Joe Harkness birds, birdwatching, books, mental health, Nature, outdoors, wellbeing, wellness, wildlife, writing

Responding to requests

I’ve been getting a fair amount of requests through the blog and I thought it would be a good time to explain what I’m able to do and what my limitations are. Sometimes people assume that this is my actual job, but it’s very much a labour of love and that makes my availability scant at best, as I’ve mentioned on earlier blogs.

I love writing. I’ve just finished an article and a book review for Resurgence magazine and I’ve almost completed an extended feature for birdwatching magazine too. I’m always happy to consider commissions for articles and once the book is out, I’d love to extend some of the chapters into some wider writing too. I can be contacted here with any enquiries.

Some of the things I’ve written can be viewed on this page of the blog site.

I am able to give talks on either the general message of Bird Therapy or about the book itself. I’m an experienced teacher and enjoy sharing my story and ideas with others. I’m keen on expanding my talks into schools next year but for now, more information can be found here

Any requests regarding publicity around the book, are forwarded to Unbound so you can always contact them directly and ask for Amy Winchester otherwise, contact through the blog still. There are also a lot of requests and messages about pre-ordering the book, so here’s a few places it’s available to order from:

I’ve got some great talks lined up this year and I’m looking forward to sharing them soon.

Joe Harkness birds, birdwatching, books, education, mental health, Nature, outdoors, teaching, teaching resources, wellbeing, wellness, wildlife, writing

Bird Therapy teaching pack – please help

A while ago, I wrote a blog called Feeling resourceful? which was about my aim to produce a teaching resource to work alongside the book. I’ve been working with young people who’ve had negative school experiences (permanent exclusion, unmet needs, bullying etc) for many years, and with that kind of target group in mind, I had grand visions of producing an all-singing, all-dancing interactive resource.

But that was definitely no more than just a vision. I researched the possibility of getting it accredited, but the cost was astronomical for me to cover and would mean I’d certainly have to charge for any resource. I want it to be free and inclusive, so that idea was ruined. It’s a shame, as all the preparatory work and research implied that a short course would be the most rewarding option for all.

Anyway. Life is always determined to put obstacles in your path and spanners in the works – and the notion of making a teaching resource was pushed behind by the demands of work and fatherhood. The last few evenings though, after catching up on my mountain of outstanding work, I started to weave together some ideas into, not quite a teaching resource, but a guidance pack that uses the book as it’s reference point.

The book’s illustrator Jo Brown is being wonderfully helpful, in making her book illustrations transparent so that I can use them with the chapter quotes as pausing points in a slideshow. Her art completes the book and simply has to be a part of anything connected to it.

I’m also lucky that I’ve taught a considerable amount of lessons and units on mental health and wellbeing and in my true obsessional style, I’ve made a lot of resources to accompany these. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I’m going to include some of these with the guidance pack and make a few more for some of the other tasks. It’s looking like it will feature a solid mix of wellbeing and nature-related tasks, much like the structure of the book. Some examples here:

Back when I posted about this before, I asked people to help, by making some little videos to be a part of the slideshow – and I’d still love for that to happen please. I’m using one of the chapters to talk about special places and this would be the theme of any video. Basically, this is what I’m looking for:

  • Mobile phone selfie videos are perfect! Much more personal.
  • Introduce yourself, what you do for work maybe and if you suffer with your mental health.
  • Film in your special place and introduce where that is and why it’s special to you.

I only ask that your special place is an outdoor one and that’s literally it. 30 seconds I reckon? They can just be emailed over to me at birdtherapy@hotmail.co.uk as the file size should be pretty small.

Here’s my special place.

  • Joe Harkness birds, birdwatching, books, mental health, Nature, outdoors, wellbeing, wellness, wildlife, writing

    The proof is in the final proof

    Yesterday morning was shepherded in by streams of gulls. Regular pulses of birds in linear formations, making their dawn flights to daytime feeding grounds. On the drive to work, two Skylarks bounced up from a field boundary and over the car. I couldn’t hear their streams of bubbly notes, but I recognised their pot-bellies and triangular wings. On other morning commutes, I’ve observed many birds – Fieldfares roving, Linnets arcing, Cormorants darting and Pink-feet returning – all above the same familiar road. Not yesterday though, yesterday was a normal day.

