Living as a Bird. Vinciane Despret

as it was, it would not be completely abandoned and would recur frequently, in one form or another, in scientific writings – no doubt encouraged by the attraction certain scientists have for the high drama often involved in competition and in others (sometimes involving the same people) because of a reluctance to abandon the notion that females are simply resources for males. Howard, however, vigorously challenged this theory of competition around females because it failed to fit certain of his observations. He wrote moreover that it held only for as long as it was believed that such confrontations exclusively involved males. In fact, as he pointed out, in certain species females fought with other females, couples with couples, or even sometimes a couple of birds might attack a solitary male or female. And what explanation might be given for the fact that, in species which travel to breeding sites, the males sometimes arrive considerably in advance of the females and immediately engage in conflict? Territorial behaviour nevertheless remains a predominantly male affair. As Howard points out, if the females behaved in the same way and isolated themselves, birds would never succeed in getting together!

The notion that birds could establish living spaces and would then protect their exclusive right to such zones is not a new one and had already been observed by Aristotle, Zenodotus and some later writers. However, the term ‘territory’ was not mentioned and would appear for the first time with reference to birds only in the course of the seventeenth century. In her book on this subject, published in 1941, Margaret Morse Nice, an American ornithologist, indicates that the first reference to territory occurs in a book by John Ray (1627–1705) entitled The Ornithology of Francis Willughby and published in 1678. As the title suggests, Ray’s book focuses on the work carried out by his friend Francis Willughby (1635–1672). With reference to the common nightingale, Ray cites another writer, Giovanni Pietro Olina, who published a treatise on ornithology entitled Uccelliera, ovvero, Discorso della natura, e proprietà di diversi uccelli in Rome in 1622. This treatise turns out to be a book on the various ways of catching and looking after birds in order to set up aviaries: ‘It is proper to this Bird at his first coming (saith Olina) to occupy or seize upon one place as its Freehold, into which it will not admit any other Nightingale but its mate.’ Ray also mentions the fact, again according to Olina, that the nightingale ‘has a peculiarity that it cannot abide a companion in the place where it lives and will attack with all its strength any who dispute this claim.’² But according to ornithologists Tim Birkhead and Sophie Van Balen,³ another writer, Antonio Valli da Todi, in fact preceded Olina in 1601 with a book on birdsong, and it is highly likely, given how similar the observations are in both books, that the latter may have copied his predecessor. He describes, for example, how the nightingale ‘chooses a freehold, in which it will admit no other nightingale but its female, and if other nightingales try to enter that place, it starts singing in the centre of this site.’ Valli da Todi would estimate the size of this territory by observing that its extent corresponded to a long stone’s throw. It should be noted incidentally that Valli da Todi himself derived much of his information from a work by Manzini, published in 1575. This latter does not, however, discuss the issue of territory.

We could of course allow ourselves to reflect on a coincidence here in that the term ‘territory’, with its very strong connotation of ‘the taking over of an exclusive area or property’, first appears in ornithological literature in the seventeenth century – in other words, at the very moment when, according to Philippe Descola and a great many legal historians, the Moderns reduced the use of land to a single concept, that of appropriation.⁴ Descola emphasizes that this conception is now so widely accepted that it would be very difficult to abandon it. In short, this notion first took shape under the influence of Grotius and the concept of natural law,⁵ although it is in fact rooted in sixteenth-century theology. It redefines the right of ownership as an individual right and is based in part on the idea of a contract which redefines humans as individuals and not as social beings (the ‘ownership’ of Roman law came about as the result of a process of sharing and not of an individual act, a sharing sanctioned by the law, the customs and the courts). In addition, it drew both on new techniques for evaluating land, which meant that any land would be delineated and its possession assured, and on a philosophical theory of the subject, that of possessive individualism, which reconfigures political society as a mechanism for the protection of individual property. We are all too aware of the dramatic consequences of this new conception of ownership, of those it favoured and of those whose lives were destroyed as a result. We are familiar with the history of enclosure, the expulsion of peasant communities from land over which they had previously exercised commoners’ rights and the ban which prevented them from taking from the forests the resources essential to their survival. With this new conception of ownership came the eradication of what is generally referred to today as the ‘commons’ and which represented land given over to the collective, coordinated and self-organized use of shared resources, such as irrigation ditches, common grazing grounds and forests⁶ … In England, writes Karl Polanyi, ‘in 1600, half of the kingdom’s arable land was still in communal use. By 1750, that figure had fallen to only a quarter and amounted to almost none at all in 1840.’⁷ Of the many different ways of inhabiting and sharing the land which had been invented and cultivated over the course of centuries, all that would remain would be the right of ownership, admittedly sometimes limited, but always defined as an exclusive right to use, and indeed abuse.

Returning to birds, to nightingales and to robins, I am not however entirely convinced that very much can be learned from this historical coincidence. That would be going rather too fast. It would mean, for example, neglecting the fact that the term ‘territory’ was not used in a random way with reference to animals but only in the description of the methods used to confine birds within aviaries, methods involving appropriation admittedly, and which involved the uses of cages and confinement but also methods intended to deterritorialize birds in order to have them live ‘with us’, in what constitutes ‘our’ territories. If I am to use this coincidence as a starting point from which to explore the story of territory, should I not also point out that the aviary originates from the desire to protect harvests from birds? And, at the same time, should I not emphasize that, as a result, it was linked to the art of hunting and falconry, an art that required cunning and an intimate knowledge of the habits of the various birds? Thus, for example, in the fourteenth century, pheasants were hunted with a mirror as a consequence of the observation that ‘a male cannot abide the presence of another’ and would immediately provoke a confrontation. A mirror would be hung from a string and the pheasant, convinced that what it was seeing in its reflection was one of its own kind, would attack the mirror, crashing into it and triggering the release of a cage which would then fall down and act as a trap. But if I am indeed to tell this story, I should also point out that it was precisely in the seventeenth century that aviaries ceased to be associated with falconry and that, instead, birds would be captured on a large scale no longer purely with the intention of killing them but for the pleasure of living alongside them and hearing their songs.⁸ This unprecedented enthusiasm for aviaries tended to focus on songbirds in particular – that is to say, in the vast majority of cases, territorial birds. This led to a spate of treatises describing their habits, their uses, the different ways of catching them and of keeping them alive. And I would no doubt need a great many more stories in order to consolidate this coincidence, to come up with other ways of linking these two events, to breathe life into a world I know little about but which – particularly in the context of this investigation – I have inherited. But if I am unable to do this, and if I must leave this coincidence as an open question, I can still be grateful for the fact that this process encourages me to be vigilant: ‘territory’ is by no means an innocent term, and I must not allow myself to lose sight of the violent forms of appropriation and of the destruction which has been associated with some of its current manifestations. It is a term which could bring in its wake certain habits of thinking as impoverished as the multiple uses which had characterized the reality of inhabiting and sharing the earth from the seventeenth century onwards.

Caution is therefore required. And curiosity. I have of course come across some examples of terms which are at the very least ambiguous, such as the fact that a male ‘claims’ a space, that he establishes ‘possession’ or that hummingbirds defend a ‘private hunting ground’. The fact that, in the context of territorial behaviour, aggressivity