by Talia
I spotted my first Great Tailed Grackle trapped in an airport. While the bird could still fly and find food to survive, the grackle called out restlessly by the big glass windows. People passed by with suitcases and coffees, barely noticing it, and I watched it, caught between wonder and sadness.
It was in the last semester of my undergraduate degree, searching for freedom from an unbearable amount of stress, when I discovered birding. When I tell this to people, I am often met with comments like “Being in my garden always helps me” or how “healing” nature is. In Scotland, access to nature is defined by our collective “right to roam” and a report in 2021 where 81% of people supported this right, cites positive mental health as one of the key reasons for that support (Scottish Government, 2021: 8).
If access to nature is as healing as we so often claim, then what does it mean that we systematically withhold the “right to roam” from certain groups of people?
Some people have found (or continued) birding while imprisoned. There are accounts of people participating in the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch through their prison window, memorising birdsong during time in prison yards, or even watching a pair of barn swallows build a nest and lay eggs outside a window in the dayroom (Osmond, 2011; Fernandez, 2023; Blackwell, 2023).
While the existence of birding in prisons is sometimes framed as evidence that nature can be “brought inside,” or that small interventions can render incarceration humane (Moran, 2021; Moran, 2025), this risks missing the point. The issue is not just the lack of nature within prisons, it is the structure of imprisonment itself, which denies autonomy, restricts movement, and interrupts relationships, including our relationship to the environment. If we take seriously the idea that connection to nature supports mental health and wellbeing, then denying that connection or our “right to roam” cannot be neutral. It becomes part of the harm.
The grackle did not stop being a bird because it was inside the airport. It still moved, still called out, still searched for a way beyond the glass, however everything about that space constrained what the bird’s life could be.
If we accept that nature is healing, that access to it is a right, then we are left with a difficult question: Can we really claim that prisons are spaces of rehabilitation when they are built on the premise of confinement?
Bibliography:
Blackwell, Christopher. “Prison Can Be a Hostile Place. Then the Birds Came.” The Appeal, 9 Aug. 2023, theappeal.org/prison-can-be-a-hostile-place-then-the-birds-came/.
Fernandez, Collin. “Prisoners Asked to Be Birdwatchers from Their Cells by Counting Birds in RSPB Wildlife Survey.” Daily Mail, Associated Newspapers Ltd., 28 January 2023, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11686009/Prisoners-asked-birdwatchers-cells-counting-bir ds-RSPB-wildlife-survey.html.
Moran, Dominique, and Emma Widdop. “Rethinking Prison Landscapes: Why Green Space Must Be Central to Penal Reform.” Penal Reform International, 2 Dec. 2025, penalreform.org/blog/rethinking-prison-landscapes/.
Moran, Dominique, et al. “Does Nature Contact in Prison Improve Wellbeing? Mapping Land Cover to Identify the Effect of Greenspace on Self–Harm and Violence in Prisons in England and Wales.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, vol. 111, no. 6, 2021, pp. 1779–1795, https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1850232
Osmond, Joe. Birdsong for Prisoners. 2011. DOI: 10.14236/ewic/EVA2011.48
“7. Statutory Public Access Rights.” Attitudes to Land Reform: Research, Environment and Forestry Directorate, Scottish Government, 5 March 2021, www.gov.scot/publications/attitudes-land-reform/pages/8/