Abstract
In The Human Shore, John Gillis invites readers to view wind, earth, and water as interconnected elements of a single, dynamic system—the shore—and argues that humanity forms an integral part of this ecological continuum. This perspective deepens our understanding of both the planet and ourselves (236). Building on Gillis’s reflection, this paper turns to Adam Nicolson’s 2017 work of non-fiction, The Seabird’s Cry, suggesting that Nicolson invites readers to imaginatively accompany the inhabitants of coastal shores, embracing their boldness and hospitality. The guiding questions of this inquiry echo those posed by Thom Van Dooren: “What kinds of human–bird relationships are possible at the edge of extinction?” and “What obligations do we have to preserve space in the world for other living beings?” (5). For both Van Dooren and Nicolson, the response lies in attentive engagement with the manifold ways humans become entangled with birds—a practice grounded in the ethical necessity of recognizing our embeddedness within a shared ecological world. Situated at the intersection of environmental awareness and cultural reflection, Nicolson’s nature writing emerges as a vital medium that cultivates wonder and fortifies our emotional and ethical connection to the marine environment and the seabirds that inhabit it.
Introduction
In The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson provides an overview of the significance of humanity’s relationship with the ocean. She acknowledges that it took human beings a long time to recognize these connections, but by the time the book was published in 1951, Carson had clearly articulated her views on the effects of the sea on the human mind. To her, “Standing on its shores, [man] must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage. [. . .] Over the centuries, with all the skill, ingenuity, and reasoning powers of his mind, [man] has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively.” 1 Alongside Rachel Carson, this reflection begins on the seashore, those very special places known as ecotones, “where two ecosystems overlap, the primal habitat of Homo sapiens and the locus of much subsequent human history.” 2 In this sense, the merit of both Gillis and Carson lies in the compelling suggestion they raise: for a long time, humans were apprentices, learning “to live not by the sea but with the sea in a sustainable relationship.” 3
This article, divided into three parts, focuses primarily on Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry. The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers (2017). Relying on the dialogue between ecocriticism and nature writing, it explores how Nicolson’s literary depiction of seabirds challenges anthropocentric narratives, proposing a more holistic relationship between humans and the non-human world.
The coastal shore thus provides an ideal vantage point from which to observe seabirds—master navigators of the oceans and a testament to nature’s diversity and richness. It also offers a privileged location for Nicolson to creatively narrate his stories about seabirds. His reflections on the seashore and on seabirds urge readers to consider our long companionship with them and, more importantly, to think with birds, recognizing the magnificent powers of their minds. Therefore, my suggestion is that Nicolson’s lines of written words invite readers to follow the lines of the birds’ lives and songs—a gesture that, in the words of Dominic Head, may become a sign of a needed “time of reparation,” a moment more inclined to revere what humanity has helped to destroy. At the confluence of Nicolson’s view on birds and Head’s reflection on the effects of nature writing, this essay intends to show how language can foster “the redemptive capacities of emotion and rationality, and the effects they stimulate: change through empathy, and scientific intervention.” 4
More specifically, this reflection aims to present Nicolson’s rigorous yet emotional perspective on seabirds as a way to promote the development of intellectual ecosystems that demonstrate the benefits of observing and caring for nature. Building on Mitchell Tomashow’s concept of ecological imagination, I argue that these mental ecosystems will expand and extend as means of accessing and appreciating the interconnected realm of human and non-human worlds. Crucially, a broader understanding of the global crisis is related to the ability of art, poetry, and narratives to stimulate imagination while cultivating “biospheric perception.” 5 Nicolson’s description of seabirds should draw readers’ attention to the lives and ecosystems of these birds, celebrating their beauty and independence. This will encourage readers to “to cultivate empathy and wisdom, internalize biological and cultural diversity, and then finally to ask the big important questions about meaning and purpose.” 6
As a broad term, ecocriticism refers to a critical and creative literary perspective that investigates issues such as the environment, planetary survival, and interactions with the more-than-human-world. Since Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm defined it as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment,” 7 the term has evolved to encompass reflections on multispecies studies, the climate crisis, material ecocriticism, media and film studies. 8 Thus ecocriticism is characterized by “new ontological perspectives and understandings of the world’s inherent diversity, where not only humans are included but also the rest of the planet’s richness.” 9 In this sense, ecocriticism has revitalized approaches to reading texts, particularly those belonging to the nature writing tradition. As Michelle Nijhuis affirms, the genre emerged in the late eighteenth-century, when nature ceased to be understood as merely fearful and dangerous. Following the Romantics, it was seen as a source of the creative inspiration.
