From The Perspective Of A Bird: Caught In A Net

As a volunteer doing wildlife rehabilitation, I always tried to put myself in the shoes of the animals. I don't believe they knew we were trying to help. I think that mostly, if not entirely, they expected us to devour them at any moment. I think it is my experience doing wildlife rehabilitation that has made me wonder about mist netting from a bird's perspective.

I will never know what it is like to be a bird caught in a mist net, but my guess is that it is terrifying. The more you struggle, the tighter the net wraps around you until you can barely move at all and it may even be cutting into you in places. You are stuck, helpless. Time passes. What goes through the bird's head? I doubt that birds anticipate all the bad things that can happen to them the same way that people do. I think what makes certain situations so terrifying for me is the awareness of the potential for harm, and the anticipation of that coming to pass. That dread is often worse than what actually happens.

It is extremely frustrating to me that I will not ever know what the bird experiences, that I cannot get inside their heads. Kay Redfield Jamison wrote in her book Exuberance that there are hard limits to what one can know about oneself, other people and especially animals. That's not an exact quotation, but I remember that line so well even though it is not primarily a book about animals. J.M Coetzee wrote something very similar in the The Lives of Animals. He wrote that one can never really know what it is like to feel what another animal feels, for example the feeling of being a bat as it flies around. It makes me sad that I cannot find out what animals really feel (oddly, I don't think I'd want to know most of the time what is really going on in other people's heads, too much information).

Whatever they may be thinking or feeling before I show up, I am pretty sure that most of them think that I am going to eat them when I arrive on the scene. Although people do not usually prey on birds, we are still large and have the classic mark of a predator with both eyes facing forward. The birds usually act fearful, thrashing about in a last desperate attempt to get away and then sometimes fiercely fighting my attempts to free them (this can be irritating but I try to remember they don't know I am going to free them).

I'm not saying that we shouldn't mist net or band birds. I think it is possible to have a deep empathy for animals and still do research that is stressful, likely terrifying, for them. After all, the birds are set free unharmed and ultimately the research may benefit them. I actually think it's important to think about these things, it helps me work quietly and quickly with animals and always makes me think hard before prolonging a bird's handling just so I can get a photo.

I suspect that in terms of stress the event might be similar to being held hostage and then let go unscathed. However, just as I don't think birds have specific thoughts about future scenarios while they are trapped in the net, I don't think birds form memories that cause them future psychological trauma such as post-traumatic stress disorder. I think birds live much more in the moment, and so for them the experience of being caught in the net is likely intensely terrifying then mostly forgotten (they definitely remember where the net is though because very few fly in twice in one day). But the truth is I don't really know what they remember and what they don't and I never will. If I could, I think I would change shoes in an instant, just to know what it is like to be a bird, or a bat for that matter.

(I might add I'm both surprised and a little relieved that no one commented on the photos I posted of birds stuck in the net a little while ago. I was sure someone would find them objectionable as the birds are so incredibly tangled and they are very detailed, graphic you could almost say, photos. Oddly, most people who walk by our mist nets do not object either, so there must either be less wacky animal rights activists out there than I think or more people who understand the larger objectives of doing this type of research or maybe more people who just don't give a damn what is going on around them... the last being most likely. I did once have a group of construction workers in hard hats walk by a net in a Baltimore park and get very mad at me when I told them we were purposefully trapping the birds to get data on them for a research project. They protested, “That's not right!” It's not the group I would have picked to become outraged, but there was nothing I could say to soothe them. Lucky for me they did not try to take any birds out of our nets because without a little experience that only tends to make them more tangled and hard to undo later).