User Reviews

The Messenger by Su Rynard is a film that delivers on its overarching promise of raising awareness of the importance of birds as environmental indicators. My one minor critique is that the film could be even more aggressive in its conservation stance in one or two critical moments. The film exceled in demonstrating the pressures facing modern day birds in urban and rural settings, both in the US and abroad. The Messenger struck down the idea that conservation and city life don't intersect, by detailing challenges facing bird populations in urban environments. In one of the movie's opening scenes, a 9/11 memorial shone two spotlights into the New York sky, which over the course of the evening, attracted many confused and light-addled birds. An avian biologist overseeing the situation made the tough call to cut the memorial short to rescue the birds. In a later scene, scientific investigation of bird strikes against windows in Toronto informed policy mandating window treatments, which ultimately reduced bird collisions by 80%. In these examples, The Messenger highlighted instances of avian mortality in cities that might go overlooked and provided actionable ways for city-dwellers to help in the fight (like reducing light use at night, treating your windows, participating in citizen science initiatives, etc.). The film also detailed the plight of birds in international, agrarian contexts. The Messenger highlighted habitat destruction as a major issue impacting bird and other faunal communities across the globe, exemplified in Costa Rica, which has lost 80% of forests since 1945. The film argued that planting more trees in coffee plantations in Costa Rica would recruit more insectivorous bird species to consume crop pests and improve yields. Habitat destruction is indeed one of the most pressing challenges facing birds today, and the film did a strong job of challenging the notion that exploiting natural resources is required to fuel the economies of developing nations. In summary, the film paints a broad picture of avian communities under duress on a global scale, which encourages concern and participation from people of all nationalities and walks of life. Early on, the film effectively emphasized of the natural beauty of birds, although this caused them to stray off message on rare occasions. In one of the first shots of the movie, a brightly plumaged bird took off in slow motion against a dark backdrop. This stunning shot instilled awe of the innate, spectacular beauty that birds possess in me. Birds are everywhere in our daily lives- from the crows on our roofs to the pigeons on the sidewalk- and the film's artistic shots encouraged viewers to look at birds differently, not as a mundanity, but as a marvel of movement and natural beauty. In my opinion, the film leaned a little too heavily into emphasizing the beauty of birds, which on rare occasions caused them to stray off message. In the film's most bizarre scene, a German DJ explained how the beauty of bird songs inspires his genre of club music. While a quirky human-interest story, it didn't really deepen my appreciation for birds at all, and served as an odd tangent to an otherwise tightly crafted story. Thankfully, the movie didn't dwell on the aesthetics of birds for too long. The film's rationale behind protecting birds intensified over its run time, eschewing beauty for the vital ecosystem services that birds fulfill. One of the movie's strongest scenes detailed a historical precedent for a world without birds. In China in 1957, Mao ordered all tree sparrows killed because he believed they ate grain from the country's grain fields. Chinese citizens participated in huge numbers; people chased birds away from fields until the birds died of exhaustion. The bird nearly went extinct, and without the tree sparrows, insects devastated China's crops which resulted in a famine that killed more than 30 million people. This harrowing historical example was a classic illustration of the law of unintended consequences and demonstrating an overlooked ecosystem service that birds provide humans. I finished that scene feeling shocked. How could the Chinese government and its citizens be so myopic? Surely with the benefit of hindsight and 70 plus years of research, this couldn't happen in today's day in age! Then The Messenger delivers a crushing blow to this notion by incisively pointing out that we haven't learned from our past mistakes. The film showed the North American sugar beet farmers, wanting to do the conscionable thing, consulting pamphlets to choose which 'healthy' pesticides to use on their crops. However, many of the chemicals espoused by these pamphlets were scientifically proven to be more harmful than previously thought. A particular class of widely used crop chemicals, neonicotinoids, were reported by scientists to be running off into water and killing insects that were vital food sources to birds. A decline in insectivorous birds was reported. This story underscored the fundamentally poor standards to which the agrichemical industry are held to: chemicals are assumed to be harmless into proved harmful, which can have major effects on human health and the health of neighboring ecosystems. This story really hit home for me; it was easy to condemn the PRC's myopic approach to bird eradication in the 50's. I realized after watching this scene that we're not much better today. This scene made me realize that rarely are conservation problems 'solved', but rather they mutate and persist in ways that if we aren't vigilant, we can easily overlook. The film also touched on how birds are sentinels for the advancing specter of climate change. According to researchers interviewed in the film, purple martins are naïve to how warm or cold the spring is during migration, so climate change was confusing their timing of arrival in their northern range. This research underscored the fact that climate change is not only real, but that it is exacting deleterious species-specific effects on birds that are important to ecosystem health. For all The Messenger's strengths, my only critique is that I wanted them to take a stronger pro-conservation stance in a few critical scenes. For example, in the film's closing scene, one of the documentary's commentators asks: "could we live without birds? We just don't know." If these historical examples (especially the famine caused by sparrow eradication in China) have taught us anything, it is that we cannot live without birds. I understand that this commentator wanted to avoid hyperbole, but I felt like his quote bordered on understatement, and implicitly lent credence to scientific detractors like the French songbird trapper (who is oddly given a platform to justify his actions in the movie), who say that 'more research is required until people should change their actions'. So much research and historical precedent already exists, and a future with compromised bird communities is a dark one indeed. In short, The Messenger is an excellent film that effectively details the anthropogenic effects on birds and demonstrates their importance of future environmental change. Aside from a few spare lapses in focus, the film tells a cohesive, urgent story of the plight of avian fauna and their importance as sentinels for preeminent environmental challenges (like climate change) that we face in the 21st century.