Bird Banding and the Environmental Humanities - Duke ...
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
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—the practice of catching and affixing
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
T he April 1, 1912 edition of Country Life in America announced “A New Method in Bird
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 guest114 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 guestWhitney / 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 guest116 Environmental Humanities 13:1 / May 2021
collection on game birds; and Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie has most recently given us an
exquisitely detailed, full-length biography.8
The example and heritage of Nice, as well as banders and scientists like her, shows
a phenomenological approach common to any number of observation-based field biol-
ogy disciplines, in which the observer develops an embodied, empathetic understand-
ing of animals’ subjective experience. Scholars have tended to portray mid-century
behavioral sciences as barren of intersubjectivity—ethology in the time of Tinbergen,
whose four aims of ethology left no room for the exploration of animals’ inner lives.9 A
focus here on Nice, the interpretive frameworks she adapted, and the explicitly phe-
nomenological method she employed, helps to correct this portrayal. Nice sat at the
crossroads of “classical ethology,” ornithology, and natural history, and helped to main-
tain what she called “fellow-feeling” with the birds she studied (and encouraged others to
do the same). And the phenomenological method deployed in her ethological studies—
involving extensive, close observation of birds, imagining oneself in the animal’s sub-
jective experience, and developing an affective connection with them—maps onto the
practices of bird banding and a wide range of contemporary humanities and social sci-
ence work. Recentering Nice, therefore, both enriches our understanding of twentieth-
century biology and offers inspiration to scholars in the present exploring more-than-
human worlds and ethics.
Bird Banding: Institutions and Embodied Experience
Systematic bird banding—affixing metal or plastic “bands” to birds to track their move-
ments over time—seems to have emerged in several places in North America around
the turn of the twentieth century.10 For the purposes of briefly tracing the institutional
lineage of banding in the US, the work of Leon Cole is a logical starting point. Cole
began local banding efforts with members of the New Haven Bird Club, suggesting
larger-scale banding to the Congress of the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU, now
the American Ornithological Society) in November 1908. By the end of 1909 about one
thousand birds had been banded and members of the AOU organized the American
Bird Banding Association (ABBA). In the wake of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918,
banding became an official ornithological pursuit organized and licensed under the aus-
pices of the US Bureau of Biological Survey. The Biological Survey took over banding
records, supplies, and authority from ABBA in 1920. The Biological Survey solicited par-
ticipation, issued prestamped aluminum bands, and created a number of documents
(discussed below) to disseminate banding methods and results. The Biological Survey
8. See, respectively, Barrow, Passion for Birds, 195–98; Mitman and Burkhardt, “Struggling for Identity”;
Benson, “Centrifuge of Calculation”; and Ogilvie, For the Birds.
9. Tinbergen, “On Aims and Methods of Ethology.” See discussion section below for a summary of this
literature.
10. For a concise and thorough history of early, interwar banding, see Benson, “Centrifuge of Calcula-
tion.” See also Barrow, Passion for Birds, 169–71; Wood, “History of Bird Banding”; and Tautin, “One Hundred
Years of Bird Banding in North America.”
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf
by guestWhitney / Bird Banding and the Environmental Humanities 117
was merged into the newly created US FWS in 1940. The first twenty-five years of band-
ing, begun under the Biological Survey and continued under the FWS, saw more than
4.5 million birds banded.11
While the institutional history of bird banding is one of slow professionalization—
bending the practice toward the monitoring of game fowl on wildlife refuges—regional,
and largely avocational, banding organizations also played a pivotal role in field orni-
thology. Perhaps chief among these organizations was the New England Bird Banding
Association, begun in 1922 and renamed the Northeastern Bird Banding Association
(NEBBA) in 1924. NEBBA published its own bulletin the following year, which became
the nationally distributed journal Bird-Banding in 1930. Over the course of the twentieth
century, NEBBA became the Association of Field Ornithologists, and Bird-Banding be-
came the Journal of Field Ornithology.12 In this and the following section, I focus on the
extensive publications of birdbanders—amateur and professional, public and private—
as a way to track not solely the ebbs and flows of institutional support for banders and
banding but also to describe a rich catalog of the experiences of banding. Institutional
support was important, of course, as birdbanders and wildlife researchers attested at
the time, but beneath the surface of banding supplies, techniques, and number crunch-
ing was a world of human and nonhuman interactions that lend themselves to an
embodied environmental history of banding and a focus on intersubjective experi-
ence.13 As Sellers suggests, describing these interactions as fundamentally phenomeno-
logical approaches to understanding nature helps to reveal the embodied experience of
perceiving bird behavior—perceptions that underpinned banding and ethological work.
