Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (2014) 78–87

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and

Biomedical Sciences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc

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 i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Using a recent environmental controversy on the U.S. east coast over the conservation of red knots (Cal-
Received 29 August 2013 idris canutus rufa) as a lens, I present a history of North American efforts to understand and conserve
Received in revised form 25 October 2013 migratory shorebirds. Focusing on a few signal pieces of American legislation and their associated
Available online 21 November 2013
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
Keywords: have been described by some scholars as ‘‘domestication’’—a level of surveillance and intervention into
Wildlife biology
nonhuman nature that constitutes a form of dependence. I pause to reflect on this historical trajectory,
Conservation
Domestication
pointing out the breaks and continuities with older forms of natural history. Using the oft-mobilized Fou-
Umwelt cauldian metaphor of the panopticon as a foil, I question the utility and ethics of too-easily declaring
Ontology ‘‘domesticated’’ wildlife an act of ‘‘biopower.’’ Instead, I argue that Jacob von Uexküll’s ‘‘umwelt’’ from
Foucault early ecology and ethology, and more contemporary Science and Technology Studies (STS) analyses
emphasizing multiple ontologies, offer more illuminating accounts of endangered species science. Nei-
ther 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 sulfu-
rous/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 draw-
ing upon the resources of the Delaware for decades, if not centu-
ries. The Bay, in fact, has been a major center for a number of
industries—most prominently fisheries—for the duration of Euro-
pean 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 palimp-
sest 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 environmen-
tal commons.
Recent fisheries in the Delaware Bay, for eel and conch (techni-
cally, whelk), have embroiled the entire U.S. east coast in a fisheries

E-mail address: kwhitney@ssc.wisc.edu

1369-8486/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2013.10.008
 K. Whitney / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (2014) 78–87
management dilemma involving two ecologically-related migra-
tory 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 sus-
pect 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 ar-
rival 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 popula-
tion 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 monitor-
ing 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 his-
tories, and the contemporary socio-political situations they be-
queath to us, are also inextricable from the scientific expertise
utilized to understand and attempt to adjudicate them. In what fol-
lows, 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 ‘‘domes-
tication’’ 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 re-
flect on this historical trajectory, pointing out the breaks and con-
tinuities 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 ecol-
ogy and ethology, and more contemporary STS analyses emphasiz-
ing 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 conser-
vation science makes clear the epistemological and normative
implications of both conservation strategies and conservation his-
tories (Mol, 1999, pp. 74–89). In short, neither science, conserva-
tion, nor history are well-served by the conflation of wildlife
79
‘‘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 suste-
nance, 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 con-
cluded 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 inter-
esting class . . . unless the present reprehensible and most destruc-
tive 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 true-
minded naturalist’’ (Turnbull, 1869, pp. 30, 49–50) In this and sim-
ilar 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 (Bar-
row, 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). Histo-
ries of ornithology and wildlife management often point to the La-
cey 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 Depart-
ment 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 Ornitholo-
gists’ Union (AOU), the Lacey Act gave the USDA control over inter-
state shipment of wild animals and birds taken in violation of state
laws (Barrow, 2009, p. 105). Much stronger protection for migra-
tory 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 popula-
tions, 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 dis-
cipline of ‘‘economic ornithology’’ (Evenden, 1995, pp. 172–183).
The ‘‘Division of the Biological Survey,’’ headed by C. Hart Merriam,
80 K. Whitney / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (2014) 78–87
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 Divi-
sions played important roles in not only justifying federal protec-
tion 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 shore-
birds, making the case that not only were these animals disappear-
ing 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 crea-
tures, 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 ‘‘senti-
ment,’’ as insectivorous pest-control for U.S. agriculture.
The Biological Survey was largely responsible for researching,
drafting, testifying, justifying, and enacting these steps toward fed-
eral 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 long-
established 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 manage-
ment 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 behav-
ior 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 stom-
achs of birds, the gizzards and the crops, for study. We have the
sportsmen send in the stomachs of game birds, and secure the stom-
achs 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 ex-
pert at this that they can tell from the fragments in the birds’ stom-
achs, 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 [be-
hind 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 Biolog-
ical 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 de-
pended 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 study-
ing 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 alto-
gether, 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 govern-
ment 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 tech-
niques 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 ac-
tively 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.
 K. Whitney / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (2014) 78–87 81