The aesthetic response to nature mirrors the scientific interest on the natural landscapes and the creatures that inhabit them. For nature writers, as for the Romantics in Europe and the Transcendentalists in the United States, the natural world was revelatory, shedding light not only on other forms of life but also on the human mind and heart.
In the twentieth-century, Rachel Carson revitalized the genre by combining scientific rigour with a sense of wonder, and moreover, the mundane with the beautiful and sublime. 10 Following the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Mary Austin or Terry Tempest Williams in the United States, and Gilbert White, Richard Jefferies, Nan Shepherd, Roger Deakin and Robert Macfarlane in the United Kingdom, these authors’ encounters with the natural world offer “an important and complex perspetive” 11 on landscape and place.
Although the genre of nature writing has its detractors, who argue that it is mostly written by white men from wealthy countries, 12 the genre has flourished due to the ecological sensibility and the non-hierarchical way of thinking of its practitioners. At the same time, in accordance with the ecocritical perspective, nature writing promotes ethical reflection and political action. There is a general agreement that nature writing acknowledges “Kindredness and ethical concern for wildlife.” 13 Combining the “long intertwining of traditions” with the consciousness “of the contours of language,” 14 nature writing considers the natural world in terms of tradition, aesthetics and politics. Importantly, it encourages a deeper “attention outward to the activity on nature.” 15 After reading prose or poetry about nature, readers should be impelled to view the natural world differently “and perhaps motivated to act on some front.” 16 The genre has developed, with questions of environmental justice, gender and race now at the center of the literary creativity and production. Today the work of Henry David Thoreau or Annie Dillard, two classic names within the tradition of nature writing, is side by side that of Drew Lanham, author of The Home Place. Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. In it Lanham claims: “my color often casts my love affair with nature in shadow.” 17 Also, in Possibilities of Tenderness, Jason Allen-Paisant considers how Black writers can escape the restrains of racism by adopting an empathetic approach to the natural world. For Allen-Paisant, nature means to “escape from the rage in which racism endeavors to confine me.” 18 In these examples, Nature is a response to historical trauma, fostering an alliance between facts, aesthetics and ethics.
Above all, nature writing uses rhetorical strategies to invite readers to reconnect with the natural world. Words are used to tell stories that may inspire readers to love nature and expose the fact that our disconnection from nature is also a reflection of our disconnection from each other. The merit of nature writing lies in inviting readers to look outside and discover that the degradation and loss witnessed in the natural world is simultaneously an ecological and human problem. At the center of nature writing lies a focus on nature or, ultimately, the intention to develop new forms of attention. It is a way of reading and imagining ways to be human that are less damaging to our shared living world.
Within ecocriticism, various ramifications have occurred in recent decades, one of which is blue ecocriticism. This “Blue Humanities thinking” 19 indicates a world centered around water, as seen in Rachel Carson’s perspectives on the sea and Nicolson’s depiction of seabirds. Nevertheless, water is regarded as a “substantial partner in creative and critical work.” 20
The presence of the Blue Humanities—an interdisciplinary field exploring human interactions with the ocean—further develops the discussion about the essential role of the ocean in both physical and imaginative life. In this sense, Nicolson’s book responds to Serpil Oppermann’s question: “How do we bring marine domains closer to human reality?” 21 It also responds to Van Dooren’s demand: “What kinds of human–bird relationships are possible at the edge of extinction? What obligations do we have to hold open space in the world for other living beings?.” 22 Both Oppermann and Van Dooren suggest that one possible answer is to pay careful attention to the ways human entanglement with birds fosters deeper awareness, engagement, and care for other living beings. As a consequence, ecocritics ask: “How can we approach a world that is crumbling through our own fault? How can we understand it, and live with and in it, without opposing its inner dynamics?.” 23 Within this theoretical framework, blue humanities and ecocriticism converge to show how The Seabird’s Cry embodies a relational approach that encompasses human and non-human entanglements, revealing Nicolson’s sensitivity to the impacts of anthropocentrism on global biodiversity.
