DON’T FORGET THE BIRDS

Memory without landmarks part1

A slender-billed nutcracker working a cone in the stone pines, Teg, 2025.

Over the last five years I have spent time photographing the slender-billed nutcrackers in Umeå, specifically around the Tegsvägen / Norra Obbolavägen roundabout. Over the last years mature trees had started to be felled as part of the road reconstruction.

A few weeks back, while eagerly anticipating the nutcrackers' return, I decided to revisit the area and was shocked by what I saw. What was left was bare earth and fencing. A few stone pines still stood nearby. Where the mature trees had been, the council had replanted young stone pine and limes.

I decided to contact the council, although I was aware that the birds were not endangered and that trees still remained. I thought it was important for them to understand that it was an area that was being used by the birds as a feeding ground. I felt they needed to be aware that this slow quiet erasure had been witnessed, regardless of whether the ecological impact was significant or not.

The slender-billed nutcracker arrived in Umeå in 1977, feeding preferably on the Siberian stone pine (cembratall), which had been planted around the railway stations of northern Sweden from the late nineteenth century onward, part of an effort to spread a kind of park culture along the line. So it's fair to say the bird followed the tree.

Over time the birds settled, with the first confirmed Umeå breeding in 1981. None of this is native. Not the trees, not the bird. A Siberian bird, living on a Siberian tree, planted by a Swedish railway company for reasons that had nothing to do with birds. The city built the conditions for a new species to move in, and it had taken roughly a hundred years to happen.

A cache is a small hidden store of food. The nutcracker buries seeds one at a time, in thousands of separate spots across its territory, in moss, under stumps, against the base of trees. It does this through the autumn, and then through winter and spring it digs them back up, one by one, to feed itself and its young. Nutcrackers cache 10,000 to 30,000 seeds a year, recovered from memory even under deep snow. It does this with landmarks. The bird reads the terrain (a stone, a stump, the particular angle of a particular tree) and indexes its caches against those fixed points. The map is the landscape. A pair holds a territory of roughly 11 to 15 hectares, kept for life. The nest is built in March and April, close to the trunk of a conifer, and the young hatch from early April, fed on the seeds the parents buried the previous autumn. So the bird does not depend on a single nest tree. It depends on the whole memorised landscape, the entire indexed map of buried food. And early April, when there are chicks to feed and the caches are being read back one by one, is the most sensitive moment in its year.

When you remove the trees, you are not only removing habitat. You are removing the index. The seeds are still in the ground, where the bird left them. But the landmarks they were measured against are gone. The food survives. The map does not.

You cannot replant a memory. A sapling is not a landmark.

I wrote to the council and asked three plain questions. Was an ecological survey carried out before the felling? Was the presence of nutcrackers or other protected species considered? Could the remaining trees be taken into account as the work goes on?

No ecological survey was carried out. They say so directly. The impact, they explained, was judged instead on the "limited scope" of the work. The felling concerned "individual trees" in an area where most of the tree stock, including several stone pines, is being kept, so the area's function as bird habitat, in their words, largely remains. No active nests or ongoing breeding were "noted." The felling was, they say, outside the birds' main breeding period. And there will be replanting: one stone pine, and two limes.

For what it's worth, I do not believe there were nests in the felled trees. In five years of watching the area I have not seen breeding behaviour there. But that is rather the point. A nutcracker's nest is not the whole of its habitat. The trees that came down were part of the bird's foraging and caching ground, which is precisely what the wider territory exists to provide.

Three things stay with me. The work was said to be outside the birds' main breeding period, but the nutcracker is one of the earliest breeders we have, building in March and hatching by early April, and the site closed on the ninth of that month. No active nests were noted, but no one had been looking for them, and a nutcracker nest sits high and tight against a conifer trunk, not where a passing glance would catch it. And the reassurance that most of the trees remain answers a question the law does not actually ask. What the law actually asks, and what the council seems to have answered instead, is the subject of Part 2.