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 dur-
ing 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 comprehen-
sive 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 bureau-
cratic 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 be-
cause it provided federal mandates, funds, and personnel to under-
stand 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 re-
search 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 cor-
ollary 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 scien-
tists 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 sci-
entific study of shorebirds in key migratory stopovers like the Dela-
ware 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 Wes-
tern Hemisphere. The Service hired a Research Scientist in 1973
to specialize exclusively in shorebirds, who shortly thereafter orga-
nized a volunteer shorebird sighting network in the eastern Cana-
dian 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. Utiliz-
ing, 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 addi-
tion to using these volunteer networks of birders to map the
distribution of shorebirds, the Service also implemented aerial sur-
veys 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 Amer-
ican 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, con-
ducted aerial and ground surveys in the Delaware Bay that
‘‘revealed a staging area of remarkable proportions, one largely un-
known 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 re-
main 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 air-
plane, relying on the legal and financial infrastructure of wildlife
bureaucracies.
By the late 1980s, based in large part on these surveys, the Del-
aware Bay had become acknowledged as the heart of the Atlantic-
coast shorebird migratory path, known as the ‘‘Atlantic Flyway’’
(Harrington, 1996b; Myers, 1986, pp. 68–76). In the 1990s, build-
ing on this earlier work, New Jersey and Delaware state biologists
began to intensify and coordinate their shorebird studies.3 Biolo-
gists 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, be-
gan 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 distur-
bances 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 dur-
ing 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 distur-
bance and all that, and this was the first indication that the whole
stopover could be in danger’’ (Niles, personal communication, Febru-
ary 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).
82 K. Whitney / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (2014) 78–87
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 Inalaf-
quen, the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, and the Austral-
asian 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 Dela-
ware 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 cap-
tured in nets every year, affixed with aluminum bands (little chan-
ged 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, Feb-
ruary 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-border-
ing 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’’ provi-
sions 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 endan-
gered, 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 subspe-
cies. The red knot has since remained in a kind of endangered-spe-
cies 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
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.
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 fed-
eral-level wildlife agencies, however, but the Atlantic States Mar-
ine 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 fed-
eral 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 gov-
ernment, 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 Adden-
dum VII adopted in February of 2012. These addenda have estab-
lished 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 po-
tential 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 mor-
atorium 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 abil-
ity 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 ef-
fort 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 chro-
nometer, 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 sys-
tems 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 in-
volves a variety of interlocking techniques, analytical frameworks,
and political implications, and the complexities of this situation war-
rant 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
 K. Whitney / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (2014) 78–87 83

read as an uneven, fitful, but nevertheless progressively more thor-
ough 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 light-
level 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 predic-
tive computer modeling in an effort to ‘‘optimize’’ both crab har-
vests and knot populations (McGowan et al., 2009). Shorebird
surveillance, in other words, is now tightly coupled with geo-
spatial 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 in-
tense 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, sur-
veillance, and management are hardly uniform, however, and both
the techniques and outcomes of these efforts have varied tremen-
dously since the passage of the ESA. Contemporary wildlife biology,
undertaken by both government and academic scientists, contin-
ues 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 de-
scribed above has acquired some of the techniques and norms of
ethology and behavioral ecology. As Gregg Mitman has noted, mid-
century changes in ethology moved from a focus on ‘‘existing and
reacting’’ animals as proxies for entire species to ‘‘thinking and feel-
ing,’’ 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 shore-
birds 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 technologi-
cally-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 ‘‘popu-
lation’’ was ‘‘the medium between the milieu and the organism,’’
and the ‘‘turning point between natural history and biology’’ (Fou-
cault, 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 & Bo-
wen, 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 to-
gether, he [the researcher] creates a database. This database repre-
sents 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 pub-
lications on shorebirds. In their discussion of initial geolocators re-
sults, for example, Niles et al. (2010, pp. 127–128) state that
former studies were ‘‘hampered by our inability to make observa-
tions simultaneously everywhere in the flyway,’’ a condition recti-
fied by the geolocators, which ‘‘are poised to greatly improve our
comprehension of shorebird migration.’’10 And while claims of pan-
opticism in the animal world should be treated with some skepticism
merely on account of the self-discipline required for the micro-pro-
cesses of power described by Foucault to work, it is tempting to claim
banding-cum-panopticon (only partially tongue-in-cheek) for shore-
birds 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.
84 K. Whitney / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (2014) 78–87