As David Abram describes it, “By asserting that perception, phenomenologically consid-
ered, is inherently participatory, we mean that perception always involves, at is most
intimate level, the experience of an active interplay, of coupling, between the perceiving
body and that which it perceives.”14 Together, that is, birds and banders have worked to-
gether during the twentieth century to shape our knowledge of wildlife movement and
behavior.15
This approach jibes with what other environmental historians and historians of
science have mentioned in passing about the practices of naturalists and early ecolo-
gists. Robert Kohler, for example, notes that for natural history collectors “knowing the
animals was an empathic ability to think or even act like the animals themselves,” and
that “data had in effect to be lived and experienced, by the ecologist, as resident animals
11. Wood, “History of Bird Banding.” Banding authority is today housed in the USGS Bird Banding Lab at
the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in the state of Maryland. Since 1960 the lab has received more than sixty-
four million banding records. See “How Many Bird Are Banded?” www.pwrc.usgs.gov/BBL/homepage
/howmany.cfm (accessed July 9, 2020).
12. Davis, “History of the Association of Field Ornithologists.”
13. Sellers, “Thoreau’s Body,” 487.
14. Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, 57.
15. On the relational co-construction of knowledge between humans and nonhumans, see Benson,
“Animal Writes”; and Whitney, “Domesticating Nature?”
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf
by guest118 Environmental Humanities 13:1 / May 2021
experienced the events.”16 But to expand these ideas in explicitly phenomenological
terms I find it useful to distinguish between three kinds of embodied perceptions: (1)
“intimate study” and descriptions of bird behavior that required a phenomenological
imagination of what the animal was experiencing—sympathetic observation in the words
of Nice and her contemporary in comparative psychology David Katz;17 (2) the implicit
understanding of bird behavior that underlies trapping and banding; and (3) the affec-
tion and anthropomorphism (critical or not) that seemed to come along with such
methods.18 All three were present in early banding and ethology—and, as I discuss in
the final section, these intersubjective aspects of banding are also to be found in later
“cognitive ethology” and multispecies studies.
Writing on the early history of banding, Frederick Lincoln credited S. Prentiss
Baldwin—a wealthy avocational ornithologist in Cleveland—with demonstrating the
use of traps in conjunction with banding to yield efficient, nonlethal “returns” (i.e., get-
ting information about the movements of live, recaptured birds rather than banding re-
cords sent in from shot game birds).19 Beginning in 1914 his techniques served as a basis
for later Biological Survey manuals and bulletins prescribing proper bird handling and
trapping, and soliciting experimentation and advice from the nationwide community
of banders. A close reading of these documents yields not only a catalog of devices and
techniques used to trap and band migratory birds but also a window into the embodied
relationships between banders and their subjects.
As illustrated by Lincoln’s 1921 USDA Circular, Instructions for Bird Banding, which
drew heavily on Baldwin’s early banding work, trapping birds for banding evolved from
the use of “government sparrow traps” to remove and destroy species such as the Eng-
lish sparrow from agricultural fields, where they were considered pests. This pattern,
modifying hunting and trapping equipment for use as banding technology, was re-
peated throughout the century.20 Despite direct comparisons to, and connections with,
hunting and trapping, banders from the first were adamant about the conservation
value of their activities and establishing the fact that banding caused no harm to the
birds. As stated in the Biological Survey’s Bird Banding Notes, “It is now generally con-
ceded that the use of bird sanctuaries as banding stations is in no way detrimental to
their original purpose, but instead is distinctly advantageous and it gives those in
charge a scientific reason for protecting and encouraging the birds.”21
16. Kohler, All Creatures, 187 (emphasis in the original); Kohler, “Paul Errington, Aldo Leopold, and Wildlife
Ecology,” 240. More recently Kohler has expanded his notion of “residential science” with a number of case
studies in the history of science including the primatology of Jane Goodall, part of the resurgence of interest in
animal subjectivities discussed in the final section. See Kohler, Inside Science.
17. Nice, “Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow II,” 1–2.
18. On emotion and affect in bird banding specifically, see Whitney, “Tangled Up in Knots.”
19. Lincoln, “History and Purposes of Bird Banding.”
20. Murphy, “Bird-Netting as a Technique for Banding Shore-Birds”; Low, “Banding with Mist Nets.”
21. Bureau of Biological Survey, Bird Banding Notes, 5.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf
by guestWhitney / Bird Banding and the Environmental Humanities 119
Banders and administrators repeatedly insisted in writing that banding had no
deleterious effects. Take, for example, Lincoln’s assertion in the pages of the Auk: “The
merits of the question as to the relative harm done to bird life through such operations
may well be discussed. Occasionally birds will be injured or even killed through acci-
dents in the trap or through careless or inexperienced handling, but such occurrences
are so rare that they may be totally ignored. A band properly placed causes neither
harm nor discomfort to the wearer.”22 Evidence for the assertion that bands caused no
discomfort to birds was built up through careful and repeated observations of their
behavior, which necessarily took the form of adopting the subject-position of the ani-
mal. As this quote hints, Lincoln’s writing was rich with phenomenological accounts of
what it was like to be both a bander and a bird. For banders, “a lively interest attaches to
the work in that each operator of a station is in a continual state of anticipation through
the knowledge that birds banded at other stations may at any time be register at his
own traps.”23 And as for the birds, “frequently after the hand is opened a bird will lie
quietly, not seeming to realize that it is free, and it may even permit gentle stroking or
the spreading of a wing. Such occurrences are interesting bits of life history information
and should be watched for and encouraged, and also reported in detail on the sched-
ules.”24 Banding could be exciting for the bander, calming for the bandee, and important
to science.
