The “bander’s grip”: Reading zones of human

Abstract

This article applies Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact” perspective within a multispecies ethnography of conservation encounters on the Delaware Bay. Using critical insights from decolonial feminist science studies, environmental geography, and critical animal studies, the article deconstructs technoscientific environmental knowledge production within a more-than-human contact zone. The tools, technologies, and “conspicuous innocence” of hands-on shorebird conservation research practices are described. Re-inscribing nonhuman agency and colonial histories of place, it argues that certain elements of conservation research may be fairly read as “violent” expressions of “animality/coloniality” and “anti-conquest.” It concludes by offering some harm reduction strategies for improving conservation and critical environment studies.

Keywords

Contact zone more-than-human decolonization postcolonial political ecology indigenous conservation birds endangered species wildlife management tracking

Introduction

Most people will never touch a migratory shorebird. The exception is dramatic. In her blog entry, “Banding together: When the shorebird met the biologist,” novice bird bander Lindsay McNamara (2015), working with the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey (CWF), explained her excitement to try the “bander’s grip”:

As a bird nerd, I’d often look on enviously at photos of biologists posted online holding shorebirds in their “bander’s grip” – the bird’s head in between their index and middle finger, using their thumb and pinky to steady the bird, while allowing its feet to dangle freely. I always wondered: I wish I could do that! Hold a bird in my hands. Yet I never once thought: Wait, how did the bird end up in their hands in the first place? I certainly hadn’t thought biologists run all over the beach chasing after shorebirds like a farmer chasing chickens – I just never thought the process all the way through.

Lindsay is describing the “exciting” yet “careful” work of bird banding (which here includes bird trapping, sampling, tagging, release, and recapture) along the Delaware Bay. The site is one of the most important locations in North America for bird watching and conservation (Burger, 2000), attracting enthusiasts from across the globe every year. Biologists and ecotourists converge to observe the spectacle of over one million birds competing with other species for coastline access in May and June. The shorebirds arrive in search of an annual supply of horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) eggs at the crabs' largest global spawning site. In this article, I borrow Lindsay’s focus on practicing the bander’s grip at this site to critically examine the asymmetrical dynamics of conservation encounters between biologists and shorebirds.

Birds resist being handled. Holding a bird in one’s hand is exciting because it is exceptional. The rarity of these encounters makes them conspicuous, especially as they require force. Legally considered harassment, the handling of birds is prohibited for most Americans according to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and other statutes. A student must learn the bander’s grip from an authorized, master (U.S. Geological Survey, 2016). I learned the bander’s grip 10 years ago. It was a thrilling experience due to the strangeness and sudden intimacy of handling a wild bird who—only a moment before—was impossibly out of reach. Yet such encounters are remarkably uneven and as such merit critical review. To “stay in touch with the material-affective dimensions of doing and engaging in science” (Barad, 2012: 208–209), following Donna Haraway (1997: 151), in this article I “critically analyze, or ‘deconstruct,’ only that which I love and only that in which I am deeply implicated.” As a white settler based in the northeastern United States, having participated in the capture of probably more than a thousand birds across multiple operations, I wrestle here with my own complicity and desire to conserve biodiversity. Because “Researchers are not flies on the wall of contact zones” (Gillespie et al., 2015: 206), I offer a critical, reflexive discussion of the complexity, costs, and benefits of hands-on conservation work in one particular multispecies contact zone. I analyze the “conspicuous innocence” of conservation encounters at ten public beaches along the New Jersey side of the Delaware Bay, closed to the public by the New Jersey Department of Fish and Wildlife during peak migration (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

New Jersey Beach Closure Sites (Source: https://www.njfishandwildlife.com/ensp/beachclozmap.htm).

