With a Bird – A Reader on Avian Kinship

With a Bird, A Reader on Avian Kinship, edited by Marjolein van der Loo, invites readers into an expansive, cross-disciplinary conversation about how we live with and think alongside birds. In a time of climate breakdown and ecological grief, this book offers birds not as metaphors or curiosities, but as kin-creatures with their own histories, desires, and forms of knowing. Spanning speculative fiction, ancestral memory, critical ornithology, personal essay, and visual art, its contributions explore the fragile, often overlooked relationships between humans and birds across myth, science, migration, and dream. Through listening and attention, the book explores how birds shape landscapes, signal planetary change, and offer new ways of understanding time, voice, and relation. Contributors draw on decolonial, feminist, and ecological practices to unsettle dominant narratives and invite forms of care, reciprocity, and repair. From the mimicry of the lyrebird to the silence of vanished species, from winter dreaming to co-domestication and spectral presence, each chapter gestures toward multispecies futures grounded in presence and poetic attention. This reader, both a continuation of an exhibition and a gathering of distinct voices, becomes a spell — woven from memory, sound, and image — that reimagines kinship in flight. With contributions by John Berger, Ignace Cami, Monika Czyzyk, Bryony Dunne, Daniel Godínez Nivón, Daisy Hildyard, Manjot Kaur, Natalie Lawrence, Marianne Elisabeth Lien, Michelle J. Moyer, Evangeline M. Rose, Bernard Lohr, Karan J. Odom, Kevin E. Omland, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Ai Ozaki, Maria Popova, Sergio Rojas Chaves, Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide), Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Yuri Tuma, and Suzanne Walsh.