Thinking through the relational geographies of humans and starlings in Rome

Keywords: more-than-human, anthropocene, Rome, starlings, birds
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Reflecting on fieldwork undertaken in the Italian city of Rome during 2019 and 2022 this paper considers the entangled lives of hundreds of thousands of winter roosting starlings and the city's human inhabitants. More specifically, I use these reflections to propose ways of thinking about the relational geographies that intersect, overlap and collide in various ways through the materials, practices and routines that constitute their urban living together.
In recent years the lives of starlings have been inscribed into the spatial politics of Rome as the city’s human residents have protested over increasing degradation centred around failed waste management and street cleaning systems and the sights and smells associated with this, including the effects of hundreds of thousands of starlings roosting in the city. In a bid to move starlings on, the city authorities have employed the use of megaphones to issue starling distress calls, trained Harris Hawks to deter them and utilised a series of tree pruning strategies to destabilise the starlings’ favoured roosting spots. Yet the starlings continue to respond by negotiating their own geographies of the city, prompting a series of unfolding spatial negotiations as different versions of the city play out.
All of this informs a more-than-human Rome constituted of a series of temporal and spatial relations where humans and starlings engage with varying degrees of intensity, their lives rubbing up against each other and, in so doing, pointing to ways of thinking more broadly through the geographies of the more-than-human city of the anthropocene.