In this article, I specifically describe the dynamics of shorebird–human conservation encounters. I focus on trapping and tagging practices performed on New Jersey’s Delaware Bayshore—the “flagship” site of the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network (WHSRN), a voluntary network of over one hundred protected sites across the Americas. Between 2011 and 2017, I observed “science in action” (Latour, 1987) and conducted interviews with scientists, volunteers, and beach users. Like other multispecies ethnographers, I wanted to know “who benefits, cui bono, when species meet?” (Kirksey, 2014: 2), specifically in instances of technoscientific, high-touch, “command and control” conservation and environmental governance. I share my experiences of participant observation working with the CWF, joined in place during May and June by state conservation enforcement officers, local volunteers, The Nature Conservancy, Rutgers University, and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (to name just a few partners). To supplement this dissertation field work, I conducted archival research, discourse analysis, close reading, and literature reviews. By examining how biologists assert authority over shorebird bodies and coastal spaces, I demonstrate how Pratt’s “contact” perspective might improve and be improved through critical environmental studies.

Mary Louise Pratt’s de/postcolonial “contact” perspective challenges colonial violence by re-centering subaltern, marginalized, peripheral perspectives and experiences at the frontier. It enfolds a suite of conceptual tools first developed together in 1991 and 1992: including the “contact zone,” “arts of contact,” and the “conspicuous innocence” of “anti-conquest.” These are used to examine how subjects “get constituted in and by their relations to each other … not in terms of separateness, but in terms of co-presence, interaction, and interlocking understandings and practices” (Pratt, 2008: 8). Pratt's most cited contribution is her definition of “contact zones”; “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (7). For Pratt, “contact” might be antagonistic, take dialogic, “interactive” or “improvisational” forms, and/or provoke transformation. The subject of her book Imperial Eyes (2008) is the white, European (early naturalist) “seeing man” abroad, whose “imperial eyes passively look out and possess” with “conspicuous innocence” as he surveys foreign lands and classifies new species. Pratt (2008: 9) described such expeditions as “anti-conquest”; “whereby [Europeans] seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony”. Specifically, she explained that “the very structuring principle of the anticonquest [is] the claim to the innocent pursuit of knowledge” (81) which is based upon “a great longing [to take] possession without subjugation and violence” (56). She includes examples of European representations of indigenous lands as “unoccupied and unclaimed terrain” where “colonial relations were offstage” and “the [seeing man’s] own presence remained unquestioned” (178). Using geographic terms, Pratt (2008) explains that “To the improving eye, the potentials of the [colonial] future are predicated on absences and lacks of [indigenous] life in the present” however

From the point of view of their inhabitants, of course, these same spaces are lived as intensely humanized, saturated with local history and meaning, where plants, creatures, and geographical formations have names, uses, symbolic functions, histories, places in indigenous knowledge formations (60).

An ecocritical, close reading of Imperial Eyes suggests that while Pratt aimed to decolonize (environmental) knowledge, she did not yet explicitly nor symmetrically (Callon, 1984) consider nonhuman agency in her analysis. For the most part, the environment and other-than-humans were “background” material (Van Dooren et al., 2016) to human activity; “a substrate for the external imposition of arbitrary cultural form – a tabula rasa for the inscription of human history” (Ingold, 2000: 214). Now recognizing explicitly that “no being is ever not in a multispecies contact zone,” Pratt (p. 799) revisits her concept. Following Sundberg (2006), Haraway (2008), Ogden (2011), Collard (2013), and Collard and Gillespie (2015), this article demonstrates how more-than-human applications of the contact zone might include fuller, more serious considerations of nonhuman agency.

I offer this de/postcolonial feminist science study to demonstrate a “more-than-human contact approach” (Isaacs and Otruba: 697). In our Guest Introduction to this special section, we argue that this approach serves three purposes: multiplying perspectives, decolonizing knowledge, and intervention. For this article, my conceptual framework combines Latin American and indigenous theories of decolonization, critical animal studies, feminist science studies, and political ecology informed by more-than-human/animal/posthuman geographies. I specifically draw upon insights from previous work on affective “encounter”/with nonhuman agents (Barua, 2015; Bennett, 2010; Wilson, 2017), writing within animal ethics on violence/in research (Donovan and Adams, 1996; Groling, 2014; Palmer, 2001; Regan, 1986; Stanescu, 2012; Taylor and Twine, 2014), and critical scholarship on touch (Classen, 2012; Dixon and Straughan, 2010; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2010; Lorimer, 2012; Manning, 2007; Puig De La Bellacasa, 2009; Sedgwick and Frank, 2003). Organized through Pratt’s contact perspective, together these critical perspectives de-center the human and better recognize nonhuman agency in place, disrupting what I next describe as “animality/coloniality.”