Sources

This piece was written in collaboration with Claude, a large language model made by Anthropic. Claude helped me find Swedish-language sources, work through legal material, and shape the prose across many drafts. The argument and the editing are mine, but the writing is genuinely collaborative. The wider questions about how these tools are trained, and at whose expense, are real ones, and I will come back to them in a later post.

The 1977 establishment of the slender-billed nutcracker (Nucifraga caryocatactes macrorhynchos) in Umeå and Skellefteå, the spread along the Norrland coast, and the breeding population of around 600 pairs are from Nötkråka, Swedish Wikipedia, sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nötkråka. The first confirmed Umeå breeding in 1981 is cited in Skånes ornitologiska förening to Vår Fågelvärld 44:417, skof.se/fagelintresse/artfakta/notkraka. The same source describes the Norrland establishment as a direct consequence of cembratall planting in the region.

The planting of Siberian stone pine around Norrland railway stations in the late 1800s and early 1900s by SJ, "to spread park culture," is from Cembratall, Swedish Wikipedia, sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cembratall. Arboretum Norr describes the same bird-and-tree relationship, arboretum-norr.se.

The biology of the bird, the caching numbers, the territory of 11 to 15 hectares kept for life, nest-building in March and April close to a conifer trunk, and hatching from early April with chicks fed on cached seeds from the previous autumn, come from Nötkråka, Swedish Wikipedia, with supporting material from fagelriket.se/notkraka and sodra.com.

The Norra Obbolavägen project page, with the project description, is at Umeå kommun, umea.se. The reply from the council was received in writing in May 2026.

Photographs were taken by the author in Teg, Umeå, between 2022 and 2026.

Imagining Godzilla residency trip

The catamaran Godzilla. Photo: Tivon Rice / Imagining Godzilla.

I've been selected to join Imagining Godzilla for a four-day leg this summer. The residency is run by artists Merja Puustinen and Andy Best, and has been bringing artists and researchers onto the catamaran Godzilla since 2019, working the Baltic with a focus on its ecology — pollution, biodiversity loss, the pressures the sea is under. This summer they're in the northern Gulf of Bothnia.

I'll be onboard from 28 June, departing Obbola just outside Umeå, and arriving in Luleå on 1 July. The route takes in Stora Fjäderägg, Holmön, Ratan and Munkviken — the outer archipelago of the Bothnian coast.

The main stop I'm looking forward to is Stora Fjäderägg, a small island off Holmön reachable only by boat. It has a lighthouse, a bird-ringing observatory that has been running for decades,

For birds, late June on the outer archipelago should be good. Common eider (Somateria mollissima) nests on the skerries in numbers. Black guillemot (Cepphus grylle) is resident throughout. Arctic terns will be nesting on the outer islands. Red-throated divers breed on the island pools and feed at sea. Holmön has a breeding population of barnacle geese. White-tailed eagles are regular along the headlands.

I'll be filming and making field recordings throughout.

Inget annat än blommor

Välkommen till Rundvik sign with the line Granskog faller ljudlöst ned från himlen written at the bottom

Foto: Simon Gran Danielsson

Inget annat än blommor

Granskog faller ljudlöst ned från himlen. — Jan Wolf-Watz

Colin Egglestons Long Weekend (1978) följer ett australiskt par som behandlar ett avlägset strandlandskap med uttråkad, vardaglig förakt, skräpar ner, skjuter med vapen på saker och hugger ner träd utan anledning. Det som skiljer den från de flesta ekohorrorfilmer är att naturen inte uppenbarligen hämnas. Eggleston filmar från marknivå hela tiden, kameran tittar på från någonstans lågt och tålmodigt.

Brottet är inte så mycket förstörelse som nedlåtande attityd. Antagandet att landskapet är en kuliss, att ingenting där ute lägger märke till dem. Men det gör det. En död dugong – ett stort havsdäggdjur som mannen skjuter tidigare i filmen – spolas upp på stranden. Eggleston visar aldrig att den rör sig, men scen för scen kommer den närmare deras lägerplats. I slutet av filmen har den nått fram. Landskapet tvingar dem att konfrontera det de har gjort. Det tar bara sin tid.