However, The Seabird’s Cry demonstrates that our knowledge of the sea “depends equally on how it is represented, put into discourse, and interpreted.” 24 In this book, Nicolson unveils one of the shoreline’s wonders: the birds that traverse both the oceans and human history, “the living skin of our ocean shores.” 25 The strength of his book lies in his ability to weave stories that are “products of an imaginative impulse to visualize through poetic language terrestrial-aquatic interactions and encounters.” 26
By interweaving Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry with Oppermann’s essay “Storied Seas and Living Metaphors in the Blue Humanities,” one can interpret Nicolson’s sea-related stories as meaningful because they “are crafted and lived in a palpable sense between the natural and the cultural,” prompting “perceptual transformations, ideological shifts, and amendments in knowledge production.” 27 Thus my argument that The Seabird’s Cry becomes an enriched source of knowledge and pleasure if we accept Oppermann’s assertion that “all of nature’s constituents, from subatomic particles to stellar formations, possess agency, creativity, and eloquence, which span ecological relations and produce perennial meanings and connections.” 28 Nicolson’s stories, in this sense, are part of an interconnected life that humans should acknowledge and respect. His bird stories remind us that the natural world is diverse and meaningful—welcoming human affection and response, always ready to be a source of wonder if only we are creative, attentive, and willing enough to engage with it.
The Storied Seashore
As already mentioned, the Blue Humanities are a dialogue between words, images, and “water’s physical and cultural instabilities” 29 the idea aligns with Oppermann’s reflection on the sea; both perspectives deepen our understanding of Nicolson’s book as a literary landscape that invites contemplation of maritime images in cultural production—both literal and metaphorical. This dual perspective enables us to grasp the sea as both a regulating ecosystem and a “science-making world” with “multispecies interdependencies,” 30 as well as a story-making world endowed with hydrogeological agency that has inspired countless narratives through the ages. Stories that broaden, as Oppermann claims, our understanding of “the storied sea and its inhabitants.” 31 In this case, the reader is in contact with Nicolson’s aim to give voice and individuality to the birds that live along the shores, recognizing that they have stories to tell, namely of their struggle for survival. Thus birds—like the ocean—project a storied existence conveyed through signs, colors, sounds, and codes that humans may not yet fully comprehend, but that does not mean that they do not represent “narrative agencies,” 32 actively producing configurations of meaningful expression.
If ecocriticism teaches that attention can be cultivated as a methodological practice—and that such attentiveness implicitly critiques anthropocentric assumptions—then the works of both Rachel Carson and Adam Nicolson underscore the importance of careful observation, deep listening, and a renewed perspective that transcends those limitations. This essay aims to explore Nicolson’s proposal for respect toward other living beings and their lifeworlds. The Seabird’s Cry functions as both a literal and metaphorical cry—an urgent warning about the possibility of a world without seabirds. Just as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) warned of a future spring without birdsong, Nicolson’s book evokes a similar image: that the great extinction unfolding in our oceans will bring countless local losses, including the disappearance of seabird populations. He cautions: “The grand cry of a seabird colony, rolling in its clamour around the bays and headlands of high latitudes, will become a memory, its absence unnoticed because people will not miss what is not there.” 33 In a world increasingly burdened with record temperatures, melting glaciers, species extinction, and pollution, Nicolson’s work reminds us that both the oceans and the birds that inhabit their shores demand our awareness, empathy, and protection.