    Until early afternoon, when I received an email from the editor of Bird Therapy with the FINAL proof attached for my perusal and approval. A flood of emotions poured over me, from petrified excitement to gnawing doubt. I knew that all the final edits were done, so I had a flick (well – a scroll) through it and checked the illustrations were all ok; and yes, it really was finished!

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    Four years of writing; of ink and emotions bleeding into notepad after notepad. The research and reading, so enlightening but time-devouring. The conversations and discussions, the friends, both lost and found. The frustration, the lows, the lack of confidence that I could get the message across in the right way. Not to mention the crowdfund, that was a different beast altogether!

    I’d laid my heart on the page in the book, but I laid it on the line with the crowdfund. I’d been reluctant to even consider it to begin with, and throughout the funding phase, the pressure was immense. Mostly self-imposed, this pressure are away at me constantly and became an obsession. Checking, posting, deleting, rewording, pleading – it was horrible. I was very lucky, that lots of people (hundreds in-fact) believed in the book and in me. The process continued, behind the scenes as edit upon edit ensued, but the ballooning pressure deflated as the target was met.

    Yesterday, seeing that final proof, was the culmination of all of that work, emotion and pressure – the release was incredible.

    Joe Harkness Nature

    Reflecting upon retweets – more musings on the pitfalls of social media

    I’ve not been using Twitter since shortly after the Winterwatch feature aired and wrote about why, in this blog A break from a skewed world. The response to the actual video was overwhelming and so was the emotional crash afterwards, I can’t function properly in a world of complete ups-and-downs like that. Not many people can.

    Since I stopped posting on Twitter, I’ve been reading a lot of studies into the effects of social media on our wellbeing. Not only is it relevant to my job, but it’s also relevant to myself, and my ongoing battle with my own social media demons. You see, we only post what we want people to see – good or bad – and I feel strongly that we only do this in the interests of self-affirmation.

    This blog post came from a bit of an experiment. I realised, when I wrote a blog on birdsong in springtime, that it automatically posted to my Twitter. I also realised that this would indicate whether anyone actually ‘cares’ about what I write. You see, any post of mine that’s been ‘popular’ has either been off the back of something media-related or from ‘known’ people sharing it. Obviously that’s how you build something, of course it is, but if you can’t maintain that level of engagement and content, it’s exhausting and anxiety-inducing, not-to-mention near enough impossible.

    I know that I can post this on my blog and not that many people will read it. That becomes cathartic in itself. A bit like a diary or journal, I can share these perspectives and air them, on a platform that is more for me, than to garner whatever it is I’m trying to get from people on Twitter. The beautiful thing is that I can write this and it posts once, I can’t login to my Twitter at the moment and so I can’t fall into the trap of retweeting and deleting in a search for reassurance and validation. I’ve been watching from afar and it’s amazing how many other people fall into this trap.

    We ‘like’ the pictures that we see, not always the words or perhaps any deeper content, such as a blog. We tend to see something attractive to us and think we like it, so click to affirm that we do. We may then share it ourselves, so other people can see it, because we want people to know that we like it. In a weird way, likes and shares and whatever they are on other platforms, are almost like a currency.

    I read somewhere that when we post something, we check it, relentlessly, for 48 hours after. I noticed that at the peak of my obsessive usage, I wanted to post every other day, to keep ‘interest’ up – so perhaps there’s something legitimate in that timeframe. Through my distant observations, I’ve seen others doing this too.

    Even when we post something that isn’t directly about us, we’re still doing it for a reaction and for attention. I have no doubts that we do and see things and coincidentally, we share it, but most content is engineered to impress – to show something off. How many times have you looked at an object or view and thought ‘that would be great on my instagram’? That’s when posting becomes part of our lives – a routine of sorts. A bit like the person filming a concert on their phone.

