Domesticating nature? Surveillance and conservation of migratory shorebirds in the "Atlantic Flyway".

Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences xxx (2013) xxx–xxx

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Domesticating nature?: Surveillance and conservation of migratory shorebirds in the ‘‘Atlantic Flyway’’ Kristoffer Whitney Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 6325 W.H. Sewell Social Science Building, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA

a r t i c l e

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Article history: Received 29 August 2013 Received in revised form 25 October 2013 Available online xxxx Keywords: Wildlife biology Conservation Domestication Umwelt Ontology Foucault

a b s t r a c t Using a recent environmental controversy on the U.S. east coast over the conservation of red knots (Calidris canutus rufa) as a lens, I present a history of North American efforts to understand and conserve migratory shorebirds. Focusing on a few signal pieces of American legislation and their associated bureaucracies, I show the ways in which migratory wildlife have been thoroughly enrolled in efforts to quantify and protect their populations. Interactions between wildlife biologists and endangered species have been described by some scholars as ‘‘domestication’’—a level of surveillance and intervention into nonhuman nature that constitutes a form of dependence. I pause to reflect on this historical trajectory, pointing out the breaks and continuities with older forms of natural history. Using the oft-mobilized Foucauldian metaphor of the panopticon as a foil, I question the utility and ethics of too-easily declaring ‘‘domesticated’’ wildlife an act of ‘‘biopower.’’ Instead, I argue that Jacob von Uexküll’s ‘‘umwelt’’ from early ecology and ethology, and more contemporary Science and Technology Studies (STS) analyses emphasizing multiple ontologies, offer more illuminating accounts of endangered species science. Neither science, conservation, nor history are well-served by the conflation of wildlife ‘‘surveillance’’ with the language of Foucauldian discipline. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

1. Introduction The Delaware Bay is a broad, shallow tidal estuary sandwiched between the states of New Jersey and Delaware in the northeastern United States. Fringed by green salt marshes and the occasional narrow, sandy beach, the Bay stands out in this densely-populated region for its relatively undeveloped waterfront. Standing in the middle of a large patch of salt marsh, one could almost imagine being on the American great plains surrounded by flat expanses of green grass. The illusion would quickly be shattered, however, by any number of distant landmarks (not to mention the sulfurous/salty odor of decaying salt marsh vegetation). A stray cell tower, or the cooling tower of the Salem nuclear power plant, for example, or perhaps the passage of a container ship headed upriver to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania are reminders that these are the fringes of a crowded, industrialized landscape. A closer look at abandoned salt-hay farm dikes and long-unused railroad tracks

around the edges of the marsh itself—as well as hunting blinds scattered throughout—make it clear that humans have been drawing upon the resources of the Delaware for decades, if not centuries. The Bay, in fact, has been a major center for a number of industries—most prominently fisheries—for the duration of European occupation. Sturgeon, oysters, shad, and blue crab fisheries, to name a few, have all undergone the boom and bust of many ‘‘natural resources’’ over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Bay, therefore, is quintessentially crowded nature—a palimpsest of shifting human and nonhuman populations, geo-political boundaries, regulatory regimes, and migratory pathways. Natural resource markets and migratory wildlife have served to connect this humble estuary to places and populations around the globe, frequently causing conflict over the ‘‘best’’ use of this environmental commons. Recent fisheries in the Delaware Bay, for eel and conch (technically, whelk), have embroiled the entire U.S. east coast in a fisheries

E-mail address: [email protected] 1369-8486/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2013.10.008

Please cite this article in press as: Whitney, K. Domesticating nature?: Surveillance and conservation of migratory shorebirds in the ‘‘Atlantic Flyway’’. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2013.10.008

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K. Whitney / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences xxx (2013) xxx–xxx

management dilemma involving two ecologically-related migratory visitors to the Bay: the horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) and a small shorebird called the red knot (Calidris canutus rufa). The collapse of the Caribbean conch fishery in the 1980s along with burgeoning global markets for these animals suddenly made it profitable for fishers in the northeast and mid-Atlantic U.S. to catch the closely related whelk, an enterprise pursued by harvesting horseshoe crabs and using them as bait. In the 1990s, biologists working for the states of New Jersey and Delaware began to suspect that the multi-million animal horseshoe crab harvest might be affecting shorebirds’ ability to refuel during their migration from South America along the ‘‘Atlantic flyway’’ to their breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic, as many of these birds utilize the eggs of the horseshoe crab as food during their precisely-timed arrival in the Bay each spring. The red knot, one shorebird among several that feed on crab eggs along Delaware Bay beaches, quickly became the symbol of this concern, and the primary locus of the political struggle to limit crab harvest for the sake of the birds. This particular shorebird had been studied intensely in the Bay since the late 1970s, and it was feared that the relatively small population of sub-species rufa red knot, a large proportion of which passed through the Delaware on its northward migration, would suffer a catastrophic decline if there were not enough horseshoe crab eggs available on the beaches. These fears seemed justified in the early 2000s, when the rufa red knot population numbers crashed. Like so many threatened and endangered species over the past century, these animals have found themselves enrolled in ever more intense and complex systems of population monitoring and political wrangling. Environmental conservation controversies, like the one swirling around horseshoe crabs and shorebirds, each have their own long and complexly intertwined social and political histories. Such histories, and the contemporary socio-political situations they bequeath to us, are also inextricable from the scientific expertise utilized to understand and attempt to adjudicate them. In what follows, I present a history of North American efforts to understand and conserve migratory shorebirds like the red knot over the course of the twentieth century and into the present. Focusing on a few signal pieces of American legislation and the scientific bureaucracies that these laws have created and empowered, I show the ways in which shorebirds—and by extension other forms of migratory wildlife—have been thoroughly enrolled in efforts to quantify and conserve their populations. As a result of particularly intense study in the wake of the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973, interactions between red knots and wildlife biologists have come to resemble what some scholars have thought of as ‘‘domestication’’ via conservation—a level of surveillance and intervention into nonhuman nature that has constituted a form of dependence (Alagona, 2004a, 2004b; Barrow, 2009). After briefly describing the domestication of endangered nature, however, I pause to reflect on this historical trajectory, pointing out the breaks and continuities with older forms of natural history. I then discuss the extent to which historians and Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars have described domesticated nature in Foucauldian terms. Using the oft-mobilized metaphor of the panopticon as a foil (Foucault, 1978, pp. 195–228), I question the utility and ethics of too-easily declaring modern wildlife biology an act of ‘‘biopower.’’ Instead, I argue that Jacob von Uexküll’s ‘‘umwelt’’ from early ecology and ethology, and more contemporary STS analyses emphasizing multiple ontologies, offer more illuminating accounts of endangered species science. In particular, using the red knot case as a guide, I find that attention to ‘‘ontological politics’’ in conservation science makes clear the epistemological and normative implications of both conservation strategies and conservation histories (Mol, 1999, pp. 74–89). In short, neither science, conservation, nor history are well-served by the conflation of wildlife

‘‘surveillance’’ with the language of domestication and Foucauldian discipline.

