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Bird Banding and the Environmental Humanities Institutions, Intersubjectivities, and the Phenomenological Method of Margaret Morse Nice

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Bird Banding and the Environmental Humanities Institutions, Intersubjectivities, and the Phenomenological Method of Margaret Morse Nice Bird Banding and the Environmental Humanities Institutions, Intersubjectivities, and the Phenomenological Method of Margaret Morse Nice KRISTOFFER WHITNEY Department of Science, Technology, and Society, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA Abstract This article tells a history of bird banding—thepracticeofcatchingandaffixing birds with durable bands with the intent of tracking their movements and behavior—by focusing on the embodied aspects of this method in field ornithology. Going beyond a straightforward, institutional history of bird banding, the article uses the writings of biolo- gists in the US Bureau of Biological Survey and the US Fish and Wildlife Service to describe the historical practices of bird banding and the phenomenological experience of banding, both for the scientists and the birds (via their banding interlocutors). The article then pres- ents the career and research of Margaret Morse Nice as an exemplar of the embodied prac- tice of banding for the purposes of understanding bird behavior. Finally the article uses the example and heritage of Nice as well as banders and scientists like her to discuss a phenom- enological approach common to any number of observation-based field biology disciplines (including, especially, ethology) and deep connections between human and animal subjec- tivities. And these connections, in turn, have implications for the environmental humani- ties, environmental conservation, and the ethics of knowing the nonhuman world. Keywords bird banding, phenomenology, Margaret Morse Nice, ethology, multispecies studies he April 1, 1912 edition of Country Life in America announced “A New Method in Bird T Study,” succinctly capturing the methods and hopes of a recent ornithological innovation—bird banding. The article is worth quoting at some length: The American Bird-Banding Association was formed in 1909 to introduce a plan which has already brought surprising results in England. The method employed is the placing of inscribed metal bands on the legs of any birds, young or old, that can be captured un- hurt, and setting them free again. If ever a banded bird should be recovered, definite knowledge of its travels is obtained. The bands are supplied to any applicants, but it is Environmental Humanities 13:1 (May 2021) DOI 10.1215/22011919-8867230 © 2021 Kristoffer Whitney This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 114 Environmental Humanities 13:1 / May 2021 earnestly desired that banding be done only by reliable persons, who realize the serious import of the work. The simplest question of bird migration can be solved in no way but by marking individual birds. The feeling that the band may injure the bird is giving way. The facts refute it. The birds do not seem frightened at the operation.1 In this passage the author describes the chief dynamics that have defined the practice and philosophy of bird banding during the past century: institutional support, reliable techniques, and expert assessment of what constitutes not only a “reliable person” but also a reliably unaffected bird. In this article, I tell a history of bird banding by focusing on the experiences of banders as related in both professional and amateur published literature—journals and circulars created by US institutions such as the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the Bureau of Biological Survey as well as regional avocational banding associations. Insti- tutional support for banding, and the studies of behavior and migration that it enabled, created the baseline conditions for avian research—providing bands, centralizing data collection, and coordinating and disseminating results and best practices. This baseline of support, however, is a necessary but insufficient perspective from which to under- stand the epistemological and ontological significance of bird banding. As historian Eti- enne S. Benson has pointed out, organized banding was a balance between the need for a centralized data-gathering and processing center, concerned mostly with large-scale migration of game birds, and the needs of enthusiastic local and regional banders inter- ested in small-scale bird movements, individual life histories, and bird behavior.2 While he convincingly shows that this balance decidedly shifted away from amateurs and life history and toward FWS professionals banding migratory game fowl after WW II, I am interested in the ways that bird banding has always relied—and continues to do so—on an understanding of bird behavior in intimate, phenomenological terms regardless of whether the research is professional or avocational. Christopher Sellers, drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (among others), has called for an embodied environmental history: history that examines the ways in which “human and extrahuman realities are apprehended ‘through the body.’”3 Bird banding offers just such an opportunity—to tell a history of wildlife science and conser- vation through the ways in which banders of various stripes sensed and understood their own practices as well as the experiences of the birds themselves. In this way, banding also offers what Benson elsewhere calls the trace of the birds’ lives: “Human writing in a world where human life is so intricately intertwined with nonhuman life will inevitably reveal the traces of the other.”4 If this is true of human writing in general, how much more so when scientists deliberately and systematically intertwine their 1. Rogers, “New Method in Bird Study,” 56. 2. Benson, “Centrifuge of Calculation.” 3. Sellers, “Thoreau’s Body,” 487. 4. Benson, “Animal Writes,” 6. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Whitney / Bird Banding and the Environmental Humanities 115 lives with birds in the act of banding and proceed to write their methods and results for other scientists and the general public? As I show below, this scientific writing was grounded in the intersubjective experience of bird banding and phenomenological descriptions of bird behavior. As discussed in detail in the concluding section, a robust literature exists on embodied, relational epistemologies and ontologies between humans and nonhuman nature—in environmental humanities, animal studies, STS, and the history and philos- ophy of science, to name just a few. In recent years, in fact, this journal has published a special issue on multispecies studies, cross-disciplinary approaches to “the multitudes of lively agents that bring one another into being.”5 Much of this work is explicitly phe- nomenological, drawing on the philosophical tradition of embodied knowledge from Merleau-Ponty and others.6 Whether explicitly or implicitly phenomenological, I argue that bird banding and contemporary forms of both ethology and multispecies studies share a suite of practical techniques as well as intellectual and ethical commitments re- lated to close observation, intersubjectivity, and affective bonds between observer and observed. In the second and final sections, I discuss the work of Margaret Morse Nice as an exemplar of the complicated admixture of sciences and senses involved in bird banding in the early to mid-twentieth century, and as an ethologist who explicitly utilized a “phenomenological method” in her work that prefigures later ethology and humanities work after the “animal turn.” Nice, an amateur bander and ornithologist in the sense of lacking a PhD and an institutional home, nevertheless leveraged her talents, training, and scientific networks to become a leading voice in transatlantic ornithology and ethology by mid-century.7 Recognized in her time as an expert in bird behavior, a key figure in early ethology, and an innovator in banding technique, she nevertheless is rarely mentioned today alongside her more well-known, male colleagues such as Kon- rad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, or Julian Huxley. There are, of course, a few exceptions. Mark Barrow has discussed her importance in the history of ornithology and her con- nections to Ernst Mayr; Gregg Mitman and Richard Burkhardt paint Nice as a vitally important amateur in the history of ethology; Benson has pointed out the ways in which Nice pushed back against the use of bird banding solely for large-scale data 5. See the special issue from May 2016: van Dooren et al., “Multispecies Studies.” For similar, disciplinary approaches to decentering the human in anthropology, sociology, and geography, see, respectively, Kirksey and Helmreich, “Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography”; Taylor, Sutton, and Wilke, “Sociology of Multi-Species Relations”; and Anderson and Harrison, Taking-Place. 6. See, e.g., Abram, Spell of the Sensuous; Lorimer, “Forces of Nature, Forms of Life”; Ingold, Perception of the Environment,168–88; Haraway, When Species Meet, 249–63; and Lestel, Bussolini, and Chrulew, “Phe- nomenology of Animal Life.” 7. The recent, definitive biography of Nice is Ogilvie, For the Birds. Other work on the history of banding, ethology, and ornithology that includes the life and career of Nice include, respectively, Benson, “Centrifuge of Calculation”; Mitman and Burkhardt, “Struggling for Identity”; and Barrow, Passion for Birds. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 116 Environmental
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