In a later National Geographic article on banding penned by former chief of the Bio-
logical Survey Edward Nelson, banding was similarly lauded for its value to science, the
joy it brings to the bander, and its harmlessness to the birds:
Even on a town lot, trapping and banding such wild, elusive creatures as birds have the
elements of romance and adventure. . . . The recapture, after a long absence, of birds
where they were banded is a joyful event. Since last seen the little wanderer may have
visited the desolate shore of the Arctic Ocean or may have sojourned in the luxuriant
tropical forests under the Equator. Bird banding opens the door to an intimate knowl-
edge of wild birds in a manner and on a scale hitherto impossible. . . . Not only may defi-
nite answers be found to problems formerly unanswerable, but the investigator has the
added joy of pitting his wits against those of wild things in their capture. This gives an
outlet to that spirit of the chase which has come down to most of us from our primitive
ancestors, and is one of its delightful but harmless manifestations, to be classed with
the sport of wild-life photography.25
Romantic descriptions of the mysteries of migration were every bit as common in writ-
ing about bird banding as tender or amusing anecdotes about handling birds as well as
22. Lincoln, “History and Purposes of Bird Banding,” 225.
23. Lincoln, Instructions for Bird Banding, 4.
24. Lincoln, Instructions for Bird Banding, 17.
25. Nelson, “Bird Banding, the Telltale of Migratory Flight,” 103.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf
by guest120 Environmental Humanities 13:1 / May 2021
insistence that trapping and banding had no injurious effects on birds or bird popula-
tions. Aldo Leopold himself waxed eloquent about the “thrill” of banding for the bander,
the “mild annoyance” experienced by the birds, and the rigorous “quantitative science”
that banding has helped to create. In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold describes the plea-
sures of banding “to the old-timer the banding of new birds becomes merely pleasant
routine; the real thrill lies in the re-capture of some bird banded long ago, some bird
whose age, adventures, and previous condition of appetite are perhaps better known to
you than to the bird himself.”26 But he also describes the experience, using poetic li-
cense, of the bandee, in this case chickadee “65290”: “When banded and released he
fluttered up to a limb, pecked his new aluminum anklet in mild annoyance, shook his
mussed feathers, cursed gently, and hurried away to catch up with the gang.”27 For Leo-
pold, as for other banders, administrators, and scientists of the period, banding was
about the pleasure it held for the bander, imagining the birds’ subjective experience,
and the anthropomorphization of these animals as a way to understand their behavior
and justify banding activities. As he wrote later in the Almanac, “Field studies have
developed techniques and ideas quite as scientific as those of the laboratory. The ama-
teur student is no longer confined to pleasant ambles in the country resulting merely in
lists of species, lists of migration dates, and lists of rarities. Bird banding, feather-
marking, censusing, and experimental manipulations of behavior and environment are
techniques available to all, and they are quantitative science.”28
These ideas about the philosophy, value, and practice of banding very much rang
true throughout the century and into the present. As Elliot McClure reflected in the
mid-1980s,
In ringing [banding], the bird is the primary objective. It is to be captured, studied alive,
recorded, and ringed. The governing thought is that it must be released uninjured—
uninjured both physically and “emotionally.” . . . Bird banding is a philosophy, an atti-
tude, without which the would-be ringer had best desist his efforts. No phase of research
in avian bionomics requires more patience or more consideration for the subject than
does bird ringing.29
Bird banding was, in the minds of professional and amateur banders—whether
interested in migration or behavior—a key technique in ornithology. This technique,
ostensibly disinterested, objective knowledge for use in wildlife management, was in
fact a richly embodied, intersubjective experience with nonhuman nature that required
a phenomenological imagination to understand how to trap birds and interpret their
behavior, and led to affective bonds between scientist and subject. And these bonds,
26. Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 93.
27. Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 94.
28. Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 207–8.
29. McClure, Bird Banding, 20.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf
by guestWhitney / Bird Banding and the Environmental Humanities 121
most famously in the case of Leopold, were associated with a strong wildlife conserva-
tion ethic. In the next section, I turn to the example of Margaret Morse Nice as an avid
and innovative bander, a founder of ethology, and an embodiment of the phenomeno-
logical aspects of avian research and conservation.