“Animality/coloniality” is offered here as a shorthand for the theoretical critique which traces problems of (colonial/imperial) domination and violence back to asymmetrical relations between (some) humans and other-than-humans. Hovorka (2017: 389) essentially summarizes this critique in her observation that “indigenous and animal circumstances, experiences, and standpoints have been plundered alongside one another through dominant Western worldviews and imperialist projects”. The problem of human supremacy has been described in (Western) ecofeminism, critical animal studies, environmental and animal ethics (theory) as speciesism, the “dominion hypothesis,” or “human exceptionalism” (Armstrong, 2002; Best, 2009; Plumwood, 2002; Singer, 1973; White, 1967). De/postcolonial activist-scholars have similarly problematized anthropocentric Western ontological divisions and hierarchies, including Man/nature and Man/animal, analyzing them in relation to instances of genocide, slavery, environmental degradation, resource depletion, cultural erasure, and species extinctions (Galeano, 1997; Grosfoguel, 2011; Guha, 1989, 1997, 2000; Santos, 2015; Nixon, 2011). For example, Mignolo and Walsh (2018: 160) explain that the “colonial matrix of power” was built by Europeans who viewed themselves as superior “Man/Human” and “upon that belief built the colonial differences: racial, sexual, and the separation from nature.” This argument is premised in part on the historical observation that colonized peoples are frequently “described as less than human” (Mignolo, 2009: 174).¹ Such colonial differences are imperial impositions where “The whole point, purpose, and meaning of imperial power, and its most basic legitimation, is to give [some] humans control over otherness” (Birch, 1990: 458). What I am calling animality/coloniality builds upon Maria Lugones’ (2010: 743) assertion that “the dichotomous hierarchy between the human and the nonhuman [is] the central dichotomy of colonial modernity”. It strengthens Parreñas (2018: 193) argument that “When decolonization is definitively limited to humans, it falls short of its potential to envision and enact expansive forms of justice”. Animality/coloniality operates across disciplines to challenge the (colonial) difference(s) by first troubling the reductive category of “the animal”; for instance, by examining how “the conjoined logic of race and species work in tandem ‘to decide who lives, who dies, who is used as an experimental subject without consent, who is imprisoned, […] whose labor is exploited, who is fully grievable, and who is not’” (Times, 2018: 112–113 quoting Gossett, 2015). As a critical tool for decolonization, animality/coloniality is helpful now because decolonial thought “has yet to engage with a politics of animality that not only recalls ‘traditional’ and/or ‘ceremonial’ human-animal relations, but is also accountable to animal subjectivities and futurities outside settler colonialism and within a project of decolonization” (Belcourt, 2015: 8). In this decolonial feminist science study, I examine how animality, specifically animal precarity, is wielded biopolitically to justify and expand EuroWestern technoscientific managerial control over lands and bodies.

This article examines the ways that the globalization of conservation expresses animality/coloniality. Conservation has elsewhere been described as privileging male, EuroWestern elite interests; for instance, Yarbrough (2015: 110) described conservation as “fundamentally ideological, its evolution dominated by the ideas and desires of affluent white men”. Well-documented by political ecologists are many local histories of violence and displacement carried out in the name of conservation (Brockington et al., 2012; Duffy, 2010; Igoe et al., 2010; Rodríguez et al., 2007; West et al., 2006; Zimmerer, 2006). Conservation (an expression of coloniality) usually requires control of “both Indigenous and animal bodies” (Belcourt, 2015: 7). To analyze animality/coloniality in conservation from a more-than-human contact perspective, I turn to Philo and Wilbert (2000: 5) who suggested focusing on “the practices that are folded into the making of [animal] representations” recognizing nonhuman agency in the ways that animals “destabilize, transgress or even resist our human orderings, including spatial ones.” Applying a critical focus on knowledge production practices and the asymmetrical dynamics of conservation encounters, I aim to interrupt animality/coloniality in place.

