Every creature perceives the world differently and, in that way, embodies its own form of intelligence. One of humanity's great and historic failures is to have seen the world so consistently from its own point of view alone. We discuss something called ‘the environment’ as if the whole of nature were merely our own surroundings. It is as deep a mistake as the Ptolemaic idea that the earth was the centre of the universe. But different forms of life-expertise cannot be measured by our own and we need the equivalent of the Copernican revolution in world-attitudes: displace us from the centre, banish the ‘environment’ as word and idea and recalibrate our position in the web of life.

How incompetent humans must seem in the eyes of other creatures. We would not know how to plunge-dive for herring or locate the Mid-Atlantic Ridge by smell. We could not hang in the updraughts by a cliff or find our way alone all winter across the Atlantic. We would not know how to exist in a form that is not our own. Other animals understand the world in ways that are different from ours, and of all animals, seabirds have always seemed to me like the greatest of advocates for this validity of otherness, effortless demonstrators that the human way of life has no monopoly on vision or brilliance.

Perhaps ironically – because both these developments depend on recent human technology – superb close-up images like those on these pages, freely shared on the marvellous resource of Wikimedia Commons by photographer J.J. Harrison, of seabirds of the deep oceans at home, far offshore in their own vast environment, together with recent scientific data obtained from satellite tracking studies, may help us flightless creatures to begin the process of recalibration.

A deeper irony is that a limited view of how things are may be integral to all living things, not only to humans. I have watched a golden eagle for an evening displaying to his mate above a kittiwake colony. The kittiwakes were revolving and eddying around their cliffs while the eagle was making a series of astonishing folded tuck dives above them, each a plunge through air as driven as a stallion displaying to his mates, an arrowhead hunched into the wind, possessing his cube of air, two miles wide in each direction, a vast box of wind. The kittiwakes paid no attention.