Margaret Morse Nice and the Phenomenology of Banding
Margaret Morse was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1883. Her undergraduate edu-
cation at Mount Holyoke piqued her intellectual curiosity in a number of subjects, but
she was unable to reconcile her love of the outdoors with the focus on dissection and
taxonomy prevalent in zoology at the turn of the twentieth century. Graduate work at
Clark University in 1907 allowed her to explore experimental and observational studies
of live animals, however, and she began a research project on the feeding habits of bob-
white. Her graduate studies were cut short with her marriage to Leonard Blaine Nice in
1909, but she was to pursue her passion for research by any and all means for the rest of
her life. Despite her lack of an academic position or a PhD, by any measure Nice’s career
was astoundingly successful. And it was her explicitly phenomenological research on
Song Sparrows—aided in no small part by novel banding techniques—that secured her
reputation as a brilliant and pioneering ethologist.30
As prior work on Nice has shown, she helped to build extensive networks of insti-
tutions and people, and leveraged these networks to conduct and promote her own
intensive, species-level research on bird behavior. And as several historians note, Nice
was a prodigious reviewer of international ornithological literature for the journal Bird-
Banding, mentioned above, for decades beginning in the 1930s. She also used the plat-
form to report on conferences, as in the January 1935 issue of the journal. Remarking
on the themes covered by the Eighth International Ornithological Congress in Oxford,
Nice noted that banding was well represented in the section on “Migration and Ecology,”
while “there were less than half a dozen papers on life-history subjects,” including her
own work on the song sparrow and Konrad Lorenz’s presentation on “Comparative So-
ciology of Colony-Breeding Birds.”31 Despite the seeming low status or representation
of banding in the service of behavioral and life-history studies, it was here that Nice
joined the company of biologists who would become internationally renowned for such
studies. It was at this conference, in fact, that Nice met Konrad Lorenz in person and
had “the rich opportunity of many visits together,” having read each other’s work in
the Journal für Ornithologie (now the Journal of Ornithology). Julian Huxley invited both Lor-
enz and Nice to lunch, for “vivid tales of bird behavior.”32
Both Huxley and Nice, along with Niko Tinbergen and others, would be invited
nearly thirty years later to publish a series of articles and reflections in honor of
30. For full biographical details, see Ogilvie, For the Birds; Burkhardt, “Margaret Morse Nice”; Bonta,
Women in the Field, 222–31; and Nice, Research Is a Passion with Me.
31. Nice, “Eighth International Ornithological Congress,” 29.
32. Nice, “My Debt to Konrad Lorenz.”
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf
by guest122 Environmental Humanities 13:1 / May 2021
Lorenz’s sixtieth birthday in Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie (now the journal Ethology).
Nice’s relationship to Konrad Lorenz was particularly important—in addition to their
subsequent correspondence, Nice spent a month working with Lorenz in Austria in
1938 and Lorenz penned the forward to her autobiography decades later. My focus here
is not to mark Nice’s importance by virtue of the more-famous men she associated
with. Her work stood on its own and much has been written about the gendered aspects
of Nice’s less-visible career.33 Rather, her descriptions of her own, and Lorenz’s, work
with bird behavior help to point up the epistemological stances that trapping, banding,
and observing made possible and necessary. In the festschrift just mentioned, for exam-
ple, Nice paid tribute to her “guide, philosopher and friend” by quoting her own “Behav-
ior of the Song Sparrow and other passerines” to observe that “gifted with an unusual
sympathy for animals and insight into their ways, Lorenz makes use of . . . his own var-
ied and intimate experiences with birds.”34 Historians Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie and Ri-
chard Burkhardt each detail the personal and intellectual connections between Nice
and Lorenz, but in many ways Nice more than Lorenz—as will be discussed below—
prefigured the turn back to sympathetic understanding of animal subjectivities in late
twentieth-century ethology.35
Nice’s most well-known studies were with Song Sparrows outside her home near
Columbus, Ohio—work that would earn her the highest of praise among her contempo-
raries. In an unpublished manuscript by Leopold, clearly referring to Nice, he summa-
rizes the complexity of Nice’s contribution—her scientific perspective and status as
well as the derision she faced by virtue of her lack of position and credentials:
Another exploration—this time literally of a back yard, is a study of the Song Sparrow
conducted by an Ohio housewife. This commonest of birds had been scientifically la-
belled, pigeon-holed a hundred years ago, and forthwith forgotten. Our Ohio amateur
had the notion that in birds, as in people, there are things to be known over and above
name, sex, and clothes. She began trapping the song sparrows in her garden, marking
each with a celluloid anklet, and being thus able to identify each individual by its colored
marker, to observe and record their migrations, feedings, fightings, singings, matings,
nestings and deaths; in short, to decipher the inner workings of the sparrow community.
In ten years she knew more about sparrow society, sparrow politics, sparrow economics,
and sparrow psychology than anyone had ever learned about any bird. . . . Ornithologists
of all nations seek her counsel.36
33. See, e.g., Ogilvie, For the Birds, 104.
34. Nice, “My Debt to Konrad Lorenz.”
35. Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior; Ogilvie, For the Birds, 129–34. Ogilvie states that “the basic theoreti-
cal structure for her [song sparrow] book was Lorenzian” (195). Nice herself, in correspondence with A. L. Rand
at the American Museum of Natural History, wrote, “I am no rabid pro-Lorenzian, although possibly I once was!”
(Morse Nice to Rand, December 4, 1940, box 6, folder 2, Margaret Morse Nice Papers, Division of Rare and
Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library).