    It’s fascinating. It’s dangerous and it’s also a really engrained part of our society. I’m reminded of something that the wonderful author Melissa Harrison tweeted to me, during another time of ‘twitter turmoil’

    Never a truer word spoken.

    Joe Harkness birds, birdwatching, books, mental health, Nature, outdoors, wellbeing, wellness, wildlife, writing

    Winterwatch video

    If you couldn’t or didn’t watch it, or perhaps didn’t know we’d done it, I recorded a feature on Bird Therapy with Chris Packham which was aired in January on Winterwatch.

    The feature focuses on mine and Chris’s experience of suicidal thoughts, how I discovered birdwatching, how it can help promote wellbeing and engaging with it. I’m really proud of the overall feature and the messages it conveys. The response was overwhelmingly positive.

    I uploaded the video to YouTube a while back and you can watch it here

    Joe Harkness birds, birdwatching, books, mental health, Nature, outdoors, wellbeing, wellness, wildlife, writing

    The final cover for Bird Therapy

    I’m delighted that today has seen the finalisation of the whole cover of Bird Therapy. It’s a PPC cover, so will be lovely and tactile and at some point, I’ll share the endpapers too – which are equally as beautiful. Some of the comments from my most respected and favourite authors who have read it, have been overwhelming – I’ve shared some of these here too.

    The book is available to preorder at Unbound and also on Amazon

    Joe Harkness birds, birdwatching, mental health, Nature, outdoors, wellbeing, wellness, wildlife

    A week away, some well-stocked feeders and a stone-age pit

    This week, we’ve been at Center Parcs in Elveden for a little half-term break. I’ve been several times and rate it highly, both for children and for disabled access, as I supported someone with a learning disability to visit there twice, in a previous job. I’d always known that it’s good for resident wildlife: deer, squirrels, woodland birds and butterflies – but I’d never fully connected with the birdlife there until this visit.

    Every morning, I spent 30-40 minutes in the observation hide. This slightly raised wooden oblong sits on the precipice of a large dip in the ground, which like some other Breckland sites, is the remnant of some stone-age workings. The dip is surrounded by trees, young and old, and a small pond sits at its nadir, where all of the birds seemed to enjoy a wash and a drink. The array of feeders there is brilliant and one morning I watched them being filled – a military operation of raising, lowering, scooping and pouring, which took twenty minutes to complete.

    When the maintenance team left the birds began to return, tentatively. Blue and Great Tits arrived first in a flicker of blue or blacky-green, offset against bright yellow, a glint and then gone. The skittish flock of Chaffinches came out of hiding and returned to their methodical ground-feeding routines. A peach-blush Brambling stood out amongst them, warm, bold and black-barred.

    A whistling buzz heralded the return of a pair of Siskin to the niger feeders directly in front, offering an eye-level observation of their lemon-yellow zebra-stripes. Their meal was short-lived as a dark scythe cut through the hollow, past their feeders in a rush, down to the next set and then rapidly altering course as it failed to catch its own breakfast. A Sparrowhawk, taking a chance on an easy feed. Dispersing every bird in the vicinity in a cacophony of rapid and urgent warning calls.

    An obvious call, one known well, echoed out over the open space – “pit-choo” – a Marsh Tit. A sound that became familiar around the woodland park, as did the whip-like contact calls of the pair of Nuthatches frequenting the car-park Oaks.

    The week ended with 40 species of bird being seen around the park – mainly in the hide and on the lakes. It was in the hide though, that I was able to completely switch off from everything for a few moments. It was just me and the birds; and it meant that I could spend some time really focusing on, and enjoying, some of the more common bird species. I found myself stripping back to the basics of birdwatching again and it was wonderful. Just like this male Blackbird, whose feathers caught the sun in a dazzling display of depth and light. Magic.