Living as a Bird. Vinciane Despret

or to remain hidden have been resolved in each case through a different relationship between presence and time. Birds, with their songs and displays, are in a regime of physical presence, whereas mammals, with their marking activities, have adopted a regime of historical presence. The tracks left behind by a mammal continue to be effective over a relatively long time (in relation to its actual presence at the site), with the animal seemingly present everywhere at the same time even though in fact any actual presence occurred some while previously. Droppings might in this context be seen as a kind of decoy, in that they create the effect of a presence in absence. But it is a decoy that fails to deceive anybody (though that does not affect its efficacy), since each message conveys an element of ‘watch out!’, or ‘be careful!’ And the message finds its mark. The traces or tracks left by the animal are therefore part of this process referred to as ‘stigmergy’, or ‘non-local rules of interaction’ through which the behaviour of certain animals can – whether in space or in time – affect the behaviours of others at a distance – just as ants leave behind them the pheromones which will alter the route of those following on behind. It is a form of presence which creates certain modes of attention. Moreover, it is rather sad that Serres, who so appositely succeeded in using the argument of writing in its broadest sense to portray the traces and tracks left by animals as the astonishingly sophisticated mechanisms of writing, capable of conveying a wide range of qualities and messages, should fail to consider, or rather deliberately choose to forget, that the hunter is not the only one to read tracks, that animals do so constantly and undoubtedly read them much more often and more accurately than humans. Equally sad that he should also have reduced them to a single function: that of dirtying something in order to appropriate it.

There remains one further matter, to which I shall be returning later (since singing could be interpreted in a similar way): if the act of marking does indeed create the effects of presence in absentia, certain writers have suggested, notably with reference to the mountain goat or to certain animals in captivity, that marking also represents an extension of the animal’s body in space.²⁵ In this context, the term ‘appropriation’ takes on another meaning, since here it is a matter of transforming the chosen space not so much into something the animal ‘owns’, something which belongs to it, as into the animal ‘itself’. The distinction between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’ is even less clearly defined, in that many mammals not only mark locations and objects, but they also mark their own bodies with their own secretions, transferring these onto different parts of the body. More astonishing still, many of them also steep themselves in the smell of objects found within the area of the territory – soil, grass, rotting carcasses, tree bark. The animal then becomes appropriated both by and into the space which it appropriates as its own by marking it, thus creating a physical bond with that place which renders the ‘self’ and the ‘non-self’ indistinguishable.

It is clear that what we are looking at here is something much more complicated than the simple regime of appropriation described by Serres, and if I were to continue the list of such differences, interspersed with a few partial resemblances, it would be almost endless. But what I am trying to emphasize here is the fact that, when it comes to territories and what we can learn from them, there is no such thing as an ‘all-purpose’ approach that can be applied to every situation. Moving from one territory to another – whether it be that of a particular animal which is the focus of researchers’ interest or that of scientific methods – cannot be undertaken just like that, without due precautions, without paying attention to the incredible diversity of modes of being which territories have helped to create. And this is also why I am keen to stress that certain ornithologists – not all of them, certainly, and we shall be returning to this later – very quickly understood that territories could not easily be encompassed by one general theory. In 1956, moreover, in his introduction to a special edition of the journal Ibis which was dedicated to territories, the British zoologist Robert Hinde wrote that ‘the diversity of nature can never fit into a system of compartments and categories.’²⁶ Categories, he added, are only there to help us in our discussions. They are all the more questionable given that, within the same species, in the course of the same period of time, we can find very different practices, simultaneously or in sequence, and, in other species, we might observe practices which vary according to age, sex, habitat or population density.

      All this is no coincidence. From the very beginning, ornithologists were brought face to face with the diversity of species and very quickly developed a comparative approach which rendered them attentive to the plurality of different organizational structures.²⁷ Comparative approaches require, and encourage, a genuine culture of tact, a heightened attention to differences and to specificities, and a concern for what matters. It is a culture that many of them – not all, but those who turn out to be the most interesting – have learned to respect.

      But it is, moreover, equally possible that something is happening in relation to territorial behaviour, a behaviour which, as I pointed out, left researchers astonished and moved. Very often birds demonstrate such vitality, such power of determination, such an outpouring of energy, in fact seem so utterly ‘possessed’ by what they are in the process of defending, that it would not be unreasonable to assert that researchers have themselves been touched by the sense of something which was truly important! And that this importance mattered.

Notes

      1 1. This is, for example, the hypothesis developed by Ernst Mayr, ‘Bernard Altum and the territory theory’, Proceedings of the Linnaean Society, 45–6 (1935): 24–30.

      2 2. I am referring here to Margaret Morse Nice, ‘The role of territory in bird life’, American Midland Naturalist, 26/3 (1941): 441–87, and to David Lack, ‘Early reference to territory in bird life’, Condor, 46 (1944): 108–11.

      3 3. T. Birkhead and S. Van Balen, ‘Bird-keeping and the developments of ornithological science’, Archives of Natural History, 35/2 (2008): 281–305, at p. 286. I would add, since we are on the subject of appropriation, that the work of these two writers involves highlighting this form of amnesia, very prevalent among scientific ornithologists when it comes to the knowledge of bird amateurs, knowledge they nevertheless make extensive use of, though without acknowledgement.

      4 4. P. Descola, ‘Les Usages de la terre: cosmopolitique de la territorialité’ [The uses of land: cosmopolitics of territoriality], lecture (in French) given at the Collège de France, 2 March 2016. On the same subject, see also S. Vanuxem, La Propriété de la terre. Marseilles: Wildproject, 2018.

      5 5. For the jurist Grotius (1583–1645), and as Philippe Descola reminds us, individual and collective appropriation was only possible because of the existence of a basic right during the fictional pre-social period, which he refers to as a ‘state of nature’. This ‘natural’ right ensured that each human being had free access to everything: ‘Each man could at once take whatever he wished for his own needs, and could consume whatever was capable of being consumed …. Whatever each had thus taken for his own use another could not take from him except by an unjust act.’

      6 6. On this subject, see in particular Sarah Vanuxem, who examines the resources of legal history to find ways of modifying the modern conception of ownership. See also, with a view to providing food for thought and envisaging the possibility of a reappropriation of the ‘commons’, the very fine article written by S. Gutwirth and I. Stengers, ‘Le Droit à l’épreuve de la résurgence des commons’, Revue juridique de l’environnement, 41/2 (2016): 306–43.

      7 7. Cited ibid., p. 312.

      8 8. E. Blaze, ‘Moeurs et usages de la vie privée: chasse, vénerie, fauconnerie, oisellerie’, in P. Lacroix and F. Seré (eds), Le Moyen Âge et la Renaissance: histoire et description des moeurs et usages, du commerce et de l’industrie, des sciences, des arts, des littératures et des beaux-arts en Europe, vol. 1. Paris: Editions Paris Administration, 1848, pp. i–xix. It should be noted that the author points out that, even in the fifteenth century, bird keeping was a profession subject to rules and regulations and bringing with it certain privileges (in particular, that of being able to hang up bird cages in Paris shops without the permission of tenants, and also the right accorded to master bird-catchers