Although Adam Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry forms the core of this essay, this section also considers Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1952) and The Edge of the Sea (1955). Carson’s expertise and poetic tone provide a compelling framework for understanding that this world “is a water world, a planet dominated by its covering mantle of ocean, in which the continents are but transient intrusions of land above the surface of the all-encircling sea.” 34 Blending history and prehistory, geology and biology, into a secular and celebratory hymn to the ocean, Carson draws readers into the waterscape, revealing the interconnectedness of oceanic life and how the sea has shaped Earth’s climate, landforms, and evolution over geological time. For Carson, the sun, moon, winds, and currents constitute an elemental world that has shaped all life on Earth. Her writing on watery landscapes also reflects on humanity’s history of exploration and exploitation of the sea. At the same time, she reveals how the sea, once seen as a symbol of darkness and mystery, came to be understood as a composition of fragile ecosystems—those that humans have dramatically altered over the past five decades. Blending scientific observation with lyrical language, The Sea Around Us invites readers to perceive the sea as more than the sum of its ecosystems, to observe and appreciate its beauty and vitality. As Margaret Atwood notes, Carson’s work is animated by an underlying refrain: “Look. See. Observe. Learn. Wonder. Question. Conclude.” 35 In The Sea Around Us, Carson teaches readers to look at and think about the sea in new ways, taking them on a journey through the evolution of life in the ocean, making it clear that we must learn that this is a watery world—”a planet dominated by its covering mantle of ocean, in which the continents are but transient intrusions of land above the surface of the all-circling sea.” 36
Alongside her scientific insight, Carson’s broader message conveys a poetic and symbolic reflection on the ocean’s essential role in the interconnectedness of life on our planet: “In its mysterious past it encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives in the end, after it may be many transmutations, the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea—to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.” 37 Though written in the mid-twentieth century, Carson’s words remain urgently relevant, especially in light of increasing pollution and the destruction of marine ecosystems. As Chris Jordan’s striking work reveals, the ubiquity of plastic waste has even made seabird bodies lethally heavy. 38
Because seabirds—such as those Nicolson describes—are creatures equally at home in the air, on land, and at sea, they are, in a sense, creatures of the shore, a space Carson described as embodying “that unity that binds life to the earth.” 39 For her, the edge of the sea remains an “elusive and indefinable boundary,” 40 an intertidal zone often inhabited only by birds, wind, and waves. Yet Carson expands upon this reflection, affirming that it is humanity’s search for meaning and significance that “sends us again and again into the natural world where the key to the riddle is hidden. It sends us back to the edge of the sea, where the drama of life played its first scene on earth and perhaps even its prelude; where the forces of evolution are at work today, as they have been since the appearance of what we know as life; and where the spectacle of living creatures faced by the cosmic realities of their world is crystal clear.” 41
Some years after publishing The Seabird’s Cry, Nicolson released Life Between the Tides (first published in Great Britain as The Sea Is Not Made of Water, 2021), a work that invites readers to witness the wonders of the rock pools—those intricate sites of discovery and calm, where “the rock pools still beckon, the blennies and gobies still shimmer beneath us.” 42 Yet Nicolson is quick to remind us that the seashore is no place of reassurance; it is a space “thick with variability.” 43 For him, the tidal coast also represents one of humanity’s earliest frameworks for understanding life’s patterns—through the careful observation of “what was happening to animals and plants between the tides.” 44 His synthesis of the seashore environment is telling: “There are no boundaries here. The human, the planetary, and the animal all interact, and all of them are interleaved in the realities of the shore.” 45
In both Between the Tides and The Seabird’s Cry, Nicolson pursues the same objective: to recognize “the continuities between animal and human consciousness, the continuousness of the spectrum that runs from bacterium and virus to scientist and poet.” 46 As he insists, “To know something—a person, an animal, or a place—to become intimate with it, is not to know in any very conscious way, but to dissolve the boundaries.” 47
This idea provides an important framework for the discussion of seabirds. With the rise of ecocriticism in the late twentieth century, the natural world became central to literary and critical attention. Within this context, alongside landscapes, plants, and ecosystems, animals have increasingly entered human narratives. Nature writing has become a genre in which authors offer their words and imagination to engage with the non-human world, often providing “a new piquancy for readers seeking solace in the non-human, or for those looking to change their habits in the face of ecological catastrophe.” 48 Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry exemplifies how imagination and close observation of nature can invigorate the human spirit and renew individual lives. In Nicolson’s account, birds enter the human realm not as passive subjects of curiosity or victims of cruelty, but as fellow beings who compel us to rethink our relations—with places, societies, and politics. Evolutionary history shows that humans have always coexisted with animals, and indeed, are themselves animals—an understanding that underscores The Seabird’s Cry’s relevance to the intertwined worlds of ocean, bird, and human life.
In Life Between the Tides, after invoking Heidegger’s notion of care for all that exists, Nicolson writes: “The coexistence with the things of the pool, the being-with them, a total presence with them, came to seem like a way of establishing my own being in the world. To be-with is the only way to be.” 49 This idea powerfully synthesizes the argument developed thus far. His later injunction—”Be with the shore, be with its others, be with everyone there” 50 —not only illuminates the content of this proposal but meaningfully anticipates the following section, which turns to the observation of seabirds and their coastal habitats.