2. Saving shorebirds through science: surveillance and conservation under the biological survey By the end of the 19th century, shorebirds like the red knot were valued similarly to other ‘‘game’’ birds—as sources of sustenance, income, and sport by hunters, and as objects of scientific scrutiny by naturalists in the slowly professionalizing discipline of ornithology. These extractive forms of value had a cost, however. Turn of the century accounts by hunters and naturalists began to evince increasing concern that shorebirds, like other forms of migratory wildlife in the Americas, were in danger and decline. As early as 1869, Scottish emigre and naturalist William Turnbull listed the red knot and other shorebirds as ‘‘common,’’ but concluded with a warning about the dangers of market gunning in the U.S. northeast: ‘‘the constant shooting of ‘Bay Snipe’ and shore birds generally, by market gunners, always on the watch for their arrival, has seriously reduced the flocks of many species formerly known to abound in districts now but thinly peopled by this interesting class . . . unless the present reprehensible and most destructive system of shooting—wholesale slaughter, it may with propriety be called—be rigidly put down, the decrease will, in all likelihood, become permanent, to the great regret of every trueminded naturalist’’ (Turnbull, 1869, pp. 30, 49–50) In this and similar accounts by naturalists, hunters, and regulators at the end of the 19th century, shorebirds were part of a wider push for bird preservation and nature conservation in America (Barrow, 1998, 2009, pp. 100–107). At the time, it was widely accepted by naturalists and sport hunters that market and subsistence hunters (often referred to as ‘‘pothunters’’) were to blame for declines in game species like shorebirds, and organizations representing these groups pushed for restrictions on hunting designed to curb market gunning (Barrow, 2009, p. 90; Dunlap, 1988; Reiger, 1975). More outspoken wildlife preservation activists did not limit their accusations to poor pothunters, however, but accused all sportsmen and their ineffectual ‘‘bag limits’’ for legal game (cf. Hornaday, 1913). Histories of ornithology and wildlife management often point to the Lacey Act of 1900 as the first large-scale, federal-level action to regulate wildlife trafficking and, to some extent, hunting. Drafted by the Biological Survey, a bureau within the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and passed with the support of nature advocacy groups like Audubon, sport hunting organizations like the League of American Sportsman, and the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU), the Lacey Act gave the USDA control over interstate shipment of wild animals and birds taken in violation of state laws (Barrow, 2009, p. 105). Much stronger protection for migratory birds followed in the nineteen-teens, with the passage of the Weeks-McLean Migratory Bird Act in 1913 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918, establishing the then unprecedented power of the federal government to remove species from the game lists and set restrictive limits on hunting seasons (Bean, 1983, p. 74; Dunlap, 1988, p. 38). As scientific expertise transitioned from questions of taxonomy to those of migration and the quantification of populations, management jurisdiction over these populations became one of national and international law. Ornithologists, especially those working for the USDA, were key to making the case for bird protection (Pauly, 2000, p. 80). But what justifications did they offered for such sweeping legislation? On what basis did shorebirds acquire federal and international protection as a shared natural resource? The answer lies in the discipline of ‘‘economic ornithology’’ (Evenden, 1995, pp. 172–183). The ‘‘Division of the Biological Survey,’’ headed by C. Hart Merriam,



in fact grew out of the ‘‘Division of Economic Ornithology’’ in the USDA, a bureau created at the behest of the AOU in 1885 (Czech & Krausman, 2001, p. 16; Dunlap, 1988, p. 35). Faced with the task of compiling scientific information about birds and establishing their economic importance to American agriculture, these Divisions played important roles in not only justifying federal protection of birds, but in coordinating the implementation of these laws. This justification, applicable to shorebirds like the red knot as well as their more inland relatives, was primarily related to these animals’ service as agents of biological pest control. W.L. McAtee, a well-known economic ornithologist for the Biological Survey, devoted a popular article and a Survey circular to shorebirds, making the case that not only were these animals disappearing rapidly, due to extensive hunting and the birds’ low reproductive rates compared to other game birds, but that they should be saved for their service to humans in the form of eating insect pests: ‘‘There is something more than a sentimental reason why we should take steps to save our vanishing shore-birds from extinction. The economic record is spotless. They injure no farm crop, but on the contrary feed upon many of the worst enemies of agriculture . . . Their continued disappearance means not only the loss of some of the most beautiful and graceful of living creatures, but also of valuable enemies of our worst insect pests’’ (McAtee, 1911, 1912, pp. 19–22). McAtee and others in the Survey, in allegiance to economic argument and their institutional home, made it clear that shorebirds were to be valued, beyond ‘‘sentiment,’’ as insectivorous pest-control for U.S. agriculture. The Biological Survey was largely responsible for researching, drafting, testifying, justifying, and enacting these steps toward federal protection of wildlife. When requesting the passage of the 1913 Migratory Bird Act, for example, the Survey presented copious amounts of information on the temporal and geographic distribution of these animals in order to argue that only federal coordination of hunting seasons based on the best scientific understanding of when and where migratory birds breed, feed, and nest would serve to save these animals from extinction (House Committee on Agriculture, 1912, pp. 72–85; Senate Committee on Forest Reservations and the Protection of Game, 1912, pp. 47–54). In order to do this, of course, migratory patterns and population levels had to be actively studied, an undertaking that went beyond the walls of the USDA to longestablished surveillance networks of state game agencies, amateur bird enthusiasts, and professional ornithologists. These networks supplied bird sightings and counts as they had for decades, but to a new purpose—protection by the U.S. Government and coordination with international partners like the Canadian government. The migratory habits and agricultural importance of migratory birds were considered well established enough by the Survey, in fact, that debate in the U.S. Congress instead focused on questions of management jurisdiction. Bill supporters for passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, for example, made the case that only the federal government had the right and ability to regulate species that crossed state and national boundaries. Local and state governments, in their eyes, were too uncoordinated and shortsighted to properly protect animals that bred and wintered throughout the hemisphere. The few bill detractors conceded this point, and simply argued for more state and local input into federal regulation of game birds (House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 1917b). It is worth noting here that surveillance of migratory birds did not stop at monitoring habitat, flight routes, and population levels, but included large-scale behavioral research. Monitoring feeding behavior through stomach content analysis proved to be among the most important lines of research. When testifying before Congress on the 1918 Migratory Bird Act, in fact, the Biological Survey showcased its extensive study on the contents of birds’ stomachs: ‘‘In the Biological Survey we have had a corps of experts for years gathering the stomachs of birds, the gizzards and the crops, for study. We have the