För några veckor sedan genomförde Simon Gran Danielsson, en konstnär baserad här i Umeå, ett projekt på uppdrag av Statens konstråd, där han undersökte hur offentlig konst kan stärka mindre samhällens lokala identitet. En del av det arbetet förde honom till Rundvik, där han placerade en rad poesi på välkomstskylten vid byns utkant. En av de där vanliga vägskyltarna som listar lokala evenemang. Han kontaktade IFK Rundvik, idrottsföreningen som äger skylten, fick deras godkännande och satte fast raden på plats. Planen var att den skulle sitta kvar till den 11 juni, när projektperioden avslutas.

Raden är hämtad från en debutbok med titeln Södra Västerbottens kustland, utgiven 1997 av den Vännäsfödde poeten Jan Wolf-Watz. Den vann Katapultpriset, Sveriges mest prestigefyllda pris för en litterär debut, samma år. Raden lyder: Granskog faller ljudlöst ned från himlen. Wolf-Watz föddes 1945 och har tillbringat sitt liv i denna del av världen. Han känner till detta landskap. Raden är inte en protest. Det är en iakttagelse.

Innan verket ens hade hunnit installeras ordentligt stannade en man till i en tjänstebil från ett lokalt skogsbolag och krävde att få veta om det fanns tillstånd för det. Det fanns det. Mannen körde iväg.

Inom några dagar ringde IFK Rundviks ordförande och sa att folk i byn hade tagit illa vid sig och bett om att verket skulle tas bort. Simon åkte tillbaka och tog ner det i tysthet, eftersom han inte ville orsaka problem för en frivilligorganisation som är beroende av lokala sponsorer. Ordföranden erkände att det handlade om yttrandefrihet men var noga med att vara vag om vem exakt som hade klagat. Inget företag namngavs. Ingen enskild person registrerades. Pressen kom, dikten försvann, och alla inblandade var mycket artiga om hela saken.

Välkomstskylten återgick till att lista evenemang. Skylten hade kortvarigt blivit något annat – en yta med en röst, som talade om den plats den stod på snarare än att bara administrera den. När dikten togs bort förlorade den det. Den återgick till att vara en tavla. Liksom dugongen återfördes den till passivitet. Den handlingskraft den kortvarigt hade haft togs tillbaka utan att någon behövde säga det direkt.

Över hela Sverige sätter markägare rutinmässigt upp skyltar med texten privat område på mark där allemansrätten gäller. Juridiskt sett betyder de ingenting – att utestänga allmänheten från mark som omfattas av allemansrätten kräver kommunalt tillstånd enligt svensk lag, ett tillstånd som enligt Naturvårdsverket nästan aldrig söks. Nils Hallberg, juridisk rådgivare där, har offentligt sagt att sådana skyltar dyker upp över hela landet och olagligt urholkar allemansrätten. Kommunerna ansvarar för tillsynen. De flesta agerar aldrig. Skyltarna står kvar och folk vänder om. Detta är det landskap Simon arbetade i. En rad poesi placerad på en välkomstskylt, med fullt tillstånd från skyltens ägare och ett nationellt konstorgan i ryggen, togs bort inom några dagar på begäran av en part som aldrig gav sig till känna. En typ av skylt omformar det offentliga rummet utan någon juridisk befogenhet. En annan, med alla tillstånd på plats, försvinner ändå.

Vilket får en att fundera över vad det offentliga rummet egentligen tolererar. Ivor Cutler tillbringade årtionden med att dela ut små klistermärken till främlingar i London. "Bli vän med en bakterie." Kryptiska små ingripanden placerade på lyktstolpar och bussäten och delade ut till barn som läxa. Ingen ringde efter en tjänstebil. Ingen bad om tillstånd. Klistermärkena fanns i det offentliga rummet på samma sätt som ett leende gör, kortvarigt, utan tillstånd, med förståelsen att det offentliga rummet tillhör den som råkar passera genom det.