36. Leopold, Aldo, the Aldo Leopold Archives, University of Wisconsin. Writings: Unpublished
Manuscripts—AL’s Desk File. Philosophic and literary to 1940, p. 513.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf
by guestWhitney / Bird Banding and the Environmental Humanities 123
While Leopold’s reference to Nice as an “amateur” and “housewife” (the latter a
label at which Nice bristled) made his praise of her sparrow work somewhat of a back-
handed compliment, other writing suggested, in fact, that Nice’s work and methodolo-
gies were precisely what he considered the cutting edge of “wildlife research.” Com-
menting on this “new field” in his home state of Wisconsin in the mid-1930s, Leopold
suggested that research on wildlife should be conservation minded, diverse in terms of
both investigators and investigatory methods, and local. Lamenting that scientific insti-
tutions “should have to seek outlets for its brains and energy in expeditions to foreign
lands,” he suggested that “the era of geographical exploration of the earth is about
over, but the era of ecological exploration of our own dooryards has just begun. Wildlife
research is one of many virgin fields of inquiry in which any persistent investigator may
contribute not only to science but also to the permanence of the organic resources on
which civilization is dependent.”37
Encouraged by Ernst Mayr, a longtime friend and collaborator of Nice, Leopold
soon after published a review of Nice’s song sparrow work. The praise could hardly
have been higher. “If field ornithology has produced any science, this is it. In it [the
study] is exhibited a complete and convincing integration of the field observation, con-
trolled experimentation, and scientific deduction. . . . She marshals her evidence on
question after question in bird physiology, psychology, and ecology which the old-
fashioned field naturalist has hardly heard of, and which the laboratory scientist has
discussed only in terms of white rats, guinea pigs, and fruit flies. This feat of moving
laboratory methods into the outdoors is made possible by the individual identification
of an entire song sparrow population by means of coloured and numbered leg bands.”38
Lauded by ethologists, ornithologists, and ecologists such as Lorenz, Tinbergen, Huxley,
Mayr, and Leopold, Nice’s research showed the benefits to be gained by close attention
to and intimate association with bird behavior, made possible by the practice of banding.
It is from Nice’s Song Sparrow work itself that we can get a sense for the embod-
ied, phenomenological nature of her research in the three ways described above. In the
second volume of her study, published in the Transactions of the Linnaean Society in 1943,
Nice is explicit that her approach to bird behavior is phenomenological: “The technique
of my study was largely . . . the ‘phenomenological method.’” She then goes on to ex-
plain this “description of behavior,” quoting David Katz’s 1937 Animals and Men, as “a con-
tinuous sympathetic observation of an animal under as natural conditions as possible.
To some degree one must transfer oneself into the animal’s situation and inwardly
take part in its behavior.” Nice then continued, “It is all-important to see and record ex-
actly what a bird does. Instead of saying one bird ‘threatens’ another, we should de-
scribe precisely the notes and gestures. We need to know a bird’s equipment of instinc-
tive actions before we can judge as to what is innate and what is learned.” By her own
37. Leopold, “Wild Life Research in Wisconsin,” 207–8.
38. Leopold, “Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow Vol. 1,” 126.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf
by guest124 Environmental Humanities 13:1 / May 2021
description, to address the pressing questions about animal behavior of her time—
whether innate or learned, mechanistic or mindful, intelligent or emotional—the ob-
server must to some extent take part in, and faithfully record, that behavior. This is the
“intimate study” of bird behavior that was replete in her popular and scientific writ-
ings.39 Her descriptions required an embodied sense of what an individual bird was
doing and why.
A more subtle form of this phenomenology was the understanding of bird behav-
ior necessary to trap and band them in the first place. Nice went into great detail with
respect to her banding methods in the first volume of the Song Sparrow study, printed
six years earlier in 1937. As with other banders of her time she stated that “as a rule
the birds can be trapped without too much trouble and are not disturbed by the experi-
ence.”40 In the first appendix of this study she explained her methods for “trapping the
birds,” each of which required Nice to understand the behavior of birds and the utility
of using “food,” “rivals,” and “nestlings” as bait in the traps. On using rivals as bait, for
example, Nice wrote,
Sometimes birds can be captured by using rivals as decoys, i.e. if I have caught a male
and place him in the trap on his neighbor’s territory, the latter may enter the trap, or a
female may be caught in the same way by using a next-door female. But this method is
successful only with birds that know each other, for otherwise a Song Sparrow cannot
tell the sex of one of its kind in the trap any more surely than a person can, and the pres-
ence of a strange Song Sparrow in this situation usually arouses little interest on the part
of the male owner of the territory and even less from the female. In some cases in March
and early April this method has proved helpful, but in others neighbors have failed to be-
come sufficiently aroused to go into the trap.”41
This intimate understanding of bird behavior underpinned all banding-related study
whether or not it was explicitly focused on behavior. In that sense, not only ethology
but also migration studies and avian ecology benefitted throughout the century by the
epistemology and methods pioneered and championed by scientists like Nice.42
There was, and is, a purported epistemological pitfall in attempting to describe,
share, or embody the behavior of wildlife—the specter of anthropomorphization.43
39. Nice, Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow II, 1–2. Historian of science Katherine Pandora
has found Nice’s description of her method similarly noteworthy, marking that Nice’s phenomenology “de-
manded intuitive insight” into the lives of birds and linking it to “field studies” across scientific disciplines. See
Pandora, Rebels within the Ranks, 138.