Animality/coloniality is made and unmade in face-to-face encounters, through practices often involving touch, in more-than-human contact zones. A feminist focus on touch fleshes out any “contact” analysis by highlighting the embodied, affective, and ethical aspects of encounter. For instance, Puig De La Bellacasa (2009) explains that

understanding contact as touch intensifies a sense of the co-transformative effects of connections between beings in the flesh. Significantly, in its quasi-inescapable evocation of close relationality, touching is also called upon as the experience par excellence in which boundaries between self and other are blurred (298).

This emphasis on co-presence, proximity, and affect however does not disprove Birch’s (1990) explanation of the ability of encounters to incite (colonial) disruption;

When we see the real otherness that is there beneath the imperium’s version of it, beneath all the usual categories of use and value, then we see an otherness that can never be fully described, understood, or appropriated, and the entire edifice of the imperium is called into question to such a degree that it becomes practically necessary to resist and deconstruct it, because it so epitomizes bad faith and delusion (460).

A more-than-human contact approach examines episodes of interspecies touch using feminist theories of performativity to analyze how “animality is a doing or becoming, not an essence” (Birke, 2004: 167). Because animals have been considered “virtually all body … their speechlessness [makes] touch an essential medium for human-animal interaction” (Classen, 2012: 93). Such sites of touch are always ethical spaces. Collard (2012: 25), recalling Haraway, Derrida, and Barad, reminds readers that “ethics form in the exchange of affect that occurs in meetings between entities”. Manning (2007: 9) also describes touch as firstly an “ethical discourse” because “I cannot touch you without being responsible for doing the touching, I cannot touch you without being responsive. For touch must always indicate its source, and its source can never be identified by an individual: touch is singular-plural.” A more-than-human contact perspective relates environmental knowledge production encounters involving touch and technology to larger systems of governance. In this article, focusing on the “biopolitics and microphysics of power,” I describe how migratory birds are interpellated (Althusser, 2006) through touch, via physical force and technology, into a larger, transnational system of wildlife management (Bergman, 2005; Reinert, 2013); wherein “power relations have an immediate hold upon [the animal body]; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs” and “none of its localized episodes may be inscribed in history except by the effects that it induces on the entire network in which it is caught up” (Foucault, 1979: 25).

The article proceeds as follows: (1) I offer contextual background for the case, describing New Jersey’s Delaware Bayshore as a multidimensional, more-than-human contact zone; (2) I share my multispecies ethnography of the asymmetrical intimacy of bird banding—describing its tools, technologies, discourses, practices, and applications; (3) using critical theory and animal ethics, I analyze whether certain aspects of bird banding research practices might be fairly read as “violent” and/or “conspicuously innocent,” deconstructing the conservation paradox harm as care; (4) before offering some practical suggestions of harm reduction, I explain how conservation and its critical reformulations might be read as “anti-conquest” which reasserts EuroWestern authority and control as new forms of “care” and “concern” for an expanded multitude.

Background: The Delaware Bayshore as multidimensional frontier site

Every islander has had to cross a beach to construct a new society. Across those beaches every intrusive artefact, material and cultural, has had to pass … Every species of tree, plant and animal on an island has crossed the beach … Beaches are beginnings and endings … beaches divide the world between here and there, us and them, good and bad, familiar and strange … Crossing the beach that divided savage from Christian, chief from king, did violence to a man in all his parts. (Dening, 1980: 32–34)
Beaches are liminal sites where different beings, elements, and forces come into contact and contrasts are pronounced. As the “narrow edge” of continents (Cramer, 2015), beaches are ecologically distinctive landscapes that are highly vulnerable to negative anthropogenic impacts, such as climate change (Duran, 2017). They also resist definition; Peter Hay (2006: 22–23) offered a heterogenous sampling of shoreline representations; as a “mobile, fluid, or permeable boundary,” a “liberated zone,” and/or “a site of possibility.” Anderson (2003: 47 in Hay, 2006) described the beach as “the space between exclusion and inclusion, discrimination and acceptance, the known and the unknown … the past and the future, utopia and hell, reality and the imagination.” Beaches are lively frontier sites of unsettling, sometimes violent (colonial) contact, conflict, movement, migration, and transition. These qualities make the beach an ideal site for de/postcolonial “contact” analyses; as Wischermann et al. (2018: 33) explain, “The beach with its liminal characteristics represents the ideal human and nonhuman contact zone between the [European] arrivals and the indigenous inhabitants of the beach’s hinterland”.