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sportsmen send in the stomachs of game birds, and secure the stomachs of smaller birds in various ways . . . The contents of 70,000 or 80,000 have been examined with a microscope, to determine the kind of insects that these birds eat. The scientists have become so expert at this that they can tell from the fragments in the birds’ stomachs, the kind of insects that made up the food of the bird, and this evidence has been published in detail’’ House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 1917a, p. 4. As Matthew Evenden makes clear in his work on the history of economic ornithology, this was quintessentially bureaucratic, rational knowledge production: ‘‘The reasoning [behind stomach content analysis] was that if a bird’s diet appeared to contain a major portion of bad insects in relation to, for example, plant material, then it could be classified as a useful species . . . this mode of analysis . . . provided a clear quantitative measure of the morality of birds in the economy of nature’’ (Evenden, 1995, p. 175). And as Kurkpatrick Dorsey (1998, pp. 165–237) points out, the shift from ‘‘aesthetics’’ to ‘‘science and economics’’ was key to the passage of Progressive Era migratory bird legislation. The Biological Survey had surveilled shorebird and other wildlife populations throughout the Western Hemisphere, had their stomach contents quantified in the lab, and the U.S. Congress had made these animals wards of the State. Under surveillance by the Biological Survey, shorebirds mattered most as insectivores and their conservation depended on perhaps the archetypal force for domesticating nature: modern agriculture (cf. Scott, 1998, pp. 262–306). After 1918, some of the justifications discussed above for studying and protecting shorebirds remained available to naturalists and regulators, while others were replaced. As spring shooting of shorebirds was banned and these animals became ‘‘game’’ birds with increasingly restrictive seasons or removed from the game lists altogether, they generally ceased to be of interest to hunters and wildlife agencies. Their importance to agriculture shrank with the decline of ‘‘economic ornithology’’ in the Biological Survey and the advent of synthetic chemical pesticides (Evenden, 1995, p. 173); chemicals that, ironically, indiscriminately killed the very organisms government scientists had preserved for insect control (Carson, 1962; Russell, 2001). Though shorebird stomachs are no longer studied as a boon to American agriculture, a number of surveillance techniques survived the reorganization of the Biological Survey. One of these, bird banding (or ringing, as it is known internationally), is the practice of affixing coded tags of various types to birds in the hope of recapturing or otherwise reacquiring the tags at a later date, thus amassing information on bird movement and mortality. The Biological Survey centralized this practice in the 1920s, and used new data on the movements of migratory birds to develop the ‘‘flyway’’ concept—a key intellectual and bureaucratic feat used to manage the Survey’s burgeoning refuge system (Wilson, 2010, pp. 72–75). While the vast majority of this effort was directed toward actively hunted wildfowl, professional and avocational banders across the country practiced the technique and recorded the movements of a wide variety of migratory birds. On such a large scale, the technique has the potential to accumulate enormous amounts of data on the movements and life histories of migratory birds, and has played an integral role in ornithological research throughout the 20th century (Jackson, Davis & Tautin, 2008). I will return to the most recent variants of shorebird banding below, in the context of the red knot controversy. First, however, I turn to the transition from wildlife surveillance under the USDA to the contemporary endangered species paradigm under the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

3. Scaling-up shorebird surveillance: science in the endangered species paradigm It is impossible, it seems, to write a history of wildlife biology or conservation in the 20th century without mentioning the U.S.


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Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA). There is good reason for this. As many policy analysts and historians have noted, the ESA marked not only a sea-change in wildlife regulation, but arguably the pinnacle of federal progressive environmental legislation during the environmental movement of the 1960s and 70s. The Act has been called ‘‘one of the most stringent and comprehensive pieces of legislation ever enacted,’’ the ‘‘peak’’ of the ‘‘wave’’ of environmental legislation in the 1970s, ‘‘the most important single achievement’’ in responding to ‘‘wilderness problems,’’ and ‘‘the strongest mandate for protection of the biota on the globe’’ (Barrow, 2009, p. 348; Doremus, 2006, p. 195; Sale, 1993, pp. 36–39; Yaffee, 1982, p. 48). The ESA was remarkably comprehensive in its scope, designed to prevent the extinction of wildlife and with ramifications far beyond the federal government. For my purposes, two aspects of the ESA as it has evolved since 1973 are especially important to highlight: the expansion of bureaucratic systems to track and manage wildlife like shorebirds, and the reliance of this ramifying regulatory structure on scientific expertise and surveillance techniques. The ESA was remarkable because it provided federal mandates, funds, and personnel to understand and manage nongame wildlife in addition to traditional game animals. Equally important for the red knot story, these changes at the federal level also translated into the creation or strengthening of existing, state-level rare and endangered species programs, as well as greater availability of funds for NGO activity in wildlife research and conservation.1 In addition, the ESA stood, perhaps alone, among American environmental legislation in its insistence that the federal government’s decision to declare a species threatened or endangered be made without regard of its economic impact.2 The corollary to this provision was that species were to be listed ‘‘solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available’’ (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1973, p. 5). This was important not only in that it created a particularly powerful environmental law, but that it, by its very nature, ceded an unusual amount of that power to bureaucratic experts able to speak authoritatively on the question of which species were and were not endangered. In the 1970s, as I describe briefly below, governmental and government-funded scientists began to pay renewed attention to animals like shorebirds in the United States and Canada. This expansion of wildlife bureaucracy at the state and federal level created the conditions for extensive scientific study of shorebirds in key migratory stopovers like the Delaware Bay. Based on these post-1970 studies, rare and endangered organisms like red knots have once again become, as with migratory waterfowl in the nineteen-teens, wards of the State. The Canadian Wildlife Service was one of the first institutions to revive systematic, governmental study of shorebirds in the Western Hemisphere. The Service hired a Research Scientist in 1973 to specialize exclusively in shorebirds, who shortly thereafter organized a volunteer shorebird sighting network in the eastern Canadian maritime provinces to help establish the location and extent of shorebird migration through these areas (Burnett, 2003, p. 80; Morrison, personal communication, December 2009). Around the same time, the Manomet Bird Observatory (now the Manomet Center for Conservation Science, an environmental NGO in the state of Massachusetts), started a similar volunteer network. Utilizing, in part, funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the ‘‘International Shorebird Survey’’ was coordinated with the Canadian Wildlife Service efforts to establish the location of shore-

bird migration staging areas throughout North America. In addition to using these volunteer networks of birders to map the distribution of shorebirds, the Service also implemented aerial surveys over known wintering grounds and migratory stopovers. By the early 1980s, surveys in Latin America had been completed and aerial survey data published for ‘‘28 000 km of the South American coastline,’’ counting ‘‘more than 2.9 million shorebirds’’ (Morrison & Ross, 1989, p. 3). At roughly the same time, though on a smaller scale, researchers at the Cape May Bird Observatory and New Jersey Audubon, also with funding from the FWS, conducted aerial and ground surveys in the Delaware Bay that ‘‘revealed a staging area of remarkable proportions, one largely unknown to the scientific community’’ (Dunne, Sibley, Sutton, & Wander, 1982, p. 32). By 1986, the New Jersey Endangered and Nongame Species Program had begun yearly aerial surveys of the Bay to determine spring migratory population levels. These aerial surveys of the Delaware Bay shorebird populations and their South American wintering grounds continue to the present day, and remain one of the primary techniques of population surveillance mobilized in the political controversy over red knot conservation. The crash in shorebird populations has largely been viewed by airplane, relying on the legal and financial infrastructure of wildlife bureaucracies. By the late 1980s, based in large part on these surveys, the Delaware Bay had become acknowledged as the heart of the Atlanticcoast shorebird migratory path, known as the ‘‘Atlantic Flyway’’ (Harrington, 1996b; Myers, 1986, pp. 68–76). In the 1990s, building on this earlier work, New Jersey and Delaware state biologists began to intensify and coordinate their shorebird studies.3 Biologists working for the New Jersey Endangered and Nongame Species Program, in coordination with researchers at Rutgers University, New Jersey Audubon, and their state counterparts in Delaware, began to publish findings confirming the importance of the area as a migratory staging area and highlighting what they saw as the major threats to this habitat. Topping the lists of these potential threats were coastal development, oil spills, human disturbance of shorebird feeding on beaches, and ‘‘horseshoe crab over harvest’’ (Clark, Niles, & Burger, 1993, pp. 694–705). While all of these issues remained a concern among scientists and conservationists, the horseshoe crab harvest would come to take center stage by the late 1990s, bringing intense public and bureaucratic attention to the plight of shorebirds like the red knot. Concern over this new fishery centered, at first, on hand-collecting on Delaware Bay beaches and the possible disturbances to shorebirds as they attempted to feed during their spring stopover. New Jersey, for example, enacted laws in 1993 and 1996 designed to track and limit the time, quantity, and location of crab harvests in the Bay, with an emphasis on protecting the beaches during peak spawning (Himchak & Hartley, 2001, pp. 103–106). Concern soon arose, however, at the sheer number of horseshoe crabs being harvested and marketed throughout the mid-Atlantic. The Chief of New Jersey’s Endangered Species Program at the time recalled the moment in the mid-90s when he began to worry about the size of the crab harvest, saying: ‘‘it hit me like a fist in the stomach. All this time we were focusing on buying land and worrying about disturbance and all that, and this was the first indication that the whole stopover could be in danger’’ (Niles, personal communication, February 2009). State wildlife biologists believed, in other words, that the magnitude of the new horseshoe crab fishery would endangered

