Cultivating more-than-human care: Exploring bird watching as a landscaping practice on the example of sand martins and flooded gravel pits

Abstract

The environmental crisis has created a demand for practices that build awareness about the interconnections of diverse forms of life, allowing humans to understand complex earthly relationships and reconnect with the land they inhabit. This paper contributes to this debate by investigating bird watching activities and their relevance for architects and landscape architects. Drawing upon multispecies studies and the notion of landscape thinking, it examines the potential of birding as a caring landscaping practice. It analyzes the relationship between birders and sand martins in two case studies and probes how birders develop attentiveness for the birds and their shared environment. The investigation suggests that birding fosters care beyond the observed species. It can trigger a landscaping practice comparable to landscape thinking that helps humans reconnect with the land, fostering response-able spatial design practices.