On a quiet Sunday morning, as I was going for a walk, a stranger sidled up to me and said his “Good morning, sir”. “I see you on walks around the estate, with a camera. Are you into architecture?”, he then asked. The reality, I told him, is more prosaic: “I’m a birdwatching and photography hobbyist”. “Birdwatching?!” I wasn’t sure what the additional look on his face was. Disbelief? Disgust? Pleasant surprise? “Isn’t that what ‘Oyinbo people’ do?”, he blurted out. And that’s how seven years after the covid-19 pandemic forced me into a more intimate conversation with the space that my species occupies on this planet, especially how this tenancy isn’t exclusive to humanity but co-dependent on every other species that the earth is made up of and includes, I realised that I’d strayed into a culturally dubious territory.
A few months earlier, on a much larger birdwatching excursion outside urban Lagos, our group walked by a gathering of villagers. Pleasantries casually exchanged, we moved on to the faint whisper of a stray comment. One of the team we’d just passed by was overheard telling another that “àwọn ègbè ẹ l’ẹyẹ nìyẹn”. Loosely translated, it means “those are members of the bird group”. As we sashayed through the thickets, the import of this statement exercised members of the team. Absolutely nothing wrong on the face of it? Yes. But that’s before you remember that for a lot of Nigerians, birds (and bats) are, in reality, shape-shifting elementals (more often than not, witches on their way to meetings of their covens) – or at the very least, other even more unsavoury entities.
In this sense, to be members of the “bird group” was, clearly, all shades of maleficent – first as a description, and no less crucially, as possible members of society. And if the consequent fortune of trees from our general loathing of birds is anything to go by, a company to be avoided. As abodes of birds, especially nocturnal raptors with their eerie, if often beautiful calls, the local attitude here is to bring all vegetation that harbour birds down. Besides, who does not know that the witch’s call that was overheard yesternight before the child died this morning was from the treetops. Try squaring this “fact” with the claims that trees, by inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen (and through providing shade) are storm troopers in the fight against a warmer world, or that their deep roots help compact the earth, preventing soil erosion and flooding.
The birdwatcher won’t win many such arguments in her bid to preserve habitats for wildlife in Nigeria. The role that despoiled wetlands play in Lagos State’s management of its flood prone spaces underlines another of these failed arguments. The central flood control case is that wetlands act like natural sponges. In other places (Nigeria is always an exception in this kinds of conversation), rather than allowing rainfall or river water to rush downstream all at once, wetlands temporarily store excess water and release it gradually. This reduces both the height and speed of floodwaters. Here we pave wetlands over and proxy for their lost flood control effect by enacting environmental sanitation days where we clear offending debris and clogged sewers.
Wetlands do more. They are among the most important ecosystems for nature conservation because they support an extraordinary diversity of life. Although they cover only a small fraction of the Earth’s land surface, they provide habitat for a disproportionately large number of species. By destroying these wetlands, we also constrain the space available to birdwatching. Easy to ask at this point, a familiar Nigerian question: “Who has birdwatching helped?”
Responses to this question provoke an even more interesting query: “What would urban planners in Nigeria do, given a go at the 843 acres (341 hectares) of space between the Upper West Side and Upper East Side neighbourhoods of Manhattan in New York City?” Most would probably create a concrete refuge for real estate developers. Yet, as we all know, the Central Park in New York is a birdwatcher’s paradise, a celebrated stopover location for many migrating birds. Arguably, few Nigerians on a visit to New York will stop at the Central Park just to experience its avifauna.
Is my point that Nigeria does not look favourably on birdwatchers. No, it doesn’t. In the passive sense described above, and in the more active threat to persons toting birdwatching gear from miscreants who demand ground rent for use of such kit in their yards, and security personnel who cite possible breaches of security conditions. (I have not found its antecedents, but there is a part of our culture that makes toting cameras, their lenses, and binoculars about as verboten as addressing older persons by their first names).
A couple of years back, an older, more experienced birdwatcher told me that “If the mosquitoes bite, then you are in the right spot”. And, yes, biting insects are some of a birdwatcher’s less pleasant nightmares. In Nigeria, though, the mosquitoes that birdwatchers contend with are figuratively bigger, and their bite more savage.
Uddin Ifeanyi, a journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.