“Without Weight or Limit”: Seabirds at Home in the Air, on Land, and at Sea
In The Seabird’s Cry, Adam Nicolson combines the rigor of scientific knowledge with a deep love for seabirds—those he describes throughout the book: the fulmar, puffin, kittiwake, gull, guillemot, cormorant and shag, shearwater, gannet, great auk, razorbill, and albatross. Nicolson argues that seabirds, freed from the “sin of gravity,” 51 are magnificent embodiments of life itself—”half-presences and near-absences” 52 that “cross the boundary between the matter-of-fact and the imagined.” 53
In a detailed and sensitive introduction to his study of ten seabird species, Nicolson notes that many of his observations originate from the Shiant Isles but also from other Atlantic sites: the Hebrides, the west coast of Ireland, St Kilda, Orkney, Shetland, the Faeroes, Iceland, Norway, the eastern seaboard of Maine, Newfoundland, Ascension, the Falklands, South Georgia, the Canaries, and the Azores. He writes that these ten birds have “magnetized [his] mind—partly in amazement at the nakedness of their lives, its cruelties and beauties, the undressed nature of their existence, partly in envy, in longing to be what they are.” 54 Nicolson’s fascination arises from the central fact that all of them know how to exist across three elements—the only animals that are truly “at home on the sea, in the sea, in the air, and on land.” 55 As noted earlier, Nicolson describes seabirds as “the living skin of our ocean shores” and “the florid, rowdy summer clothing of what would otherwise be barren rock.” 56
Part of the book’s title comes from a line by Seamus Heaney: “What came first, the seabird’s cry or the soul / Imagined in the dawn cold when it cried?.” 57 Nicolson’s work, we argue, invites readers to connect Heaney’s soul-seabird with the origins of perception and life itself, exploring “the ways seabirds exert their hold on the human imagination.” 58 Other poets have also written of seabirds—for instance, Alice Oswald’s “Seabird’s Blessing,” in which the birds are “makers of many angles, / workers that unpick a web / of the air’s threads and tangles,” battling the wind “one to one” with a “perverse body” that is “without weight or limit.” 59 Oswald’s verses help illuminate the struggle these species endure to survive and resonate with Nicolson’s call for humans to listen to seabirds—their cries, their language, their ways of being: “O sky count us as nothing / O sea count us as nothing.” 60 Both writers share the conviction that seabirds have stories to tell, and that if humans listen attentively, we might understand “what might be going on in the mind of a bird as it solves the problems around it—and also, perhaps, gain some perspective on what is going on in our own minds. All these birds stretch our thinking about what it means to be intelligent.” 61 These examples echo Clara Dawson’s insights into what thinking with birds might mean: “Birds in literature are textual artifacts, imaginative constructs feathered by myth and superstition, often distorted by scientific errors. But they are also more-than-human beings who think, feel, sing, move, make noise, lust, give birth, die, decay, are reborn, and whose material interventions in human culture are brought to the fore. The intervention of birds swooping into the human world disrupts, inspires, and shapes human thinking.” 62
Like Carson, Nicolson uses both numbers and words to invite readers to share in his wonder at seabirds. His style oscillates between that of a meticulous scientist—precise and data-driven—and that of a poet—sensitive and alert. Nicolson informs us, for example, that “only 350 of roughly 11,000 bird species have taken to the sea.” 63 He draws attention to the singular patterns of their life histories: seabirds mature slowly, raise only one chick at a time after long incubation, and often remain with the same partner throughout their lives, each parent depending on the other to sustain the next generation. Much of his data reflect advances in ornithological science; these findings foster admiration, yet they also reveal how human activity has brought sorrow to the natural world. As Nicolson notes, over the last sixty years seabird populations have declined globally by about two-thirds. The causes are numerous: “the damage threatened by climate change, warmer seas, more acid seas, changing oceanographic patterns, pollution, the effects of industrialized fishing, the loss of habitat, and the appetites of the rats and cats we have distributed around the world all ripple through the seabird community like songs to be sung at the apocalypse.” 64 Against these grim statistics, Nicolson employs a rhetoric of conviction, asserting that seabirds “are pregnant with meaning and assertions in a world of denials.” 65 To him, seabirds “concentrate beauty and coherence [. . .] embody genius [. . .] and are emblems of hope.” 66
Closely aligned with recent studies that link “alienation from the natural world to the mental health crisis in the West,” 67 Nicolson urges readers to feel awe for the diverse ways each seabird meets the challenges of the sea. He awakens us to the mystery and wonder of seabird life—a realm of “fluidity and hardness, the cauterising cold, the oceanic expanse, the mocking inaccessibility, the freedom, the evasiveness, the otherness.” 68 Across ten chapters, each devoted to a particular species or group, Nicolson invites readers into the world of seabirds, describing his book as “a manifesto for the Ecozoic—an age that rests on the belief that all living beings have a right to life and to the recognition that they possess forms of understanding we have never shared and probably never will.” 69
The work is not a simple celebration of seabirds; Nicolson writes candidly about the cruelty at the heart of nature—the brutality among gulls, the aggressive drive of gannets. His method balances observation with selection, acknowledging that his understanding of seabirds is indebted to scientific experimentation, often involving harsh methods. Yet his ultimate aim is to foster an empathetic understanding of birds according to the sensory and cognitive frameworks that define their existence—echoing the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt, the unique sensory world of each organism. Nicolson thus contends that the human, anthropocentric view of other species must expand: “The seabirds are intelligent in ways that are different from ours,” 70 and “the whole seabird is the vehicle of intelligence—its memory, its eye, its coloring, its aggression, its fear, its beauty.” 71 Through this, Nicolson reinforces Uexküll’s perspective on the subjectivity of all living beings, shaped by their sense organs and nervous systems.
