‘The birds of the Bay’#: Avian landscapes of Morecambe Bay

In Morecambe Bay, the landscape is created in mutuality with non-human life, most notably experienced through temporal and seasonal changes in its avian residents. However, Morecambe Bay’s relationship with seabirds is increasingly under threat from the climate crisis. In this paper, I argue that the Bay’s avian inhabitants are critical to understanding how this ever-changing landscape is shaped by – and in turn shapes – more-than-human life. Drawing on ethnography and interviews, the paper seeks to disrupt or help to open up landscape research beyond the human. The paper is structured through three visions of landscape: (1) ecological landscapes, as the Bay goes through a period of transformation; (2) more-than-human landscapes; and (3) landscapes in crisis in a climate-changed world. I end by asking what it might mean to include non-humans not just as co-producers of landscape, but of landscape research.