Simons gest var mer formell än Cutlers klistermärken. Den hade en beställare bakom sig, ett juridiskt avtal, ett fastställt slutdatum. Den uppfyllde alla kriterier som en artig offentlig intervention förväntas uppfylla. Och ändå togs den bort, inte av någon namngiven myndighet utan av det sociala trycket från ekonomiskt beroende.

Vilgot Sjömans I Am Curious (Yellow), inspelad i Sverige 1967, skickade ut en ung kvinna på gatorna med en mikrofon för att fråga vanliga människor och politiker om Sverige faktiskt hade ett klassystem, om landets progressiva självbild stämde överens med vad som hände i verkligheten. Det som gjorde folk obekväma var inte frågan i sig, utan att den ställdes offentligt, fäst vid något, omöjlig att ignorera. En rad poesi på en välkomstskylt fungerar på samma sätt. Den bara står där. Den anklagar ingen. Men den förväntar sig att bli läst.

Just nu pågår en debatt i Sverige om huruvida privata pengar bör spela en större roll i finansieringen av kulturen. Rundvik besvarade den viktigaste frågan i den debatten redan innan rapporten ens hade publicerats.

Det som slår mig med Simons projekt är inte att det censurerades. Det är att det överhuvudtaget fanns – att Statens konstråd finansierar den här typen av arbete, att en kommun ger en konstnär i uppdrag att ställa svåra frågor om hur offentlig konst fungerar i mindre samhällen, att en idrottsförening i en by med några hundra invånare sa ja. Infrastrukturen för den här diskussionen finns i Sverige på ett sätt som den inte gör på många andra ställen. En rad poesi på en skylt inbjuder dig att stanna till en stund, att läsa något som inte är en reklam, en vägbeskrivning eller en varning. Att den togs bort är en besvikelse. Att den överhuvudtaget fanns där är värt något.

Samtidigt som allt detta hände uppdaterades vägskyltarna in till Umeå i tysthet. Efter mer än tio år av ansökningar och avslag godkände Lantmäteriet äntligen det umesamiska namnet på staden – Ubmeje, som betyder den brusande floden – och i början av 2026 sattes skyltarna upp. Namnet är flera hundra år äldre än staden. Umesamiska klassas som akut hotat av UNESCO, med färre än tjugo flytande talare kvar, de flesta av dem äldre. Språket har gått tillbaka på grund av långvarig assimileringspolitik, förtryck i skolan och det offentliga livet, samt avbrott i överföringen från föräldrar till barn. Stavningen standardiserades inte ens förrän 2016. Det dröjde till 2026 innan namnet kom upp på en vägskylt. Michael Grahn, som har talat umesamiska sedan barndomen, sa när skyltarna sattes upp att det kändes som en bekräftelse på att de finns här också. Språk i det offentliga rummet som bevis på närvaro. Ett namn som återvänt till den plats det beskriver. Vissa saker tar längre tid än en vecka att ta bort. Vissa saker tar längre tid än ett sekel att sätta tillbaka.

Källor

Claude (Anthropic), claude.ai, juni 2026: Denna essä har utvecklats i samarbete med en AI. Ämnet, argumentationen, referenserna, den kritiska inriktningen och alla redaktionella beslut är författarens. Majoriteten av meningarna har utformats av Claude under den inriktningen. Frågan om var det lämnar upphovsrätten är en fråga som essän själv förmodligen är bättre lämpad att besvara än denna fotnot.

Jan Wolf-Watz: Södra Västerbottens kustland, Norstedts, 1997. Katapultpriset 1998.

Sara Meidell: "Händelsen i Rundvik är en liten konstskandal", Västerbottens-Kuriren, 27 maj 2026.

Vilgot Sjöman: I Am Curious (Yellow), 1967.

Colin Eggleston: Long Weekend, 1978.

Ivor Cutler: Befriend a Bacterium: Stickies by Ivor Cutler, 1992.

Talking Heads: (Nothing But) Flowers, Naked, 1988.

Nils Hallberg, Naturvårdsverket: "Skyltar kan utgöra en inskränkning av allmänhetens rätt", Sveriges Radio Ekot, 1 augusti 2016.

