Humans constantly take space from birds, who themselves relentlessly try to make place. By looking at specific cases of humans’ interactions with wild, feral, liminal, domesticated birds in human-dominated environments, we observe attempts to negotiate life and place, where birds claim rights: nesting in buildings, repurposing bird spikes, stealing food waste … Following the idea that social sciences should move “beyond-the-human”, I propose to frame these negotiations as political, and to look at them as “avian everyday activism”. Re-branding these negotiations opens the perspective that birds express their claims through tactics akin to “everyday resistance”. Doing so, I reveal how to conceive differently animal and multispecies politics, one where birds, and by extension other animals, can express directly their claims, rather than through humans voicing them.
Théophile Robert-Rimsky (Sun,) studied this question.