SEPALE Bird Sanctuary

The birds we live alongside

Recently I’ve had the pleasure of spending some time with the artist Ana Kun, who is based in Timișoara. In her own words: “My practice takes me to both art shows and civic discussions. I work with artists and curators but also with activists and educators.”

Ana was in residence in Umeå for the past three months, in the studio next to mine. Over that time we spent a few hours walking and talking. Her warmth, generosity, and criticality made a lasting impression.

I’m not going to map out all our conversations, but as we wandered around Umeå we ranged from red squirrel leprosy to vampiric historical misconceptions; from Romanian–Hungarian conflict to Vasili Gogol-Yanovsky; from non-human perspectives to vegan thinking. She also advised me not to write essays for a while, so I’m keeping this short and trying not to jump around too much.

Before leaving, Ana sent me a link to SEPALE Bird Sanctuary, run by her friend and fellow artist Silvia Moldovan. The sanctuary focuses on the care, rehabilitation, and long-term support of raptors, corvids, and community pigeons, grounded in principles of veganism, permaculture, and sustainability.

This volunteer-run organisation is always looking for support: https://sepale.ro/despre/. I hope to visit and volunteer one day.

I don’t yet know much about Silvia’s wider work, but her focus on pigeons caught my attention. I’ve always been interested in the common birds that live around us — robins, blue tits, pigeons, crows, sparrows, and all the other familiar types.

Whenever I travel, I notice how these birds shift from place to place, sometimes becoming unexpectedly distinctive in new settings. Since moving to northern Sweden, the fieldfare — “the traveller through the fields” — has really caught my eye. Although migratory, they feel like part of the everyday here. Coming from the UK, where fieldfares appear only in winter and usually in flocks, it’s strange to meet them as regular neighbours. Here they breed locally, defend territories, and can be surprisingly bold, often mobbing crows to protect their nests.

Pigeons are, in many ways, the ultimate domestic bird. They have lived closely alongside humans for thousands of years: first as a food source, then as pets, messengers, racing birds, and research animals. Over time, released or escaped birds formed the feral populations now common in cities, towns, and parks.

Pigeons often reflect the conditions of a place. Their long domestication has enabled them to adapt to pollution, architecture, seasonal change, and human behaviour. They quietly register how we live with other species.

The work of SEPALE Bird Sanctuary is a reminder of another way of relating to birds: one that involves time, recovery, care, and the space to heal. Pigeons come and go in contemporary art and theory, but SEPALE feels outside of that. It isn’t about symbol or trend — it’s about care, recovery, and everyday commitment to the birds themselves.

References and Credits

Image: SEPALE Bird Sanctuary, Romania. Photo courtesy of Silvia Moldovan.

Image: Crystal Park Pigeon, 2015.

SEPALE Bird Sanctuary information: https://sepale.ro/despre/

Artist Ana Kun: https://anakun.com

“Speak, Bird, Speak: Seeds, Birds, and Memory”

 

“Speak, Bird, Speak: Seeds, Birds, and Memory”

When artist Areej Huniti visited Umeå as part of the IASPIS residency, I attended her talk at the artist-run gallery Verkligheten and spent time in conversation with her during her stay. We spoke about the militarisation of birds, the destruction of the Palestinian seed bank, and how stories and seeds travel under conditions of control. Her reflections stayed with me and became one of the starting points for Speak Bird Speak.

“Speak, bird, speak again,” begins an old Palestinian folktale — a phrase that feels like both invocation and endurance, a way of saying: keep going, even when the story is broken.

I live in northern Sweden, surrounded by birch, pine, and spruce, where magpies, jays, and nutcrackers cache seeds through the winter. I’ve never seen Palestine in person, only through what others record and share. The conflict may seem distant, yet war is no longer far from here — technology, media, and climate make its effects immediate. Food systems, migration, and ecological loss are all connected; what happens to a seed bank in Hebron links to broader patterns of control and survival that shape landscapes everywhere.

In the summer of 2025, Israeli forces demolished the Palestinian Seed Multiplication Unit in Hebron, the country’s only national seed bank. It had safeguarded more than seventy native crop varieties — grains, legumes, herbs, vegetables — all adapted to the dry soil and long memory of the West Bank. For decades, it stood as Palestine’s only national seed bank, a living archive of continuity. Its destruction was not only the loss of a building, but the interruption of a cycle: the destruction of what allowed people to feed themselves on their own terms.

Seeds are not inert. They carry adaptation, stories, and instructions written through generations of care and observation. When a seed bank is destroyed, what is lost is not just food security but a living record of how to inhabit a place — how to belong through cultivation rather than control.