Nothing But Flowers

Granskog faller ljudlöst ned från himlen. — Jan Wolf-Watz

Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend (1978) follows an Australian couple who treat a remote beach landscape with bored, mundane contempt, littering, firing guns at things, chopping trees for no reason. What distinguishes it from most eco-horror is that nature doesn't obviously retaliate. Eggleston shoots from ground level throughout, the camera watching from somewhere low and patient.

The crime isn't destruction so much as condescension. The assumption that the landscape is a backdrop, that nothing out there is paying attention. But it is. A dead dugong — a large marine mammal the husband shoots earlier in the film — washes up on the beach. Eggleston never shows it moving but scene by scene it gets closer to their campsite. By the end of the film it has arrived. The landscape forces them to face what they have done. It just takes its time.

A few weeks ago Simon Gran Danielsson, an artist based here in Umeå, was carrying out a project commissioned by Statens konstråd, looking at how public art can strengthen the identity of smaller communities. Part of that work took him to Rundvik, where he placed a line of poetry on the welcome sign at the edge of the village. One of those standard roadside boards listing local events. He contacted IFK Rundvik, the sports club that owns the sign, got their approval, and fixed the line in place. The plan was for it to stay until June 11th, when the project period ends.

The line is from a debut collection called Södra Västerbottens kustland, published in 1997 by the Vännäs-born poet Jan Wolf-Watz. It won the Katapultpriset, Sweden's most prestigious prize for a literary debut, that same year. The line reads: Granskog faller ljudlöst ned från himlen. Spruce forest falls silently from the sky. Wolf-Watz was born in 1945 and has spent his life in this part of the world. He knows this landscape. The line isn't a protest. It's an observation.

Before the work was even properly installed, a man pulled up in a company car from a local forestry business and demanded to know whether there was permission for it. There was. The man drove off.

Within days, IFK Rundvik's chairman called to say people in the village had taken offence and asked for the work to be removed. Simon went back and took it down quietly, not wanting to cause trouble for a voluntary organisation dependent on local sponsorship. The chairman acknowledged it was a free speech issue but stayed carefully vague about who exactly had complained. No company named. No individual on record. The pressure arrived, the poem left, and everyone involved was very polite about the whole thing.

The welcome sign went back to listing events. The sign had briefly become something else — a surface with a voice, speaking about the place it stood in rather than just administering it. Once the poem was removed it lost that. It went back to being a board. Like the dugong, it was returned to passivity. Whatever agency it had briefly held was taken back without anyone having to say so directly.

Across Sweden, landowners routinely put up privat område signs on land where allemansrätten applies. Legally they mean nothing — excluding the public from land covered by the right to roam requires municipal permission under Swedish law, permission that according to Naturvårdsverket is almost never sought. Nils Hallberg, a legal adviser there, has said publicly that such signs appear across the whole country and illegally chip away at the right to roam. Municipalities are responsible for enforcement. Most never act. The signs stay up and people turn back. This is the landscape Simon was working in. A line of poetry placed on a welcome sign, with full permission from the sign's owner and a national arts agency behind it, was removed within days at the request of a party that never went on record. One kind of sign reshapes public space without any legal authority. Another, with every permission in place, disappears all the same.

Which makes you think about what public space actually tolerates. Ivor Cutler spent decades handing out small stickers to strangers in London. "Befriend a bacterium." Cryptic little interventions placed on lamp posts and bus seats and handed to children as homework. Nobody called a company car. Nobody asked for a permission slip. The stickers existed in public space the way a smile does, briefly, without authorisation, on the understanding that public space belongs to whoever happens to be passing through it.

Simon's gesture was more formal than Cutler's stickers. It had a commissioning body behind it, a legal agreement, a defined end date. It ticked every box a polite public intervention is supposed to tick. And it was still removed, not by any named authority but by the social weight of economic dependency.