1 With regard to shorebirds, the Canadian government and NGOs like Audubon have been key players in research and conservation, developing programs prior to, or concurrently with, FWS nongame programs. See Burnett (2003, pp. 79–83) and Gradwohl & Greenberg (1989, pp. 297–328). The larger point is that endangered and nongame projects, like those for shorebirds, have combined funding from numerous federal, state, and private sources. The 1973 ESA provided incentives to create or expand such programs, and provides historians with a touchstone for marking changes in wildlife governance throughout North America at this time. 2 Of course, political realities throughout the listing process have tended to incorporate economic impacts into listing decisions. The ESA is still unique, however, in its rhetorical dismissal of economics. See Yaffee (1982). 3 For a synthesis of much of this early work and shorebird conservation issues, see these volumes co-edited by Joanna Burger, a behavioral ecologist at Rutgers University who has herself been involved in shorebird research in the Delaware Bay since the 1980s: Morrison (1984, pp. 125–202) and Senner & Howe (1984, pp. 379–421).



shorebirds not through disturbing their feeding, but by creating a shortage of crab eggs for them to feed on. This concern over Delaware Bay horseshoe crab harvest at the state level soon received an infusion of international interest in shorebird migration—creating the conditions for one of the largest ‘‘mark-recapture’’ studies of migratory birds (or any animal) in the world. In the spring of 1997, a group of international researchers from the Royal Ontario Museum, the Argentine Fundacion Inalafquen, the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, and the Australasian Wader Studies Group mounted an expedition to ‘‘follow’’ shorebirds from Argentina to Delaware Bay (Baker et al., 1999, pp. 64–75). Working with state scientists in New Jersey and Delaware since that time, this initial effort launched a yearly shorebird monitoring project centered in the Bay, and the beginning of a long series of highly-visible political and bureaucratic battles over horseshoe crab harvest quotas. The defining technique of this ongoing study, in addition to ground and aerial population counts, has been bird-banding. Red knots and other shorebirds are captured in nets every year, affixed with aluminum bands (little changed since the banding program of the Biological Survey in the 1920s) and color-coded ‘‘flags,’’ and manipulated for a variety of biometric data. Since 2003, the plastic flags have been individually engraved with alpha-numeric codes readable from a distance with optics. With these codes, shorebirds in the Atlantic Flyway have been tracked over the course of years as individuals, yielding a wealth of population-level statistical information on abundance, survival rates, and behavior (Niles, personal communication, February 2009). Contemporary surveillance of red knots and other shorebirds has far exceeded banding rates and population surveys dreamed about by Biological Survey personnel a century ago. As largely agency-sponsored science, of course, the primary purpose of the red knot study has been to assess the impact of the horseshoe crab fishery on the Delaware Bay stopover for the purposes of management and conservation. And as the Bay-bordering states limited crab harvests within their own jurisdictions, they were part of a larger movement to push larger-scale bureaucracies to do the same. Biologists and activists engaged directly with the federal FWS to build the case that east-coast, rufa red knots should be listed and protected under the ESA—a direct impact of this piece of legislation on the knot’s story. Under ESA ‘‘section six’’ provisions for cooperation with states, FWS provided funding to New Jersey and Delaware investigators to conduct shorebird surveys throughout the flyway in collaboration with their international counterparts, and contracted with New Jersey in the early 2000s to provide a formal red knot population status assessment for the FWS endangered species internal review process (Niles, 2002; Niles & Dey, 2003). In addition, from 2004 to 2006, the FWS was petitioned by environmental NGO’s to list the subspecies as endangered, and to invoke its powers of ‘‘emergency listing.’’ In 2006, partially in response to outside petitions and lawsuits, and based upon the internal review process, the FWS adopted the red knot as a ‘‘candidate species’’ for eventual threatened or endangered listing under the ESA. In 2008, the priority level of the red knot’s candidacy was raised to 3, the highest level available to a subspecies. The red knot has since remained in a kind of endangered-species limbo, awaiting enough funds from the FWS to complete listing procedures for the priority ‘‘1’’ and ‘‘2’’ species ahead of it (Scherer, personal communication, December 2009). However, the agency recently took a significant step toward listing by issuing a proposed rule that, if finalized, would award ‘‘threatened’’ status to rufa red knots (Department of the Interior, 2013). The timeline

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and ramifications of this status for ongoing study and conservation remain unclear at present. The central institutional setting for horseshoe crab/red knot surveillance and management has turned out not to be state or federal-level wildlife agencies, however, but the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC). The ASMFC can be described as a collaborative regulatory body, which establishes management plans and harvest quotas for around two dozen state fisheries along the east coast of the U.S., as well as coordinating these plans with National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) regulation of federal waters. The ASMFC is comprised of voting board members from each east coast state, as well numerous technical advisory panels that can include representatives from state and federal government, conservation interests, and the fishing industry. On the advice and insistence of a number of private and public entities, the ASMFC developed a Horseshoe Crab Management Board and Management Plan in 1998 (ASMFC, 1998; Sargent, 2002, pp. 80– 83). The horseshoe crab management plan has been revised through a series of addenda since, the most recent being Addendum VII adopted in February of 2012. These addenda have established increasingly strict quotas on horseshoe crab harvest in member states, delineating the timing, quantities, and sex of the crabs that may be taken from state to state.4 As the red knot’s potential endangered status with the FWS has remained undecided, and the ASMFC harvest quotas have remained relatively steady since Addendum IV in 2006, more drastic restrictions have been pursued at the state level (the ASMFC prescribes maximum quotas, states are free to be more conservative). In 2006 New Jersey adopted a two-year horseshoe crab harvest moratorium, and in 2008 the moratorium was extended through an act of the state legislature (Senate and General Assembly of the State of New Jersey, 2008). As of this writing, New Jersey’s moratorium remains the most strict restriction on horseshoe crab harvest in the U.S.—tied directly to the state’s ability to define, measure, and track red knot abundance. In the few years since the New Jersey moratorium, the effort to gather data on rufa red knots has continued to intensify. The latest effort to do so has involved fitting birds caught in the Delaware Bay or elsewhere in the flyway with ‘‘geolocators.’’ These 1-gram packages consisting of microprocessors, a light sensor, batteries, and a chronometer, can roughly determine and record the latitude and longitude of birds as they travel along their migratory paths (Niles et al., 2010, pp. 123–130). The resultant data means that red knots and other shorebirds can now be tracked, as individuals, from the tip of South America to the Canadian arctic and back, revealing migratory routes and flight distances only guessed at formerly. The technological denouement of decades of government-supported wildlife biology, red knots now find themselves entangled in hemisphere-wide systems of surveillance on an unprecedented level—surveillance that is actively used to conserve and control wildlife and fishery populations. As I will discuss in the final section, ‘‘surveillance’’ as a practice involves a variety of interlocking techniques, analytical frameworks, and political implications, and the complexities of this situation warrant care not only in the ways ‘‘we’’ choose to interact with nonhuman nature, but in the choice of metaphors with which we frame and understand such environmental science and policy. 4. Discussion: panoptical dreams vs. multiple realities in conservation science The history of the red knot controversy in the Delaware Bay, and shorebird science and conservation more generally, can be

4 For a summary of various state and ASMFC harvest restrictions through 2006, see Niles et al. (2008, pp. 112–114); for a summary of the latest Addendum provisions, see ‘‘Horseshoe Crab Board Approves Addendum VI,’’ ASMFC News Release (August 5, 2010). Accessed 10/27/2010, at: http://www.asmfc.org/press_releases/2010/ pr21HSCAddendumVI.pdf.


