I think it was John Stott, preacher, Bible expositor and world Evangelical leader who first taught me the word 'ornitheology'. Amongst Stott's interests beyond Bible teaching and writing was his lifelong fascination with birds. He was a twitcher, and a very knowledgeable ornithologist. He often used the habits and lore about birds as illustrations of spiritual life.
My own interest in birds goes back to my childhood on the farms in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire. I grew up surrounded by fields, woods, rivers, burns, small lochs, endless hedges, farm buildings and always one or two meadows or fallow fields. It was a bird habitat paradise. Without a pause I can rhyme off lists of the birds we heard, saw, and took an interest in. Field birds included lapwing, curlew, snipe, skylark, partridge, pheasant; around the farm pied wagtail, house sparrow, starling, swallow, house martin, jackdaw, wren, robin, jackdaw, wood pigeon; along the hedges and grass verges yellow hammer, chaffinch, hedge sparrow, mavis, blackbird, greenfinch, linnet, goldfinch; down at the lochs there were coot, waterhen, heron, mallard, geese; along the burns and in the woods, dippers, sand martins, mistle thrush, yellow wagtail, kestrel, cuckoo, blue tit, great tit, long tailed tit; and in the meadows blackcap, coal tit, meadow pipit, and several of the above where there were bushes, gorse or other promising nest sites.
It is one of the great blessings in my life that I lived at a time of ornithological abundance, before so much industrialised agriculture laid waste the habitats and reduced the food sources of all those feathered beauties that populated my days. I remain passionate about birds; their beauty, their fascinating variety, their habits and habitats, and the hard to explain sense of companionship I feel when I hear bird calls and song, and see birds in flight and going about their lives.
So ornitheology is also one of my subsidiary interests. The geese migrating and heading unerringly where they need to go; murmurations of starlings demonstrating ballet in flight; skylarks soaring and singing as if life depends on it, and maybe sometimes it does; the patience and stillness of the heron; lapwings showing off moves that are amongst the best displays of aerobatic mastery; the partridge chicks clustering together around a mother trying to run an impossible creche; and the kestrel, hovering with deceptive laziness moving only the wingtips tilted in breeze. All of these have been the subject of various poets, not least because of their achievements as creatures who learned to live and survive and flourish, until human activity began to threaten their future.
Jesus said consider the birds. At the risk of anachronism, those urgent words of Jesus come whispering down the centuries to a world increasingly hostile to the non human species who share this planet with us. And whatever else the doctrine of Creation addresses, it raises questions of human responsibility as stewards and curators of a fragile planet. A strong Christian doctrine of creation cannot co-exist in the same mind as an attitude of careless, ruthless exploitation of world resources for economic power. That would require a moral contradiction and a genuine distortion of a biblical theology of creation.
The near idyllic account of taken for granted diversity and pervasive presence of birds in my childhood only sounds near idyllic because the plight of bird life has become so critical. The catastrophic fall in numbers, and the large increase in the number of endangered species populating lists of birds at risk on our islands means it is very unlikely future generations of children will ever experience what I took for granted as the way the world is. Ornithology therefore becomes ornitheology. Birds, with their relatively recent security, and now their fragile hold on survival putting them at risk of extinction, are reminders that this world is not a supermarket for humans to raid and plunder.
Call it what we will; green theology, ecology, environmental ethics. But one way or another the bird population, its diversity and health levels, are pretty accurate measurements of the overall impact of human economic activity. And unless we consider the birds, we may well find that once they, and the bees, and the ice, and the forests are pushed to the cliff edge, our human future likewise will be put at risk. That would be ornitheology. I for one cannot subscribe to the irresponsible shoulder shrugging of those whose beliefs bring them to say, "God is in control; it's not down to us." Stewardship is freighted with responsibility, and accountability. We have been entrusted with much, and of us, much will be required.