Vilgot Sjöman's I Am Curious (Yellow), made in Sweden in 1967, sent a young woman out into the streets with a microphone to ask ordinary people and politicians whether Sweden actually had a class system, whether the country's progressive self-image matched what was happening on the ground. What made people uncomfortable wasn't the question exactly, it was that it was being asked in public, attached to something, impossible to ignore. A line of poetry on a welcome sign works the same way. It just sits there. It doesn't accuse anyone. But it expects to be read.

There's a debate happening in Sweden right now about whether private money should take a larger role in funding culture. Rundvik answered the most important question in that debate before the report was even published.

What strikes me about Simon's project isn't that it was censored. It's that it existed at all — that Statens konstråd funds this kind of work, that a municipality commissions an artist to ask difficult questions about how public art functions in smaller communities, that a sports club in a village of a few hundred people said yes. The infrastructure for this conversation exists in Sweden in a way it doesn't in many places. A line of poetry on a sign invites you to stop for a moment, to read something that isn't an advertisement or a direction or a warning. That it was removed is disappointing. That it was there at all is worth something.

While all of this was happening, the road signs coming into Umeå were quietly being updated. After more than ten years of applications and rejections, Lantmäteriet finally approved the Ume Sámi name for the city — Ubmeje, meaning the roaring river — and in early 2026 the signs went up. The name predates the city by centuries. Ume Sámi is classified as critically endangered by UNESCO, with fewer than twenty fluent speakers remaining, most of them elderly. The language declined through long-term assimilation policies, suppression in schools and public life, and the break in passing it from parents to children. The orthography wasn't even standardised until 2016. Getting the name onto a road sign took until 2026. Michael Grahn, who has spoken Ume Sámi since childhood, said when the signs went up that it felt like a confirmation that they exist here too. Language in public space as proof of presence. A name returned to the place it describes. Some things take longer than a week to remove. Some things take longer than a century to put back.

Sources

Claude (Anthropic), claude.ai, June 2026: This essay was developed in collaboration with an AI. The subject, argument, references, critical direction, and all editorial decisions were the author's. The majority of the sentences were drafted by Claude under that direction. The question of where that leaves authorship is one the essay itself is probably better placed to answer than this footnote.

Jan Wolf-Watz: Södra Västerbottens kustland, Norstedts, 1997. Katapultpriset 1998.

Sara Meidell: "Händelsen i Rundvik är en liten konstskandal", Västerbottens-Kuriren, 27 May 2026.

Vilgot Sjöman: I Am Curious (Yellow), 1967.

Colin Eggleston: Long Weekend, 1978.

Ivor Cutler: Befriend a Bacterium: Stickies by Ivor Cutler, 1992.

Talking Heads: (Nothing But) Flowers, Naked, 1988.

Nils Hallberg, Naturvårdsverket: "Skyltar kan vara inskränkning av allemansrätten", Sveriges Radio Ekot, 1 August 2016.

I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird

Treecreeper (trädkrypare)

Boids

Craig Reynolds developed the Boids program in 1986 and published his seminal paper "Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model" in 1987 at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference.

Slavonian Grebe (svarthakedopping) Holmsund Golf Course, Ubmeje.

George Carlin on Golf

I've got just the place for low-cost housing. I have solved this problem. I know where we can build housing for the homeless: golf courses! It's perfect! Just what we need. Plenty of good land, in nice neighborhoods, land that is currently being wasted on a meaningless, mindless activity engaged in primarily by white, well-to-do male businessmen who use the game to get together to make deals to carve this country up a little finer amongst themselves.

I am getting tired, really getting tired, of these golfing cocksuckers in their green pants, and their yellow pants, and their orange pants, and their precious little hats and their cute little golf carts! It is time to reclaim the golf courses from the wealthy and turn them over to the homeless!

Golfing is an arrogant, elitist game which takes up entirely too much room in this country. Too much room in this country! It is an arrogant game on its very design alone, just the design of the game speaks of arrogance. Think of how big a golf course is — the ball is that fucking big! What do these pin-headed pricks need with all that land?!

There are over seventeen thousand golf courses in America, they average over one hundred and fifty acres a piece — that's three million plus acres, four thousand, eight hundred and twenty square miles.