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read as an uneven, fitful, but nevertheless progressively more thorough enrollment of wild animals into systems of surveillance and control. In the endangered species paradigm after 1970, especially, monitoring for rufa red knots grew from localized volunteer efforts to bureaucratically-supported and hemisphere-spanning surveys and mark-recapture studies. With the more recent use of lightlevel geolocators, as briefly mentioned, shorebirds can now be tracked individually throughout the Atlantic Flyway. Furthermore, recent implementation of ‘‘Adaptive Resource Management’’ by the ASMFC in the Delaware Bay has meant that monitoring data on both red knots and horseshoe crabs is now being used for predictive computer modeling in an effort to ‘‘optimize’’ both crab harvests and knot populations (McGowan et al., 2009). Shorebird surveillance, in other words, is now tightly coupled with geospatial mapping and population management. Scholars have told similar stories about other endangered bird conservation efforts, most strikingly with California Condors and Whooping Cranes. In cases such as these, intensive captive breeding programs have gone beyond surveillance to involve outright dependence, an irony of ‘‘wildlife’’ conservation well marked by historian Mark Barrow: ‘‘endangered species must in effect become partially domesticated, subjected to continued human surveillance, manipulation, and control to ensure their continued perpetuation. It is one of the many environmental ironies we have learned to live with in the twenty-first century.’’5 And as Etienne Benson notes, to this ironic wildlife management we might add a sort of self-surveillance on the part of wildlife biologists, pursuing their research under the intense scrutiny of environmentalists who were partly responsible for the push to preserve wildlife in the first place.6 The domesticating effects of endangered species science, surveillance, and management are hardly uniform, however, and both the techniques and outcomes of these efforts have varied tremendously since the passage of the ESA. Contemporary wildlife biology, undertaken by both government and academic scientists, continues to exhibit a hybrid nature. Embracing modern techniques, such as population genetics, stable isotope analysis, and computerized tracking and databasing—as well as being frequently experimental and interventionist—post-ESA wildlife biology in some ways bears little resemblance to the earlier natural history techniques and concerns exemplified by the U.S. Biological Survey.7 In other ways, however, studies of red knots and other species of concern show remarkable continuity with older traditions in natural history tied to life histories, ‘‘collecting’’ (in both lethal and non-lethal forms), and taxonomy.8 Scientists in wildlife bureaucracies do not eschew one set of techniques at the expense of the others, but blend the old and the new to accomplish their monitoring and management goals. Furthermore, wildlife tracking like the shorebird studies described above has acquired some of the techniques and norms of

ethology and behavioral ecology. As Gregg Mitman has noted, midcentury changes in ethology moved from a focus on ‘‘existing and reacting’’ animals as proxies for entire species to ‘‘thinking and feeling,’’ individual, and even ‘‘celebrity’’ animals and their life histories (Mitman, 2005, pp. 175–195). The evolution of shorebird banding from the early 20th century to the present, in some ways, parallels this change. With the introduction of alpha-numeric codes to shorebirds in 2003, followed by the use of geolocators in 2009, red knots have achieved individual, and occasionally ‘‘celebrity’’ status.9 Has the ability to ‘‘name’’ threatened and endangered species, track their movements around the globe, and manipulate their populations realized the ‘‘panoptical dreams’’ of STS-scholar Geoffrey Bowker’s (Bowker, 2000, p. 645) biodiversity databasers? In the discussion to follow, I note the oft-remarked resonances between endangered species science(s) and Foucauldian biopower, but will argue that claims of panopticism in wildlife biology can obscure more than they reveal. In its stead, I suggest that biologists utilizing the technologically-mediated ‘‘situated knowledge’’ (Haraway, 1988, pp. 575–599) of shorebirds have revealed entirely new realities that both expand our understanding of the world and make it possible to imagine an ‘‘ontological politics’’ (Mol, 1999, pp. 74–89) of conservation. STS scholarship on wildlife biology has at times stressed the domestication of animal populations in baldly Foucauldian terms. Foucault himself, in fact, posited that a Darwinian notion of ‘‘population’’ was ‘‘the medium between the milieu and the organism,’’ and the ‘‘turning point between natural history and biology’’ (Foucault, 2009, p. 78). In their detailed ethnography of field studies on lizards, Wolff-Michael Roth and G. Michael Bowen conclude that ‘‘lizards, unknown and wild, are domesticated (and ‘disciplined’, in multiple senses of that word) into that which we know’’ (Roth & Bowen, 1999, p. 757). And Jamie Lorimer, in his study on corncrake studies in Scotland, describes the ‘‘domestication’’ of these birds through census efforts: ‘‘Aggregating all the counted corncrakes together, he [the researcher] creates a database. This database represents the completion of the panoptic gaze’’ (Lorimer, 2008, p. 394). These panoptical accounts do not seem terribly far-fetched. Indeed, it is difficult not to invoke Foucault when reading the scientific publications on shorebirds. In their discussion of initial geolocators results, for example, Niles et al. (2010, pp. 127–128) state that former studies were ‘‘hampered by our inability to make observations simultaneously everywhere in the flyway,’’ a condition rectified by the geolocators, which ‘‘are poised to greatly improve our comprehension of shorebird migration.’’10 And while claims of panopticism in the animal world should be treated with some skepticism merely on account of the self-discipline required for the micro-processes of power described by Foucault to work, it is tempting to claim banding-cum-panopticon (only partially tongue-in-cheek) for shorebirds as well (Foucault, 1978, pp. 195–228).11 Researchers in Australia