40. Nice, Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow II, 3.
41. Nice, Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow II, 215.
42. On the historical and theoretical links between bird banding and various kinds of ethology, see McDo-
nald, Jackson, and Davis, “History of the Role of Bird Banding in Avian Behavioral Research.”
43. On anthropomorphism broadly, see Daston and Mitman, Thinking with Animals. On “critical anthropo-
morphism” in animals studies, see Weil, “A Report on the Animal Turn.”
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf
by guestWhitney / Bird Banding and the Environmental Humanities 125
Ascribing human motivations, ethics, or behaviors to birds, or conflating animal and
human minds, was paradoxically both common and frowned upon. Nice, like her fa-
mous contemporaries, was no exception.44 For example, in her “Relations between the
Sexes in Song Sparrows” in the Wilson Bulletin, Nice provided intensive descriptions of
sparrow behavior, but by the end of the article expressed worry that her sparrows did
not seem suitably monogamous: “I hope that this paper will not give a false impression
of the marital relations of my Song Sparrows; although considerable space has been de-
voted to desertions . . . the majority of my birds are models of devotion to home, mate,
and family.”45
Nice was of course aware of the tensions inherent in writing about nonhuman
behaviors and minds in (necessarily) human terms, writing in her chapter summaries
of the second Song Sparrow volume that “although it was tempting to point out analo-
gies with human behavior in many places, I refrained from doing so until the final chap-
ter.”46 Nice’s biographer has noted that “although Nice described the activities of the
birds in anthropomorphic terms in her popular works . . . in her formal papers she kept
fastidious records of the behavior of these birds and generally refrained from using such
descriptions. . . . Nice’s anthropomorphic treatment of her Song Sparrows in her popu-
lar writing did not mask her original, meticulous, and consistent observations of the
lives of those birds.”47 This is no doubt the case, yet it is perhaps interesting to note the
times at which Nice and her contemporaries chose (deliberately or not) to compare peo-
ple and birds. In the Song Sparrow study, she praised the “wide experience” and “sym-
pathy with wild birds” that investigators into avian ethology share, and devoted the
twelfth and final chapter to the “innate and learned behavior in the adult.” In it, she
used ethologists’ theories to analyze the balance between innate and learned behavior
as well as emotions, intelligence, and culture in birds, while at the same time discussing
the “instincts” and “suggestibility of human beings.”48 Nice made clear in this chapter the
reason for a phenomenological method that at times bordered on anthropomorphism—a
willingness and ability to sympathize, describe, and analyze behavior that draws analo-
gies between different kinds of minds. In her words, “The study of animal behavior is
the only and ultimate source of understanding ourselves.”49
Discussion: Fellow-Feeling, Ethology, and the Environmental Humanities
By way of discussion, below I describe in more detail the phenomenological method
that Nice promoted; trace the historical arc from Nice and the ethologists who inspired
44. Etienne S. Benson remarks on the commonplace and seemingly unproblematic practice of naming
and anthropomorphizing animals at this time in “Naming the Ethological Subject.”
45. Nice, “Relations between the Sexes in Song Sparrows,” 59.
46. Nice, Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow II, 2.
47. Ogilvie, For the Birds, 150–51.
48. Nice, Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow II, 4, 266, 270.
49. Nice, Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow II, 273.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf
by guest126 Environmental Humanities 13:1 / May 2021
her, through classical ethology, to cognitive ethology and beyond; and discuss the ways
in which Nice’s sympathetic observation of birds is relevant to contemporary, “posthu-
manist” work in the humanities and social sciences.
The Phenomenological Method and “Fellow-Feeling”
As mentioned above, Nice herself framed her study as employing the phenomenological
method of the psychologist David Katz.50 In Animals and Men, Katz described this
method in detail, of which the “only aim is to describe the psychologically meaningful
behavior of animals just as it finds it.” He went on, “To do this . . . one has to feel oneself
into the animal’s situation under the most natural conditions possible. A useful index
of success is the accuracy with which one can predict the animal’s future behavior in a
particular situation.”51 This description, and certainly Nice’s use of the method, again
maps onto the three aspects of an embodied understanding of bird behavior outlined
above—intense observation (usually in the bird’s habitat), the understanding of any
given bird’s likely “future behavior” required to trap and band it, and the attempt to
bond with and share subjective space with the bird (to “feel oneself into the animal’s sit-
uation”). With regard to the first, and possibly the second, there was no disagreement—
close, careful observation of animals was the foundation of older forms of natural
history and the “classical ethology” of Lorenz, Tinbergen, et al.52 It is also, as I discuss
further below, the foundation of more-than-human ethnographic work in the environ-
mental humanities.