One of Nicolson’s most compelling contributions lies in the glimpses he offers into the birds’ subjective worlds. He describes the fulmar as “the virtuoso of the wind,” 72 urging readers to notice its “adaptation of body to world, as if you were witnessing an organism gliding from dullness into all the gifts and possibilities that life in the air might offer.” 73 The shearwater knows how the wind works, able to “climb on and off the circulatory gyres like traffic on a freeway, pulling into rich fishing grounds or continuing across the ocean, apparently at will.” 74 The albatross, meanwhile, has evolved “a tendon-lock system in its shoulders, allowing it to hold out its immense wings without muscular effort—hence its effortless mastery of the wind.” 75 As Steve Mentz observes, this albatross is not only Coleridge’s symbol of burden and redemption but also an iconic global seabird traversing vast oceanic expanses. 76 The evolution of Coleridge’s portrayal of the albatross, from a Christian symbol to a creature that led the mariner’s (and the Romantics) to a new vision of the interrelatedness of human and non-human life is key. This inextricable binding of human and the world of seabirds forms the basis of Nicolson’s views and his “ecological dynamism,” 77 presenting the albatross as an iconic global seabird, and emphasizing “how widely they travel across oceanic spaces.” 78 Nicolson argues that the poet’s admiration for the seabird is rooted in physiology rather than myth; the albatross’s grace and endurance are the result of evolutionary design, embodies grace and endurance. Thus, “as the songlines of the albatross are laced around the world, their Umwelt is one to which the only sane reaction is awe.” 79
Nicolson’s and Uexküll’s insights resonate with those of other critics, such as David Herman, who explores “modes of belonging and connectedness across species lines,” 80 and James Paz, who argues that both birds and humans are “situated in and shaped by body and environment.” 81 These perspectives affirm that a scientific understanding of natural processes does not diminish but deepens our sense of awe before the majesty of seabirds. Nicolson reminds us that this pleasure begins in our animal sensorium—a capacity arising from the intertwining of thought and feeling, perception and imagination. As he suggests, humans can apprehend the rest of nature only as embodied beings, feeling it from within rather than observing it as detached intellects.
As a creative writer, Nicolson seeks to persuade readers to stay with the seabirds, populating his narrative not only with data but also with similes that emphasize our interconnected fragility. Seabirds, he writes, “can seem like victims of the world, almost like refugees, hopelessly dependent on what life can offer them, subject to weather and dearth, with failure stalking them at every turn.” 82 Whether alone or together, they form “one of our imagination’s reservoirs, summer ambassadors from the winter ocean, come to visit us in our mundane existence—creatures from the otherworld, temporarily and for a moment afloat in ours—and for all their vulnerability, a reminder of the beauty and mystery of existence.” 83
The ocean shores that Rachel Carson explored both scientifically and poetically are the same ones that shearwaters and other ocean navigators inhabit. As Nicolson explains with characteristic enthusiasm: “The shearwaters smell how the sea works, where the fish are. With enlarged olfactory bulbs that can detect the subtlest of differences, these seabirds can smell their way through the links and layers of the food web.” 84 Observing these marine environments with attention and affection, Nicolson demonstrates that the bodies of birds—like human bodies—function as sites “at which affect and ecocriticism come together,” the “confluence of environments, texts, and bodies.” 85 In this sense, seabirds are not only ecological agents but affective presences in our shared world.
