” and approaching each with individual attention and far greater care.
Video footage by artist Lorna Carmichael featuring birdlife from her backyard. Can you spot the bushtit flitting about?