5 See Barrow (2009, chap. 10). Peter S. Alagona (2004b, p. 985), writing in a very similar vein, remarks that ‘‘Historians have also identified another unintended consequence of endangered species conservation: Some organisms have been saved from extinction only to end up in an intensively managed, captive, or even domesticated state.’’ See also Doremus (1999). On the history of environmentalism and wildlife tracking more generally, see Etienne Benson’s (2010) detailed study. 6 See Benson (2011, pp. 103–123). Shorebird researchers, and ornithologists more generally, engage in frequent internal reassessments of the effects of lab and field studies on their animal subjects, as well as the public perceptions of their work. See, for example, Voss, Shutler, & Werner (2010, pp. 704–708) and Winker et al. (2010, p. 690). 7 Robert Kohler, writing on earlier American naturalists and field biologists, has called the Biological Survey ‘‘the premier federal agency for natural history.’’ See Kohler (2008, p. 30). 8 Bruno Strasser has been one of the strongest proponents for upending the common narrative that natural history was replaced by 20th-century disciplines like molecular biology. See, for example, Strasser (2010a). 9 Red Knot ‘‘B95,’’ considered the ‘‘oldest-known migratory shorebird of the rufa subspecies,’’ has recently been the subject of a book and a municipal ordinance in Rio Grande, Argentina declaring B95 the City’s ‘‘Natural Ambassador.’’ See Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network, ‘‘Red Knot ’B95’: Book Awards for Author, Ambassadorship for Bird,’’ news release, February 28, 2013, http://www.whsrn.org/news/article/red-knot-b95-book-awards-author-ambassadorship-bird (Accessed 21 August 2013). 10 Making the biopower resonance even more profound, one of the knots in this initial study happened to have been inscribed with a leg band reading ‘‘Y0U’’. 11 Etienne Benson, responding to a comment (‘‘The panopticon is not just for people anymore’’) on his book, Wired Wilderness, in a recent H-Net roundtable, responds: ‘‘Nor do I think, incidentally, that the model of the panopticon is much help here . . . Unlike the prisoners in Bentham’s design, wild animals are unlikely to be aware that the radiotags attached to them are mechanisms of surveillance, and they do not internalize their own oversight, at least not in the ways Bentham’s inmates were supposed to.’’ See Michael Lewis, ‘‘Comments’’ and Etienne Benson, ‘‘Author’s Response’’ in H-Environment Roundtable Reviews, H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. Vol. 3, No. 1 (January 10, 2013), pages 11 and 19, respectively. http://www.h-net.org/~environ/roundtables/env-roundtable-3-1.pdf (accessed 22 August 2013) While I share this critique, as I argue I believe there is more at stake here than the misapplication of Foucault’s ideas to nonhuman animals.



and the Netherlands, for example, have observed shorebirds like great knots and ruffs preening their leg flags as if they were feathers, leading them to suggest that the birds have ‘‘accepted the flag as just another body part that needs cleaning’’ (Verkuil & Hassell, 2009, p. 45). Accepting surveillance technologies as part their own bodies, perhaps shorebirds are participating in their own discipline and domestication—leg flags serving as a ‘‘technology of the self’’ (Foucault, 1988). For some scholars, this is all for the good. Describing a taxonomy of relationships between human and nonhuman nature in which ‘‘Westerners’’ adhere to a strict human/nature dualism, anthropologist Philippe Descola hopefully claims that ‘‘the programme set forth by environmental activists will perhaps lead, unintentionally, to a dissolution of naturalism, since the survival of a whole range of non-humans, now increasingly protected from anthropic damage, will shortly depend almost exclusively upon social conventions and human actions’’ (Descola, 1996, p. 97). Conservationists and their techniques of surveillance, intervention, and dependence can not only protect ‘‘nature,’’ in other words, but break down the strict nature/culture dichotomy which produces environmental destruction in the first place. Work utilizing anthropomorphic language, Foucauldian or otherwise, can perhaps also serve to blur the distinctions between human and non-human nature.12 Again, however, it may be useful to take a step back from tooeasily drawn analogies between wildlife biology and panopticism, and from seeing all surveillance as an act of control and domestication. Rather than describe nonhuman nature in terms of dominance and discipline, numerous conceptual models exist for writing more balanced human/nonhuman relationships into the history of wildlife. In more nuanced forms of co-construction, to take just a few examples, nonhumans and their habitats exist as companions, hybrid geographies, and generators of human meaning.13 Such ‘‘relational’’ metaphors and ontologies may be more accurate and politically responsible ways to tell stories about the systems of surveillance that have come to define wildlife biology. As Donna Haraway puts it: ‘‘Histories of Science may be powerfully told as histories of technologies. These technologies are ways of life, social orders, practices of visualization. Technologies are skilled practices. How to see? Where to see from? What limits to vision?’’ Geolocators remind us that scientific practice in field biology is not simply a panoptical gaze upon nature, but can reverse the visual stance to be a limited gaze from nonhuman nature. Adopting Haraway’s perspective, which requires that ‘‘the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource,’’ the literal birds-eye view derived from red knot migration can be seen as a form of ‘‘situated knowledge’’ rather than a domineering ‘‘god trick.’’ (Haraway, 1988, pp. 575–599). Furthermore, we need not stop at visual metaphors or epistemology. Knowing new spaces through wildlife monitoring invites more radical ontological stances—descriptions of realities as multiple as the individual animals being tracked. Steve Woolgar and

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Javier Lezaun have recently assessed the ‘‘turn to ontology’’ in STS, affirming the scholarly interest in multiple ontologies as a way to extend the field’s ‘‘idiosyncratic critical sensibility.’’ While finding much value in ‘‘ontological enactment’’ as a mode of analysis in STS, Woolgar and Lezaun stop short of endorsing the more normative aspects of such analysis in what Annemarie Mol has termed ‘‘ontological politics’’ (Mol, 1999, 2013; Woolgar & Lezaun, 2013). As discussed further below, I suggest that phenomenological accounts in ethology and behavioral ecology and geo-spacial wildlife tracking are fruitfully thought of as enacting novel and multiple ontologies in co-operation with nonhuman animals. Field ornithologists and their study subjects enact multiple ‘‘onto-ethologies’’ every day, red knot geolocator studies being but one example.14 Furthermore, unlike Woolgar and Lezaun, I suggest that there are indeed practical and ethical consequences from such perspectives in the realm of endangered species conservation. To explore these notions further, I want to briefly turn from contemporary STS to the much earlier spatial and sensorial theories in the work of Jacob von Uexküll, in order to describe the ways in which shorebirds themselves have expanded the worlds of their scientific interlocutors through the use of geolocators. Historians of wildlife biology in recent years have noted that endangered species concerns and tracking technologies have fundamentally changed the relationships between animals, scientists, and the broader public(s) in North America (Barrow, 2009; Benson, 2010). Von Uexküll’s work earlier in the century, however, developed a much more radical ontological stance regarding these relationships, and has been the object of re-discovery in recent biology, ecology, and social theory.15 For von Uexküll, an animal’s umwelt—the environment which it perceives in a species-specific way—was the sumtotal of its subjective reality. Indeed, reality was fundamentally a collection of interpenetrating subjectivities: ‘‘there is no space independent of subjects. If we still cling to the fiction of an all-encompassing universal space, we do so only because this conventional fable facilitates mutual communication’’ (von Uexküll, 1957, p. 29). Furthermore, phenomena like bird migration were considered to be ‘‘magic’’ umwelten, innate routes created through individual subject-space ‘‘which only birds can see’’ (von Uexküll, 1957, pp. 64-69). Given that ‘‘there can be no doubt that a fundamental contrast prevails everywhere between the environment which we see spread around animals, and the Umwelten that are built up by the animals themselves and filled with objects of their own perception,’’ the challenge for von Uexküll was to develop ‘‘a comprehensive view of the relationships between different Umwelten’’ to ‘‘be obtained by answering the question: How does the same object show up as an object in different Umwelten, in which it plays an important part?’’ (von Uexküll, 1957, pp. 64–69, 73). Is the ‘‘Delaware Bay’’ shared subjective space, or an ‘‘object’’ appearing in the umwelten of both red knots and shorebird scientists? Do biologists have any access to the ‘‘magic’’ of migration? I would argue that geolocators are an empirical project in the