The Delaware Bayshore, in New Jersey’s Cape May County, is a frontier site of colonization by white settlers. The history of contact between Europeans and the indigenous Lenni-Lenape here included the near complete erasure and removal of native peoples. Today, most residents would be surprised to hear that there are any Native Americans left in New Jersey whose active claims to the land are still being denied by white settlers. Because there persists here “a general lack of understanding about who New Jersey’s American Indians are, and where they are located” (Grant and Lockhart, 2007: 36; see Norwood, 2007), this article supports decolonization in New Jersey, in part, by re-inscribing Native American historical uses and claims to the lands, such as the Delaware Bayshore which is partly managed as public land by the state for conservation purposes. For example, the common names “Delaware Bay” and “Delaware Indians” can be traced back to a European surveyor, Captain Samuel Argall, who in 1610 named the bay after Jamestown’s Governor, Lord De La Warre (“Delaware”). New Jersey’s Cape May was named after the Dutch Captain Cornelius Mey in 1614. On the Cape May peninsula, unlike the innocuous names of the ocean-side beaches (Avalon, Sea Isle City, Wildwood, Stone Harbor, Ocean City), the toponyms of my field sites along New Jersey’s Bayshore betray histories of colonization: Higbee Beach, Norbury’s Landing, Gandy’s Beach, Pierce’s Point, Cook’s Beach, Kimble’s Beach, Reed’s Beach, and Moore’s Beach. The Lenni-Lenape trails down to and across the peninsula formed the current highway system of roads (Sailer, 2015), including the “King Nummy trail” which bisected my field sites north to south. Thomas Numee or “King Nummy” was the last recognized chief of the Unalachtigo or “ocean dwelling” Kechemeche tribe in the same coastal location of the NJ DEP closures. During field work, I passed the King Nummy Campground daily, located at the entrance of Pierce’s Point, a shorebird conservation closure site located along Route 47 (once the “Lenni-Lenape trail”). I have birded often on the salt marsh flats of Nummy Island, where the chief is thought to be buried and where nesting shorebird eggs, once harvested by the Lenape, are still plentiful (Cape May County, NJ—Official Website, n.d.; Grant and Lockhart, 2007; Kerlinger, n.d.; Kraft, 1986, 2001; The Press of Atlantic City, 2014). Despite the area’s saturation with colonial history, I have never heard the Lenape mentioned in any shorebird conservation context. My cursory review of the websites of conservation groups that currently organize shorebird protection efforts on the Delaware Bay failed to yield any/significant returns for the search terms “indigenous,” “Lenape,” or “Native American.” Though information about shorebird migration is permanently displayed at closure locations, absent are stories of Lenape Native Americans and their migratory patterns of movement to and from the same beaches for thousands of years. Thus, because conservation at these sites reads as non-colonial and almost ahistorical, I argue it appears “conspicuously innocent,” recalling Belcourt’s (2015: 6) observation that “settler citizenship is romanticized as if the state governs from a universalized space of sameness that is not characteristically violent and racist”.

New Jersey beaches today are socio-economic, multicultural contact zones where a spectrum of different others meet. Traditional and local livelihoods clash with global tourism and capitalist interests from nearby urban centers. Benjamin Franklin is said to have described New Jersey as “a barrel tapped at both ends” referring to Central and North Jersey’s cultural/economic association with New York City and South Jersey’s association with Philadelphia (Wacker and Clemens, 1995). The shore of New Jersey is not imagined or managed as a single coastline: identifications and jurisdictions break down by beach and municipality: first as Atlantic beaches or bay-side beaches, then by individual beaches around/less than one hundred blocks—each with distinctive local flavor. At the local scale, beach town populations divide between established, year-long, tax-paying residents and tourists or partial-year residents (pejoratively called “shoobies” by locals) who visit in warmer months on short stays. The Bay’s development has always lagged behind the ocean-side’s development as a tourist destination; “If you couldn’t afford the Atlantic Coast, you could the Bay coast, that is if you could tolerant [sic] the biting bugs” (Niles, 2011). What distinguishes the Delaware Bayshore from the ocean-side is its appeal as a global ecotourist destination. It is a place where stakeholders compete for access to and control over the coast: as wildlife refuge or natural resource otherwise “put to work” by humans (Moore, 2018) as recreational commons, (eco)tourist destination, or private property.