The third aspect, however, explicitly drawing on the phenomenological method of
Katz and Nice, represents a break from ethologists like Lorenz and Tinbergen who fa-
vored outward, “objective” descriptions of mechanical, instinctive behavior and actively
discouraged explanations of animals’ subjective experiences as unscientific.53 Further-
more, to return to Animals and Men, taking part in animal subjectivities was explicitly
emotional and affective—quoting the Dutch ethologist Bierens de Haan, Katz wrote, “It
is not by analogy of external signs that we draw conclusions as to special emotions or
desires or perceptions in a dog or bird, but by imagining ourselves to be the animal, by
conceiving what would be our perception and feelings and desires if we were in the ani-
mal’s place.”54
Beyond her printed work, in private correspondence Nice was quite clear about the
need for such empathetic, affective engagement with birds. In a 1953 letter to zoologist
John Emlen, offering criticisms on one of his ornithological manuscripts, Nice wrote,
“I’m not impressed about this denying ‘emotion’ to birds. Heinroth knew vastly more
50. Nice, Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow II, 1–2.
51. Katz, Animals and Men, 46.
52. See Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior, 162–63, 167; Macdonald, “‘What Makes You a Scientist Is the
Way You Look at Things.’”
53. Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior, 116, 201, 471.
54. Katz, Animals and Men, 47.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf
by guestWhitney / Bird Banding and the Environmental Humanities 127
about birds and other animals than do most of the present day animal psychologists
and he said birds are ‘Gefühlstiere’ [emotional animals].” After numerous similar cri-
tiques, she ended the letter with a general note on bonding with birds: “Study of a live
animal is different from a problem in chemistry. No one can understand birds and
other animals without a real sympathy for them. Without this fellow-feeling I say that
the study will be arid and misleading.”55 “Fellow-feeling” was both a salient aspect and
consequence of Nice’s phenomenological method for understanding avian behavior
and the close intersubjectivity involved in banding birds.
Nice, Classical Ethology and Cognitive Ethology
Historians and STS scholars have portrayed the mid-twentieth century as the period of
classical ethology of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, during which the subjective
experiences of animals were expunged from objective science, a situation remedied by
primate studies in the 1960s and the advent of cognitive ethology in the 1970s.56 Margaret
Morse Nice, positioned at the crossroads of mid-century field ornithology and ethology—
borrowing from and corresponding with Lorenz but unabashedly promoting sympathy
with birds and the phenomenological method—complicates this picture considerably.
Nice’s work and intellectual commitments offer historical continuity from earlier natu-
ralists and proto-ethologists like Jacob von Uexküll through to cognitive ethologists
such as the zoologist Donald Griffin, comparative psychologist Gordon Burghardt, and
ethologist Marc Bekoff.57 And although (and unfortunately) Nice has been largely forgot-
ten or passed over by cognitive ethologists, it is worth understanding the strong reso-
nance between the philosophy of cognitive ethology, the phenomenology of bird band-
ing, and the promises of more contemporary “multispecies studies.”
55. Nice to Emlen, February 14, 1953, box 6, folder 9, Margaret Morse Nice Papers, Division of Rare and
Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Oskar Heinroth, like Jacob von Uexküll, was an early influence
on both Lorenz and Nice, who unapologetically studied the subjective experience of animals.
56. See Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior; Crist, Images of Animals; Crist, “Ecocide and the Extinction of An-
imal Minds”; Mitman, “Pachyderm Personalities,” 178; Lestel, Bussolini, and Chrulew, “Phenomenology of Ani-
mal Life,” 127; Lingis, “Understanding Avian Intelligence,” 46. One of the founders of cognitive ethology, Gordon
Burghardt, explicitly sought to reexpand Tinbergian ethology to include the inner lives of animals. See Burghardt,
“Amending Tinbergen.” And Donald Griffin, arguably the founder of cognitive ethology, reflected on the history of
the field noting the same lacuna of animal subjectivity mid-century: “Behaviorism in psychology and reduction-
ism in biology were so dominant from roughly the 1920s to the 1960s that scientists were reluctant even to con-
sider the possibility that there was such a thing as animal cognition, let alone animal consciousness.” See Griffin,
“From Cognition to Consciousness,” 3. For a recent exception to this portrayal of mid-century ethology, see
Rose, In the Hearts of the Beasts.
