Let me tell you about the birds and the trees | Alex Clark

From pigeons to asylum seekers - generosity and friendship are in short supplyYou had to admire the pluck - tangential pun entirely intended - of the man on the radio sticking up for the anti-pigeon spikes that, a mere three years after being installed in some Bristol trees, hit the news. It happened in the way that these things now happen; courtesy of wildlife enthusiast Jennifer Garrett and a photograph taken by Anna Francis, an image of said spikes, vicious-looking things firmly attached along whole branches, began to circulate on Twitter. Cue - to my mind - justified outrage. If modifying nature in order to inflict harm on animals going about their ordinary animal business is not bad karma, I don't know what is.Before too long, the creator of the spikes, David Jones, was on Radio 4, defending the Defenders(R), as they are called. His line of argument was ingeniously counterintuitive - they are, he said, "the humane solution". But how could this be so? Well, he pointed out, better than being shot (not by him, I should add, but by notional pest control services). He knew, he added, of a manor house with a tree in which had been counted no fewer than 32 pigeons. 32! (Is that a lot? If you need four and twenty blackbirds simply to make a pie, and if blackbirds are roughly the size of pigeons, it doesn't sound like a full-on avian invasion.) Continue reading...