For all of human history, shorebirds have shared this landscape with people. But for many visitors, shorebirds are peripheral at the periphery. The birds’ small size, muted color patterns, mixed flocks, and evasive behaviors make them simultaneously common and mysterious. They are “liminal subjects” (Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2011)—living alongside humans, neither wild nor domesticated—who struggle to survive at a shifting, multidimensional (moral, ethical, physical, multispecies) frontier. Because they try to avoid humans, shorebirds are similar to Collard’s (2012) evasive cougar subjects who raise ethical questions about the appropriateness of human–animal contact. Along the Delaware Bayshore, birds are touched by humans, individually identified, legally protected for their intrinsic value, and sometimes revered. In these ways, as they skitter about at the geographic margins of the land as well as at the edges of human consideration, shorebirds make fine subaltern subjects of more-than-human de/postcolonial analysis of environmental knowledge production, which critically “looks back” at the (human, colonial) center from its periphery.

Multispecies ethnography: Hands-on conservation work

Delimiting disturbance

Knowledge about shorebirds has been gleaned from decades of surveys and repeated shorebird captures across the globe. In this section, I delimit and re-imagine “disturbance” within Delaware Bay conservation contact zones (of public exclusion). A more-than-human “contact” analysis of “disturbance” to shorebirds challenges traditional notions of ‘disturbance’ and methods of delimiting a study area by (1) implicating conservation workers as key disturbers, and (2) extending and troubling the functional boundaries and categories of any contact zone. Disturbance is discussed below not as a general pattern but as always particular, local, affective, and specific episodes of human-shorebird contact. I also analyze tracking technologies used on the bay as double-edged “arts of the contact zone” which facilitate better appreciation of nonhuman agency but also extend rule after/beyond original encounters.

“Disturbance” to endangered species is a subject of deep concern for shorebird conservation biologists. Long-distance migrants are especially sensitive to disturbance (Burger and Niles, 2017; Colwell, 2010). Because they are conspicuously exposed to predators in intertidal zones, often with no cover, they spend considerable time and energy avoiding threats. Regular, deleterious disturbance patterns are well-documented (Burger and Niles, 2017; Goss-Custard et al., 2006; Schlacher et al., 2013). On busy New Jersey beaches threats include humans, planes, raptors, trucks, jet-skis, boats, dogs, researchers, and feral cats. In 2014, rufa Red Knots (Calidris canutus rufa) earned federal protection from disturbance under the Endangered Species Act, reinforcing the need for existing New Jersey beach closures. Multispecies/multi-user contact here is anticipated, with closures officially arranged well in advance of the birds’ arrival, extending the zone in place and time. The closures protect the birds’ bodies and sense from disturbance, while for me the closures provided a formal zone of observation. As a participant observer and multi-season “shorebird steward,” I observed human–shorebird encounters from sunrise to sunset during the closure period, within or adjacent to the officially designated closure site boundaries. I grew familiar with the daily rhythms and behaviors of the migratory shorebirds who utilize the bay, including Ruddy Turnstones (Arenaria interpres), Semipalmated Sandpipers (Calidris pusilla), Sanderling (Calidris alba), Dunlin (Calidris alpine), and rufa Red Knots. I also observed asymmetrical encounters between the state and excluded beach users.

Closures transform the beaches into zones of research and ecotourism. Here experts and nonexperts, residents and outsiders, enforcers and violators, government and the public, conservationists and nonconservationists clash and grapple with each other. Inside the closures, the beaches host a mostly nonresident population of scientists and volunteers, shorebird watchers, and the media. Everybody else is physically excluded by ropes and signs. Ropes demarcate boundaries while doubly serving as the perimeter along which visitors are encouraged to observe foraging migratory birds (from a distance). Permanent displays appeal to human compassion for the birds, offering impressive facts about shorebird behavioral biology. Artful illustrations stimulate the eyes, with some placards displaying disarming shorebird drawings made by local school children (see Figure 2). The closures are enforced by paid and volunteer “shorebird stewards” as well as armed police conservation officers (COs).