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). Accept-
ing surveillance technologies as part their own bodies, perhaps shore-
birds 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 taxon-
omy of relationships between human and nonhuman nature in
which ‘‘Westerners’’ adhere to a strict human/nature dualism,
anthropologist Philippe Descola hopefully claims that ‘‘the pro-
gramme 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 so-
cial conventions and human actions’’ (Descola, 1996, p. 97). Con-
servationists 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 pro-
duces 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 too-
easily drawn analogies between wildlife biology and panopticism,
and from seeing all surveillance as an act of control and domesti-
cation. Rather than describe nonhuman nature in terms of domi-
nance 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 mean-
ing.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 Har-
away’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 domi-
neering ‘‘god trick.’’ (Haraway, 1988, pp. 575–599).
Furthermore, we need not stop at visual metaphors or episte-
mology. Knowing new spaces through wildlife monitoring invites
more radical ontological stances—descriptions of realities as multi-
ple as the individual animals being tracked. Steve Woolgar and
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 anal-
ysis 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 phenomenologi-
cal 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-ethol-
ogies’’ every day, red knot geolocator studies being but one exam-
ple.14 Furthermore, unlike Woolgar and Lezaun, I suggest that there
are indeed practical and ethical consequences from such perspec-
tives 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 theo-
ries 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 pub-
lic(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 envi-
ronment which it perceives in a species-specific way—was the sum-
total of its subjective reality. Indeed, reality was fundamentally a
collection of interpenetrating subjectivities: ‘‘there is no space inde-
pendent of subjects. If we still cling to the fiction of an all-encom-
passing 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 sub-
ject-space ‘‘which only birds can see’’ (von Uexküll, 1957, pp. 64-69).
Given that ‘‘there can be no doubt that a fundamental contrast pre-
vails 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 scien-
tists? 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.
 K. Whitney / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (2014) 78–87 85

tradition of von Uexküll’s ‘‘Umwelt research.’’ Enrolling animals in
knowledge production, shorebird biologists co-create novel subjec-
tive space with red knots. Not simply passive beings subject to sur-
veillance, 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 lat-
est turn in shorebird research. As a recent red knot article ob-
served, ‘‘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 path-
ways’’ (Niles et al., 2012, p. 199). Note that this study not only sur-
prised the researchers with new locations, paths, and flight times,
it served to individuate each bird’s migratory experience. ‘‘Fly-
ways’’—always, at best, a rough heuristic for mapping popula-
tion-level migrations—have been fractured; ‘‘magical’’ migratory
paths as flown realities are multiple. Nor are these multiple ontol-
ogies 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 informa-
tion 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 be-
tween 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 stop-
ping 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 tim-
ing and location of their migration to arctic breeding grounds,
was newly questionable once shorebirds revealed an ‘‘unneces-
sary’’ 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 en-
ough 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-prac-
tices 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 shorebird-
habitat 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 win-
tering, stopover, and nesting habitat along shorebirds’ migratory
routes. The Delaware Bay was named the first location in the net-
work, though the designation does not as of yet command legally-
binding 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 net-
work. 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-pro-
duced subjective spaces of migratory animals could be one in which
we re-imagine the relevance and role of more strictly human geo-
political boundaries and priorities.17
If the history of North American shorebird surveillance, and
wildlife biology more generally, has bestowed the dream of statis-
tically-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 ani-
mals, 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 them-
selves.18 And as different epistemological and ontological commit-
ments have different implications for the type of conservation
strategies pursued, so our choice of stories and metaphors can rein-
force or subvert prevailing notions of what wildlife biology and con-
servation 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 is-
sues 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 eschew-
ing 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).
86 K. Whitney / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (2014) 78–87
nature has always been an agent in whatever scientific study or con-
servation regime ‘‘it’’ has found itself caught up in. But not all actor-
networks, 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 sug-
gest 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 Sci-
ence Museum in London, as well as Yale University’s 2012 North-
east Environmental History Conference, ‘‘Two Kingdoms.’’
Feedback from organizers and participants at these gatherings on
early, partial versions of this article were important to its subse-
quent 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.
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