Abstract
This article follows shorebirds—migratory animals that have gone from game to nongame animals over the course of the past century in North America—as a way to track modern field biology, bureaucratic institutions, and the valuation of wildlife. Doing so allows me to make interrelated arguments about the history of wildlife management and science. The first is to note the endurance of observation-based natural history methods in field biology over the long twentieth century and the importance of these methods for the persistent contribution of amateurs. The second major line of argument advances the historical significance of scientific, government bureaucracies as sites of natural knowledge production. Historians of biology and ecology have tended to stress scientists with institutional homes in universities, museums, and at land-grant field stations—particularly as various forms of field biology became professionalized over the twentieth century. In contrast, migratory animals like shorebirds, whether under the auspices of the US Biological Survey or the contemporary Fish and Wildlife Service, were primarily studied and conserved by biologists in bureaucratic agencies. Mid- to low-level bureaucrats, along with avocational birders, have mainly been responsible for developing what we know about shorebird migration, behavior, and life history. And third, shorebirds foreground the importance of bureaucratic context for the valuation of nature, from their economic value to agriculture in the early twentieth century to their value as rare, endangered species in the twentyfirst.
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This transition is not only well documented (see the scholars cited previously), but it is also readily apparent in the abundant contemporaneous technical literature of the time. Compare, for example, economic ornithology manuals from the dawn (Palmer 1899) and peak (Weed and Dearborn 1916) of the discipline to later work questioning the efficacy of birds as insect control (Strickland 1928).
More recently, Strasser (2019, pp. 11–21) has pointed out that field biologists’ celebration of the natural history tradition and resentment of the ways in which laboratory experimentalism came to overshadow it are as old as this transition in biology itself. It is an odd testament to the longevity and durability of natural history that its practitioners have feared its demise for a century and a half.
State of New Jersey 1904, p. 380.
For concurrent and intertwining national efforts in Canada, see Foster (1998). Philip Pauly tied the final version of the Lacey Act directly to the influence of the USDA, saying “the law was a striking example of the ability of scientific bureaucrats to reshape congressional initiatives” (2000, p. 80). The USDA, and the Biological Survey in particular, were every bit as involved in passing the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. For more details on the passage of these key migratory bird laws, see Bean (1983, p. 74); Dunlap (1988, p. 38); Evenden (1995); Vileisis (1997, pp. 154–56); Dorsey (1998); Barrow (2009, pp. 141–42); and Wilson (2010).
The relatively new land grant colleges were not only important sources of personnel for USDA agencies, but also part of a network of “harmonious relations” maintained by these scientific bureaus like the Biological Survey (Dupree 1957, p. 159).
Evenden (1995), in particular, tied the decline of economic ornithology not only to the passing of the Biological Survey and the rise of synthetic pesticides, but also to internal disputes in a science “riven by debate over its fundamental methods” (p. 177). For the influence and fate of economic ornithology in the British context, see Holmes (2017).
On Bent and the Life History series, see Barrow (1998, pp. 174–75).
Historian Mark Barrow’s work on the history of ornithology and bird conservation remains the most influential text in the field. For details on the rise and eventual successes of organizations like the Audubon Society and the AOU, see Barrow (1998, chaps. 5 and 6). The more narrow focus on shorebirds here predisposes my analysis to more regional and local amateur networks and organizations.
This phenomenon bears a family resemblance to Chandra Mukerji's “elite reserve labor force” of oceanographers maintained in various ways by the federal government at this time (1989, esp. chap. 1). For marginal and little-funded scientific avocations like bird censuses and banding, I would argue that a tappable labor force still exists, although it constitutes a more subtle and less “elite” reserve.
Dale Goble (2006) marks this shift from “game management” to “wildlife management” in a series of legislative acts during the 1960s that culminated in the 1973 ESA. This is important, not only on its face value, but also because it marks shifting threats to wildlife. As dangers to animals began to stem from habitat loss as opposed to hunting, courtroom battles over endangered species became proxy struggles over scarce resources. For an analysis along these lines, see Corn et al. (2007).
US Fish and Wildlife Service (2003, p. 1).
Stomach content analysis has subsided, but not vanished. More interventionist, laboratory-based studies still utilize stomach content analysis for the purposes of understanding and modeling the physiology of long-distance migration. Shorebird feeding habits are also implicit in the use of lab-based stable isotope analysis to establish summer and winter grounds for migratory shorebirds. See, for example, Atkinson et al. (2005).
Jamie Lorimer (2008, pp. 392–398), in his account of the UK corncrake census, makes a similar point about the natural history tradition and its ongoing role as non-reductive motivation for field scientists to do their work as “curious and emotional beings” with an “ethos of engagement” with the birds they study.
Historian Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (2009, p. 363) has gone further to suggest that computer-driven data collection involving citizen science, like the Delaware Bay shorebird projects, reflects a new “epistemic culture” in modern science.
Historian Samuel Hays (1981) suggested that state-level bureaucracies are the best place to understand the twentieth-century environmental movement, as they represent a middle ground between grass-roots environmental concerns and national-level politics. In agreement with these suggestions, I argue that mid-level bureaucracies are excellent places to look in order to understand both modern environmental politics and environmental science.
Roger Turner (2010), in his history of meteorology, conceptualizes a similar type of technoscientific activity as “infrastructural science.”
Perhaps the most formative study of the dynamics of science in federal institutions is A. Hunter Dupree's prewar analysis (1957). The Biological Survey and the Fish and Wildlife Service have certainly not been the only scientific bureaucracies, and historians of science and environmental historians since Dupree have examined science within and across government agencies (and, I would argue, should do so to a greater extent). Perhaps the best comparison to these wildlife agencies, however, is the United States Geological Survey (USGS). This agency was created just prior to the Biological Survey, in 1879, like the Fish and Wildlife Service is presently located in the Department of the Interior, and, after a reorganization in the 1990s, is a scientific bureaucracy that has actively carried out environmental research in geology (Davidson 2017; Markovski and Moon 2011; Powell 2015), hydrology (Carroll 2012; Lave et al. 2010), and pollution (Jackson 2004), among other areas. See also Wellock’s (2010) exceptional work on the importance of scientists in the US Forest Service for both biology and environmental policy.
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Whitney, K. Valuing Shorebirds: Bureaucracy, Natural History, and Expertise in North American Conservation. J Hist Biol 53, 631–652 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-020-09616-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-020-09616-3