At the boundaries of these closures and “designated shorebird viewing locations,” one encounters state power. Citing the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, closure signs issue threats of force to visitors (see Figure 3). Manner of address in signage shifts awkwardly: first imploring compliance by using the word “please” three times, then threatening the reader as a law breaker, finally enlisting readers as agents of surveillance (directing the public to report violations to the 1-800-WARN DEP phone number). Such different modes of address are “conspicuous” because they suggest the limits and contradictory purposes of state power. As suggested by the need for enforcement, residents often fail to comply. Despite the signage, each day beach users violate the closures and each season closure signs, posted by the dunes at road-ends, are torn down or stolen in subversive acts, often under cover of night. As a “shorebird steward” and participant observer almost every May since 2011, I pursued violators would explain how closures support shorebird migration. If they failed to leave the closure area or act hostile, I would call the CO. Conducting independent surveys at the Villas in 2015, I asked violators why they failed to comply; a typical response was that they “didn’t know” they were in a zone of exclusion and/or claimed they didn’t see the signs. To appreciate why this is entirely plausible, I next explain how nonhuman agency presents challenges for delimiting coastal closure and research sites.
Figure 2.
Children’s drawings on CWF NJ signage.

If seriously considering nonhuman agency, delimiting the more-than-human contact zone is a challenge. Siting closures is not a perfect art. Priming spaces for shorebird encounters, such as through the provisioning of ordinances, closures, ropes, signs, etc., do not always align with which beach or closure site the birds utilize. Because closure locations are noncontiguous, if they show up at all, birds often land on the “wrong” side of the ropes where they “do not belong,” extending or relocating the more-than-human contact zones to other places. Additionally, the beach itself is unstable. The moon and tides extend and retract the contact zone throughout the day. Closure boundaries and dimensions fluctuate, causing problems for habitat classification and enforcement. For example, notice that while the sign posted near the dunes in Figure 4 would be hard to miss at high tide, at low tide the sign is well out of sight—hundreds of feet away from the water line, where most people walk and play (see Figures 5 and 6). The timing of contact and migration are determined by nonhuman agents and cosmic forces such as stars, clouds, gravity, sand type, and weather. Long-distance migratory shorebirds time their arrival to coincide with the arrival of spawning horseshoe crabs, who journey onto dry land in the spring according to specific natural cues and sand type preferences, responding to lengthening daylight, high tides, moon fullness, and low wave activity (Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission website, 2018; U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, 2006). Climate change may be the most disturbing nonhuman actant affecting shorebird migration in the future, with increasing superstorms like Hurricane Sandy often pushing debris and horseshoe crabs far beyond the beach—into the dunes, onto roads, etc.—violently extending the coastal contact zone. Such delimiting challenges precede the physical challenge of making contact with evasive, not entirely predictable shorebirds.
Figure 3.
Typical sign posted at closure.

Figure 4.
Closure sign at high tide.

Figure 5.
Lateral view of beach at low tide.

Figure 6.
View from low tide line looking east, toward shore.

Next, I will describe the process of shorebird capture and subjectification. I explain how and why birds are trapped, handled, and forced to carry devices which “emit signs” across the hemisphere. Narrowly focusing on touch, human domination over shorebirds appears striking: with the birds’ overridden flight response and the biologists’ need for tools of capture certainly seeming to constitute an active “clash” and “grappling.” Thus, I argue that Pratt’s “contact zone” framing is appropriate here.

Making contact

The agency of the wind, weather, tides, moon, waves, and birds themselves influence when, where, and if conditions are suitable for a net launch. If the morning is not rained out, team scouts hit the beaches early, looking for shorebirds. Once a sizable flock is found, they circulate text messages with the birds’ location back to base and across the team. Base of operations is a large, short-term rental home nearby which serves as communal housing and work center for visiting researchers. Here, guests enjoy a nightly family-style dinner, lively stories, and scientific presentations. The birds’ return to the area therefore occasions a reunion of scientists and friends. Many of the biologists have come for decades, some arriving from across the globe on long-distance flights themselves. The guests mirror the movements of their shorebird subjects: residing here for a few weeks, then moving on (to the next stopover site). Yearly residents of the area recognize this familiar rhythm, watching passively as birds, biologists, and birdwatching tourists come and go each spring. This is a floating contact zone—both temporary and mobile, yet recurring and predictable—staged around the spectacle of an exceptional natural event and a formidable bird capture operation.