57. These three scientists are often cited as the pioneers and leading proponents of incorporating animal
subjectivities back into biology, and all three agree that the publication of Griffin’s 1976 The Question of Animal
Awareness was a watershed moment in the creation of cognitive ethology. For work marrying phenomenological
philosophy with traditions in biology and natural history that explored animal experience of the world (e.g. Um-
welt), see Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies; and Whitney, “Domesticating Nature?” In Patterns of Behavior, Burkhardt
extensively documents the influence of von Uexküll on Lorenz—and by extension, Nice.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf
by guest128 Environmental Humanities 13:1 / May 2021
Griffin, Burghardt, and Bekoff each approached cognitive ethology slightly differ-
ently, but all grant—and investigate—the inner, subjective experiences of nonhuman
animals. Griffin has focused on animal awareness and “the value of animal communi-
cation as a source of evidence . . . that can provide investigators with information about
what animals are thinking and feeling.”58 Burghardt has called for “a critical anthropo-
morphism and predictive inference that encourages the use of data from many
sources . . . [including]: anecdotes . . . one’s thoughts and feelings . . . imagining being
the animal . . . naturalistic observations, etc.”59 And Bekoff, perhaps the greatest propo-
nent of an expanded cognitive ethology as the unifying science of animal behavior, has
written on the discipline in terms that dovetail neatly with the phenomenology of bird
banding: as rooted in “careful observation and description of the behavior patterns,”
explicitly involving the “phenomenology of animal consciousness,” and with the goal
of “understanding the subjective, emotional, empathic, and moral lives of animals.”60
In addition to a shared interest in animal subjectivity, these ethologists also read-
ily dismiss charges of anthropomorphism as circular reasoning on the part of detrac-
tors, and consider critical anthropomorphism a “pragmatic strategy” for generating
testable inferences about animal awareness.61 Bekoff writes, “Anthropomorphism has
survived a long time, because it is the only reference point and vocabulary we have. It
must be done carefully and biocentrically, as we make every attempt to maintain the
animal’s point of view by asking ‘What is it like to be _______?’ Claims that anthropo-
morphism has no place in science or that anthropomorphic predictions and explana-
tions are less accurate than behaviorist or more mechanistic or reductionistic explana-
tions are not supported by any data.”62 And Harry Greene, an ecologist who studied
under Burghardt, is explicit about getting into the heads of animals for science, claiming
that we “use human perceptions, intuition, and feelings, our inner worlds, to forge
novel, testable hypotheses about those of other species.”63
Again, I would argue that Nice, often overlooked by contemporary humanities
scholars and almost universally unacknowledged by contemporary ethologists (“cogni-
tive” or otherwise), serves to correct the notion that mid-century biology was barren of
scientific attempts to understand and empathize with the subjective experiences of ani-
mals, and that her phenomenological method and the embodied understanding of
58. Griffin, “From Cognition to Consciousness,” 4.
59. Burghardt, “Animal Awareness,” 917.
60. See, respectively, Bekoff, Animal Passions and Beastly Virtues, 41; and Bekoff, “Animal Passions and
Beastly Virtues,” 74.
61. See, respectively, Griffin, “From Cognition to Consciousness,” 11; and Burghardt, “Animal Aware-
ness,” 916.
62. Bekoff, “Animal Passions and Beastly Virtues,” 89.
63. Greene, Tracks and Shadows, 188. For a similar perspective related to birds specifically, see Birkhead,
Bird Sense.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf
by guestWhitney / Bird Banding and the Environmental Humanities 129
behavior made possible through bird banding strongly resonate with the supposedly re-
newed interest in animal subjectivity represented by post-1970 cognitive ethology.64
Multispecies Studies and the Phenomenological Method
The stories of bird banding and Nice also evoke the broad movement across the social
sciences and humanities recently dubbed in the pages of this journal “multispecies
studies.”65 Acknowledging the complementary approach of “behavioral biologists”
(including Marc Bekoff ) who “have for many years been actively engaged in challenging
and reinventing the practices of knowing and experimenting within their fields,
acknowledging the subjectivity and individuality of their research partners as well as
the researcher’s own context, embodied situatedness, and implication in what is able
to be known,” multispecies studies scholars promote “passionate immersion” that “at
its core . . . involves attentive interactions with diverse lifeways . . . to provide ‘thick’ ac-
counts of the distinctive experiential worlds, modes of being, and biocultural attach-
ments of other species.”66
Under the multispecies studies umbrella are scholars from a range of humanities
disciplines who foreground ethological inquiry, phenomenological methods, or both.
And these, too, map onto the phenomenological method of Katz and Nice. Scholars
explicitly drawing on the phenomenological tradition of Merleau-Ponty, for example,
stress “directly-felt impressions of the world” and the “painstaking act of immanent
attention” to accomplish “intrasubjective understanding” between humans and nonhu-
man others.67 Such acts of embodied attentiveness, in turn, reveal the inner lives of ani-
mals. As Eileen Crist has written of the naturalist tradition, “Knowing animals as sub-
jects, that is, with an experiential perspective and with authoring force, assembles a
world within which inner life has a part to play and is scenically present.”68 And as
Donna Haraway has noted, drawing on the phenomenology of technology, such inter-
subjectivities are not simply rooted in careful attention and observation, but are
wrapped up in technique and touch: “Animals, humans, and machines are all en-
meshed in hermeneutic labor.”69 This aptly describes the “commensal” relationship be-
tween Nice (or any bander) and bird—the application of colored bands, initiated through
capture and touch, create the individualization of birds that is the necessary first step of
long-term observation and further intersubjectivity.
64. Phenomenological methods go beyond ethology to include environmental sciences more generally.
See Roth and Bowen, “Of Disciplined Minds and Disciplined Bodies,” arguing that phenomenological embodi-
ment is the “hinge in the making of ecologists.”
65. van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster, “Multispecies Studies.” For a similar movement in sociology, see
Taylor, Sutton, and Wilke, “Sociology of Multi-Species Relations.”
66. van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster, “Multispecies Studies,” 6. The “arts of attentiveness” here draw on
the work of Anna Tsing. See, e.g., Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 17.
67. See Abram, “Becoming Animal,” 15; and Carlin, “Playing Coyote.”
68. Crist, Images of Animals, 123.
69. Haraway, When Species Meet, 262.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/13/1/113/924141/113whitney.pdf
by guestYou can also read