Across the same hills where that seed bank once stood, Eurasian Jays (Garrulus glandarius atricapillus), Hooded Crows (Corvus cornix), Rock Nuthatches (Sitta neumayer), and Nutcrackers (Nucifraga caryocatactes) bury acorns and pine nuts for winter. Most will never be retrieved. Forgotten caches sprout new trees: oak, pine, almond. This process, known as scatter-hoarding, unfolds through caching and shifting ground. Some caches are never recovered as the landscape changes, and from those buried seeds, new forests grow.

Through the act of caching, their scattered hoards create future forests. They act without map or plan, trusting the land to remember what they forget. The forest grows from loss — a model of resilience grounded not in control but in participation.

For humans, this kind of living-with is harder to accept. We tend to read error as failure, forgetting as weakness. But the more-than-human world functions otherwise. In the context of Palestine — where destruction, displacement, and restriction fragment life — this ecological truth becomes political. What if error itself could be a form of resistance? What if scattering were a way to endure?

To remain in damaged worlds is to work within uncertainty — to keep tending when there is no guarantee of return. The seed bank and the jay both hold this logic: the knowledge that regeneration depends on care distributed across space and time, on a network of small, persistent acts.

In Palestinian folk tradition, the pomegranate is a symbol of memory and abundance. In one story, each seed holds an ancestor’s soul — a piece of the land’s remembering. (From Ibrahim Muhawi & Sharif Kanaana, Speak, Bird, Speak Again, 1989.) The tale reminds us that to scatter is not to lose, but to multiply presence.

So when the Hebron seed bank was reduced to rubble, the memory it held did not end; it dispersed — into farmers’ pockets, into diaspora collections, into fragments of soil that may still germinate. Like the forgotten acorns of the jay, some of those seeds will rise again.

To stay with such a world is not an act of optimism but of entanglement. It means acknowledging that life continues through cracks, that persistence often looks like error, and that resistance can take the form of quiet replanting.

The bird’s scattered memory, the farmer’s saved seed, the folk story told and retold — all are gestures of continuity within interruption.

To speak, to scatter, to stay — this is how the land remembers. And how resistance takes root.

“Speak, bird, speak again — for the land remembers what we bury.”

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Notes & Sources

• Hebron seed bank destruction: Friends of the Earth International, Aug 2025; The New Arab, “Israel Destroys Palestinian Seed Bank Facilities in West Bank,” July 2025.
• Scatter-hoarding ecology: Garrulus glandarius atricapillus, Corvus cornix, and Nucifraga caryocatactes documented as key seed dispersers in Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Europe (Bossema 1979; Haidar & Walid 2018).
• Folktales: Ibrahim Muhawi & Sharif Kanaana, Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales (University of California Press, 1989); “Hab al-Rumman / Pomegranate Seeds.”
• Conceptual frame: ecological persistence and multispecies continuity — seeing error, dispersal, and persistence as active forms of resistance.

Birders of Palestine

Birders of Palestine

A heartfelt initiative supporting Palestinian birdwatchers — especially in Gaza and the West Bank — who continue to document wildlife despite the toughest of circumstances. Through their lens, we glimpse both the fragile beauty and the deep resilience of life in a region often overlooked.

Visit → birdersofpalestine.com

By purchasing prints or postcards, or simply spreading the word, you help sustain these dedicated bird-lovers and keep their vision — and their birds — in flight.

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Notes & Sources

• Website: Birders of Palestine — community and conservation network supporting Palestinian birdwatchers.
• Focus: Field documentation, environmental education, and migratory bird protection in Gaza and the West Bank.
• Resources: Checklist of the Birds of the Gaza Strip — Palestine.

EuroBirdPortal.org

Tracking the Bohemian Waxwing in Sweden

This interactive map from EuroBirdPortal.org shows the migration and distribution of Bohemian Waxwings (BOMGAR) over the last 52 weeks.

Counts: The map displays estimated numbers of waxwings across Sweden and Europe.

Week-by-week migration: Slide through the weeks to see how these striking birds move south from their northern breeding grounds.

Hotspots: Areas with larger numbers are highlighted in brighter colors, showing where waxwings are most concentrated.

Interactive: You can zoom in, pan across regions, and explore migration patterns in detail.

EuroBirdPortal.org aggregates data from multiple European bird monitoring networks, making it one of the most comprehensive tools for tracking migratory birds.

Watch the map to see how the Bohemian Waxwing travels through Sweden throughout the year, and explore how migration patterns can vary annually.

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Notes & Sources

• Data source: EuroBirdPortal.org — European Bird Census Council (EBCC) & partner networks.
• Species: Bohemian Waxwing (Bombycilla garrulus) — “BOMGAR” dataset code.
• Coverage: 52-week migration and distribution estimates across Europe.

Between Moon Tides