12 As many scholars have pointed out, anthropomorphism may be an important, if not unavoidable, conceptual tool for relational understanding between human and nonhuman animals. On ‘‘critical anthropomorphism’’ See Weil (2010, p. 16). On the problem of anthropomorphism more broadly, See Daston and Mitman (2005). 13 These examples are taken from, respectively: Haraway (2008), Whatmore (2002), and Smith (2005). For explicit attempts to write nonhuman agency into ethnographic work, see Kirksey & Helmreich (2010). 14 On the historical and theoretical links between bird banding and various kinds of ethology, see M. Victoria McDonald, Jackson, & Davis (2008). On the philosophical links between ethology and ontology, see Buchanan (2008). 15 While there are reasons to be skeptical of von Uexkull’s direct influence on contemporary science, the extensive and disparate claims made for his influence are interesting in their own right. Geographer Jamie Lorimer ties von Uexkull’s work to the recent ‘‘ethological turn’’ in philosophy, anthropology, cultural geography, and science studies (Lorimer, 2008, pp. 379). Von Uexkull is also considered a founder of semiotics and ‘‘biosemiotics.’’ See Kull (1999, 2001). Relatedly, the Journal of Comparative Psychology has published a special issue dedicated to von Uexkull and animal communication; see Partan & Marler (2002, pp. 116–119). Von Uexkull is also frequently mentioned in more humanities-based animals studies. See, for example, Weil (2010, p. 8). Political philosopher Giorgio Agamben considers von Uexkull a founder of modern zoology and ecology, and ties his philosophical influence directly to Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze. See Agamben (2002, p. 39). Richard Burkhardt (2005) ties von Uexkull’s ideas, particularly Umwelt, direclty to Konrad Lorenz and early ethology. In addition, for von Uexkull’s influence on twentieth-century philosophy, see Buchanan (2008). And Ludwik Fleck, in his discussion of ‘‘thought styles’’ and ‘‘collectives,’’ discusses the similarities between von Uexkull’s work and his own (Fleck, 1979 [1935], p. 179, note 6). For an excellent prosopography of pre-WWII German scientists committed to what the author calls ‘‘holism’’, which includes a biography and analysis of von Uexkull’s life, work, and politics, see Anne Harrington 1996a, 1996b, pp. 34–71.


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tradition of von Uexküll’s ‘‘Umwelt research.’’ Enrolling animals in knowledge production, shorebird biologists co-create novel subjective space with red knots. Not simply passive beings subject to surveillance, migratory birds ‘‘reveal new aspects that had not been expected’’ (Niles et al., 2010, p. 128). This capacity to surprise and share in knowledge production by carrying geolocators to unexpected destinations is one of the defining features of this latest turn in shorebird research. As a recent red knot article observed, ‘‘To date, all studies of shorebirds using geolocators have changed our conceptions about their migration strategies and the sites they use. This study is no exception. It has revealed previously unknown stopover and wintering sites and a surprising lack of commonality between the eight focal birds in their migratory pathways’’ (Niles et al., 2012, p. 199). Note that this study not only surprised the researchers with new locations, paths, and flight times, it served to individuate each bird’s migratory experience. ‘‘Flyways’’—always, at best, a rough heuristic for mapping population-level migrations—have been fractured; ‘‘magical’’ migratory paths as flown realities are multiple. Nor are these multiple ontologies limited to the space-time of shorebird life histories. Species, too, threaten to ramify as red knots co-construct their migratory habits and habitats: ‘‘The variability in migration routes, stopover locations, and wintering areas along the Atlantic coast and the Caribbean was unexpected. While we have assumed that these birds are Calidris canutus rufa, the possibility exists that information from more knots fitted with geolocators in Delaware Bay, Texas, Florida, and elsewhere will reveal additional subspecies’’ (Burger et al., 2012, p. 309). In addition, as to be expected, there is no firm distinction between the ontological relationships formed between shorebirds and wildlife biologists and the epistemologies of wildlife biology. To take a brief example from one of the red knot geolocator studies just cited, Niles et al. state: ‘‘It has . . . been assumed that . . . most fly direct from Delaware Bay to the breeding grounds without stopping and that the surplus resources are needed to sustain them in the period after arrival . . . neither the results of the present study relating to six knots nor those of Niles et al. (2010) relating to three knots support that assumption.’’ The assumption in question, that red knot metabolism and ecological energetics explained the timing and location of their migration to arctic breeding grounds, was newly questionable once shorebirds revealed an ‘‘unnecessary’’ stopover in the Hudson Bay along their way: ‘‘Why they [red knots] should do this [stop in Hudson Bay] is not readily apparent. One reason might be that, despite the resources they are already carrying, they need more to ensure their survival once they reach the breeding grounds. Another possibility might be that when they reach southern Hudson Bay they are already close enough to the breeding grounds to be aware of the conditions they are likely to encounter if they go straight there’’ (Niles et al., 2012, p. 202). Such language reveals an altered epistemological stance on the part of the researchers. Anatomical and metabolic species-level explanations for migratory behavior have given way to nearly phenomenological accounts, speculating on what it might be like to be an individual shorebird choosing to stop in the

Hudson Bay. These speculative scientific accounts can be read as narrative forms of von Uexküll’s ‘‘Picture Book of Invisible Worlds.’’ Multiple ontologies, epistemologies, and the co-construction of subjective space have ramifications beyond the knowledge-practices of wildlife biology, however, to include the techniques and politics of wildlife conservation. In the mid-1980s, for example, the ‘‘Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network’’ (WHSRN, pronounced ‘wiss-urn’) was organized as a voluntary shorebirdhabitat conservation collaboration between the Canadian Wildlife Service, the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, the World Wildlife Fund, Manomet, and a number of other U.S. and international wildlife management organizations and agencies. WHSRN was an attempt to identify and create a series of habitat preserves across political boundaries in order to provide vital wintering, stopover, and nesting habitat along shorebirds’ migratory routes. The Delaware Bay was named the first location in the network, though the designation does not as of yet command legallybinding influence over red knot conservation (Myers et al., 1987, pp. 122–124). In this case, surveillance was explicitly utilized to enroll shorebird subjectivities. In the words of WHSRN’s founders: ‘‘the network forms, in essence, an international reserve defined by the migrants rather than by geography’’ (Myers et al., 1987, p. 23; emphasis added). Red knots and other shorebirds, given the ability to ‘‘define’’ WHSRN reserves through the techniques of wildlife surveillance, have played an active role in co-constructing this network. Liberated from the confines of instrumentalist conservation (e.g. saving shorebirds for agriculture), and from a scientifically pre-defined ‘‘flyway,’’ red knots now have the potential to expand and enact Umwelten and, perhaps, aid in their own recovery.16 An ontological politics of conservation that took seriously the co-produced subjective spaces of migratory animals could be one in which we re-imagine the relevance and role of more strictly human geopolitical boundaries and priorities.17 If the history of North American shorebird surveillance, and wildlife biology more generally, has bestowed the dream of statistically-driven epistemologies and interventionist management techniques, it has also kept alive older forms of natural history rooted in ‘‘collecting,’’ life histories of species and individual animals, and observational (and often phenomenological) ethology. This continuity has been remarked upon not only by historians and sociologists of science, but also by practicing biologists themselves.18 And as different epistemological and ontological commitments have different implications for the type of conservation strategies pursued, so our choice of stories and metaphors can reinforce or subvert prevailing notions of what wildlife biology and conservation were, are, and can be. While we need not choose one, dominant narrative, the normative aspects of ontological politics would suggest care in the choice of our narratives, metaphors, and realities. Scholars, especially those engaged in the socio-political issues they study, may also have a role to play in keeping alive the practices and hopes of a post-human, post-nature ‘‘conservation’’ by more carefully choosing our analytical frameworks and eschewing facile analogies between wildlife surveillance, panopticism, and the domestication of nature. In one sense, of course, non-human