Final Considerations
My argument has been that Adam Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry is a literary enactment of the author’s own rhetorical cry—an expression arising from his embodied encounters with seabirds. For this reason, he asserts that “we must not preside over the end of these marvels, or have their absence as our memorial.” 86 The celebratory tone of his writing, the careful design of his book, and his ability to draw our attention to stories that intimately particularize the lives of seabirds—according to their ties and tides—ultimately provide an imaginative resource for critical reflection on our times, on seabirds, and on the prospect of their disappearance.
Nicolson is acutely aware that seabirds constitute one of the most threatened avian groups in both Europe and the United States, with more than a third of the species experiencing population declines. Their nesting conditions are further imperiled by climate change, human encroachment on coastlines and wetlands, and the pressures of tourism. Importantly, Nicolson’s work resonates with broader reflections on the paths humanity must find to travel with other species—to weave shared stories of cohabitation, attentiveness, and respect. Throughout this essay, several authors have been cited for their contributions to cultivating a more alert and responsive world. To these voices we may add the American biologist David Haskell, whose studies of birdsong deepen Nicolson’s insights. As Haskell observes, “sound is a powerful connector because it travels through and around barriers, finding us and calling us out of inattention.” 87 Moreover, “when bird and human minds connect, a new language is born. This expansive language weaves many species into a communicative whole, a web of listening and speech.” 88 The effects of such attention and care generate affect and a sense of unison—precisely what the planet’s diverse creatures require from humans today. In a sense, the lightness and ascensional power of flight, and the beauty of birdsong are a powerful image of the expansive language of imagination humans need to practice in order to come closer to the non-human world.
In conclusion, as I have argued throughout this reflection, the confluence of ecocriticism and nature writing is a useful literary tool to highlighting a specific moment in the planetary crisis. In a time of species extinction, biodiversity threats and changing oceanic environments, it is the role of scholars and an educators to use imagination to activate empathy towards the natural world. The first act is to encourage readers and students to observe the natural world attentively, and then to assert that encountering art, and fictional and non-fictional literary texts in particular, raises awareness of human and non-human entanglements. As a consequence of these labor of the mind, human action, guided by attention and care, can become a vital resource for restoring ecosystems—particularly coastal ones, where air, earth, sea, and seabird converge. Specifically, these are spaces that call for renewed reflection, for, as John Gillis proposes, “once we have grasped that wind, earth, and water are all parts of one dynamic system of which humankind is also a member, we will better understand not just our terraqueous planet but also ourselves.” 89
Ultimately, drawing primarily on the works of Adam Nicolson and Rachel Carson, this study has sought to underscore the relevance of literary texts—especially those belonging to the tradition of nature writing—in nurturing care and ethical responsiveness toward the other creatures with whom we share the planet. In this regard, Nicolson reminds us that seabirds “are not necessarily passive victims of the giant changes occurring to their world. They respond, they fight, they learn, and they have within and between them an adaptability and a resourcefulness which the very processes of destruction can bring to the fore.” 90 Nicolson interprets these qualities as signs of hope: he observes, for instance, the expanding gannet colonies in the North-East Atlantic and the increasing presence of cormorants in lakes and rivers as testaments to survival and adaptability. His knowledge and sensitivity culminate in a moral imperative: “we must not preside over the ending of these marvels, or have their absence as our memorial.” 91
I started this reflection on the shore, a storied place of encounters: with human history and with the history of humans intertwined with other creatures and organisms — our companions on a long journey. I will conclude by echoing the refereed authors’ view that humans must confront their destructive behaviors in order to address them, by paying attention and taking action. On the other hand, as Nicolson demonstrates, the shores may also be a place from which to reflect on “our sense of who we are, what it is to be, and what it is to understand.” 92 Finally, Nicolson insists on the necessity of sustained global attention to the world’s seabirds and the protection of their breeding grounds along coastlines. For the author of The Seabird’s Cry, seabird colonies remain “a last bastion of wholeness, insufflated from our destruction by the enveloping protection of an ocean on which they were at home and where, thankfully, we never can be.” 93
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.