You’re walking through town. You’re cycling along a canal. You’re glancing at the trees, and for a moment you see a shiver of something, a shadow. Deep black, bone white feathers. A kind of blue. A whisper of grey; maybe a gnarled red claw. What if we stopped, not just to look at what was there, but to see it?

The threads of unofficial countryside that bind our cities and collar our satellite towns, the rooves and balconies of our tower blocks, the edgelands of our once industrialised waterways, are home to an abundance of life. Passerines and corvids, wading birds and waterfowl. Often glimpsed, rarely in focus, these birds are the colour in the cracks. Profoundly beautiful in their own right, they don’t need to be understood to be appreciated, but it helps.

In celebration of the birds that quietly brighten our peripheral vision and urban spaces, Uskees presents the Habitat Series, City Birds Edition, a capsule of organic cotton T-shirts, handprinted in Manchester. A portion of each sale will be donated to our partners the Lancashire Wildlife Trust, a conservation body that manages and protects nature reserves in the North West, UK.