16 As Robert M. Wilson (2010) points out, the ‘‘birds themselves’’ were a part of the complex network of banding operations under the Biological Survey, which established the ‘‘flyway’’ concept in the first place. However, as he also argues, the resulting refuge system was often a patchwork of marginal, contested, and intensively managed landscapes scattered amongst human-dominated space. Models like WHSRN might be a next step toward more contemporary efforts to, as Wilson puts it, ‘‘give some of that space back’’ (p. 172). As Peter S. Alagona (2013) has recently argued, however, reliance on habitat, refuges, and the ‘‘protected area paradigm’’ as a cure-all for conservation is itself a highly problematic proposition—all the more reason, in my opinion, to listen carefully to what wildlife like the red knot have to ‘‘say’’ about their own life histories and trajectories. 17 One final note on von Uexkull: my intention has been to selectively appropriate Umwelt as a subject-based model of science and conservation in juxtaposition to object-based narratives of dominance and domestication. It is worth being explicit, however, that for my purposes, these ideas hold no truck with von Uexkull’s much more problematic and monarchical ‘‘biology of the state,’’ not to mention his relationship with National Socialism. See Harrington (1996b), especially pp. 59–63, 68–71. 18 On the historically hybrid nature of bird banding specifically, see de Bont (2011). On the persistence of collecting/experimenting hybrids into the present, in addition to work cited above, see Strasser (2010b). To give just one contemporary example of explicit reference to natural history, the Niles et al study cited above concludes by saying: ‘‘These results are the latest output from a sustained effort by ourselves and many others to reach a better understanding of the natural history of rufa knots in the West Atlantic Flyway, and thereby underpin their conservation,’’ (Niles et al., 2012, p. 203). On the links between older forms of natural history and conservation more generally, see also Beehler (2010).



nature has always been an agent in whatever scientific study or conservation regime ‘‘it’’ has found itself caught up in. But not all actornetworks, surveillance techniques, nor the environmental policies they imply and support are equal—a rather simple observation potentially obfuscated by over-generalized notions of biopower. Echoing Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s call for more ‘‘care’’ in STS descriptions of technoscience, given that ‘‘our ways of studying and representing matters of fact and sociotechnical assemblages have world-making effects’’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, p. 99), I suggest that our stories with, for, and about wildlife matter for choosing more humble technologies and just forms of the ‘‘politics of nature’’ (Latour, 2004)—a point worth remembering and restating in both scholarly circles and the public sphere. Acknowledgments The author would like to thank participants in the 2012 ‘‘Science, Space, and the Environment’’ conference, sponsored by the Rachel Carson Center and held at the Smith Centre of the Science Museum in London, as well as Yale University’s 2012 Northeast Environmental History Conference, ‘‘Two Kingdoms.’’ Feedback from organizers and participants at these gatherings on early, partial versions of this article were important to its subsequent development. Thanks also to Ellery Foutch, Melissa Haynes, Elizabeth Johnson, Evin Kosta, Trevor Pearce, and Kaitlin Stack Whitney for their insights and encouragement at a key moment of manuscript drafting. In addition, the author would like to thank the editor and reviewers for Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences for their positive, critical feedback, and the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the intellectual and financial support necessary to complete this article. References Agamben, G. (2002). The open: Man and animal. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Alagona, P. S. (2004a). Biography of a ‘‘Feathered Pig’’: The California condor conservation controversy. Journal of the History of Biology, 37, 557–583. Alagona, P. S. (2004b). The ghosts of endangered species past: Recent lessons at the intersection of history and biology. BioScience, 54(11), 984–985. Alagona, P. S. (2013). After the Grizzly: Endangered species and the politics of place in California. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (December 1998). Interstate fishery management plan for Horseshoe Crab. Fishery management Report No. 32. Baker, A. J., Gonzalez, P. M., Piersma, T., Minton, C. D. T., Wilson, J. R., Sitters, H., et al. (1999). Northbound migration of Red Knots Calidris canutus rufa in Argentina and Brazil: Report on results obtained by an international expedition in March– April 1997. Wader Study Group Bulletin, 88, 64–75. Barrow, M. V. Jr., (1998). A passion for birds: American ornithology after Audubon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Barrow, M. V. Jr., (2009). Nature’s ghosts: Confronting extinction from the age of Jefferson to the age of ecology. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. Bean, M. J. (1983). The evolution of national wildlife law (rev. ed.). New York: Praeger Publishers. Beehler, B. (2010). The forgotten science: A role for natural history in the twentyfirst century? Journal of Field Ornithology, 81(1), 1–4. Benson, E. (2010). Wired wilderness: Technologies of tracking and the making of modern wildlife (first ed.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Benson, E. (2011). A difficult time with the permit process. Journal of the History of Biology, 44, 103–123. Bowker, G. C. (2000). Biodiversity datadiversity. Social Studies of Science, 30(5), 643–683. Buchanan, B., Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexkull, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze, 2008, State University of New York; Albany. Burger, J., Niles, L. J., Porter, R. R., Dey, A. D., Koch, S., & Gordon, C. (2012). Migration and over-wintering of Red Knots (Calidris canutus rufa) along the Atlantic coast of the United States. The Condor, 114(2), 302–313. Burkhardt, Jr., R.W., Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology, 2005, University of Chicago Press; Chicago. Burnett, J. A. (2003). A passion for wildlife: The history of the Canadian wildlife service. Vancouver: UBC Press. Carson, R. (1962). Silent spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Clark, K. E., Niles, L. J., & Burger, J. (1993). Abundance and distribution of migrant shorebirds in Delaware Bay. The Condor, 95(3), 694–705.

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Avian influenza at both ends of a migratory flyway: characterizing viral genomic diversity to optimize surveillance plans for North America.

Key features of intertidal food webs that support migratory shorebirds.

Avian influenza virus (H11N9) in migratory shorebirds wintering in the Amazon Region, Brazil.

Dynamic conservation for migratory species.

Isolation of type a influenza viruses from the migratory waterfowl along the Mississippi flyway.

Digital technology and the conservation of nature.

Lack of genetic structure in greylag goose (Anser anser) populations along the European Atlantic flyway.

Numerical Response of Migratory Shorebirds to Prey Distribution in a Large Temperate Arid Wetland, China.

Genetic structure of avian influenza viruses from ducks of the Atlantic flyway of North America.

Conservation. The value of valuing nature.

Rapid population decline in migratory shorebirds relying on Yellow Sea tidal mudflats as stopover sites.

Understanding and managing compliance in the nature conservation context.

Spatial conservation planning framework for assessing conservation opportunities in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil.

High genetic diversity and frequent genetic reassortment of avian influenza A(H9N2) viruses along the East Asian-Australian migratory flyway.

Proposals for the conservation of nature in urban Singapore.

Technology for nature conservation: an industry perspective.

The efficiency of indicator groups for the conservation of amphibians in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

Framing the relationship between people and nature in the context of European conservation.

The alignment of agricultural and nature conservation policies in the European Union.

Digital technology and human development: a charter for nature conservation.

Diversity, distribution and nature of faunal associations with deep-sea pennatulacean corals in the Northwest Atlantic.

Spatial ecotoxicology: migratory Arctic seabirds are exposed to mercury contamination while overwintering in the northwest Atlantic.

High connectivity of the crocodile shark between the Atlantic and Southwest Indian Oceans: highlights for conservation.

The prospects for domesticating milk protein genes.