Tim Ingold offers us an abstracted portrait of the world as ¿a meshwork of interwoven lines of growth and movement¿ (Ingold, 2010: 3). His concept of meshworks builds from Bruno Latour¿s Actor Network Theory, which proposes that our collective material and social worlds are not the result of an agency held exclusively by human actors, often imagined as held by societies leading figures, but rather emerge from connections. Likewise, power is not a force exerted from above, but rather a physics flowing across these networks, although inequitably distributed (Latour, 1988). Therefore, humans and non-humans can never be understood in isolation. Rather, we are all caught up in an immeasurable complexity of interconnections. Even the concrete and steel of modern life is made vital by the Rock Pigeon and House Sparrow¿s nests. Birds are busy connecting the world through their movements. In movement they disperse pollen and then seeds and connect seemingly distinct realms of the world. The seabird connects the deep ocean to the island. The songbird connects the tropics to the arctic as they rush north for the boreal summer. The Cattle Egret connects the pasture to the heron rookery. And they connect humans to the non-human worlds surrounding us, as well as to other, distant human worlds where those birds travel.
Birds, at least most of them, fly. While their songs, calls and plumages are accessible to direct human experience, their lifeworlds are deep and broad beyond human comprehension, though that only provokes us to try harder. We come to understand birds and their greater-than-human flows of life in what I call shining moments - events in which our worlds overlap, and we become entangled.
Everywhere humans go there are birds. They are there in the background, and at times the foreground of every human life. But some of us seek moments in which they are brought into focus. In their search for entanglement, birders have worked to forge new connections, human and non-human, and learned to draw birds in and sustain them. Birding, in short, is the cultivation of these shining moments of contact between human and bird, and of entangling the world you inhabit with the multiplicity of Aves. While birding entails close, sustained observation of real and complex birdworlds, it is a human discipline filled with human categories and chasing human pleasure. In birding there is both a profound connection to vital creatures, and an abstraction and gamification of the natural world.
Many seek out shining moments with birds, or with non-humans more broadly, in travel. This demand has led to the production of experiences of intimacy with nature, and expertise around the interpretation of nature. It has also brought about the creation of ecoreserves, which produce ecosystems rich in biodiversity and accessible to tourists, with trails connecting a wealth of distinct ecosystems, and lodging and transportation infrastructure to allow non-human worlds to be seen as an act of leisure. While often understood as places of wilderness, these ecotouristic landscapes are in fact deeply inhabited by humans.
Especially in the hatos of Casanare, we see a hybrid landscape, produced by both nature and culture. Here, the work of conservation is a collaboration between humans, domestic companion species, and indigenous critters which form an ecosystem in their connections. And in the meshworks of ecotourism, these hybrid landscapes and the humans which speak for them fight for their continuation and growth. Their material existence is linked to their perceived social value, and thus hybrid landscapes must spread through human representations to exert power through the meshwork.
The materiality of the network is always in conversation with its social representations. While for sites of ecotourism and conservation these focus on a popular imagination of a place and ecosystem, for birding and ornithology the most important representations are those of birds. In field guides, online, and in scientific discourse birds are no longer fleshy creatures but abstract species. The species category is taken as essential by birders and the societies through which this scientific discourse pervades and influences interactions between humans and non-humans. These universal categories can cause one to lose sight of the individuality of non-humans and their potential beyond what is ascribed to them.
Birding, like ornithology, is a practice originating and still centered in the Global North. As a result, these supposedly universal representations of species are in fact culturally situated and tend to give an outsider¿s perspective on neotropical birds. Local taxonomies of birds, whether derived from ornithological study or human inhabitation, offer alternatives to the categories of Northern ornithology.
They situate birds in human and avian lifeworlds.
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