Hands-on contact between birds and biologists on the Delaware Bay is theatrical and explosive. Instead of using passive mist-nets, shorebird trapping uses an aggressive technology. Birds are captured by launching a “cannon net,” a well-researched, yet globally rare method of capture prepping, no longer permitted in the U.K. (Duarte, 2013; O’Brien et al., 2016). Challenges associated with the use of cannon or “rocket-nets” include extensive required training, large spaces for safe deployment, acquiring permits, securing gun powder, and physical risks for both people and birds (Bub, 1991; Clark et al., 2014). More studies measuring impacts are needed (O’Brien et al., 2016) since these (sometimes fatal) methods raise serious ethical considerations which must be squared with the aims of the study and the birds’ (already) threatened conservation status. For instance, the Bander’s Code of Ethics in the North American Bander’s Manual for Shorebirds states that: “1. Banders are primarily responsible for the safety and welfare of the birds they study so that stress and risks of injury or death are minimized” (Gratto-Trevor, 2004: 4). Because the capture and handling of birds causes stress and (repeated) trauma, impacting the population (Angelier et al., 2009; Duarte, 2013; Laiolo et al., 2009; Le Maho et al., 1992; Marco et al., 2006), the CWF team operate according to the “best practices” laid out by the USGS. Birds are ostensibly protected since “Standard practices limit the number of captures from any particular area, and numbers of birds per catch and total numbers caught over a season are limited” (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2014: 187). These limits are imposed because of the acknowledged costs and risks of capture. Yet, biologists concluded in a federal report on rufa conservation/research:
we conclude that these research activities are not a threat to the red knot because evaluations have shown no effects of these short-term stresses on red knot survival. Further, the rare, carefully documented, and properly permitted mortality of an individual bird in the course of well-founded research does not affect red knot populations or the overall subspecies. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2014: 187)
Illustrating the paradox “harm as care”, this conclusion could also be challenged by the fact that limits remain in place because impacts of tagging on both individuals and the wider population have not been fully studied (Vandenabeele et al., 2012).

Having the necessary gun powder and permits (Prisock et al., 2012), researchers ready the site for a “catch.” Dozens of gear boxes wait nearby. The scientists hope to capture as many shorebirds as possible. A good catch will contain around one hundred birds. About one thousand red knots will be captured on the Delaware Bay each year, equaling tens of thousands captured over the last few decades (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2014). A few veteran team members hold walkie talkies and spread out along the beach, corralling the birds to the catch area through disturbance. All other biologists, media, volunteers, and observing students are instructed to get down, hide behind the dunes, and stay quiet. Illustrating both a conspicuous lack of control and an abundance of caution, the team often waits for hours, baking in the heat and listening to radio chatter, besieged by no-see-ums (biting insects). Sometimes the catch is called off. In his blog, lead biologist Larry Niles (2007) described a catch which illustrates the role of nonhuman agency in determining the flow and location of human–shorebird encounters:
We had being [sic] trying for over an hour to move the birds into position but without luck. Peter was working hard twinkling the birds so slowly that you couldn’t really tell he was moving. The team … sat in rapt attention by the firing box while an unseasonably cold wind pushed sand across the long sandy flats adjacent to Hereford Inlet. But the wind-blown sand forced the birds into a new place just outside of our catch area. We decided to relocate the net. Eventually, Peter twinkled the birds onto position and we caught 84 red knots.
This passage includes the term “twinkling” as a euphemism for disturbance. “Twinkling the birds” involves active contact—moving deeper into the birds’ space, prompting them to evade and shift closer into the target catch area. For what comes next, I return to Lindsay McNamara’s (2015) account:
Cannons with gun powder charges fire heavy projectiles that carry the net over the birds, only at the perfect moment – when birds are catchable and none in danger. Luckily, it was not a “wet catch,” that day, as the net did not go into the water. As soon as the cannon was shot, we all spirited single file carrying our tubs down the beach, following the biologists. The biologists immediately knelt at the base of the net and started picking up birds and shouting their identification and passing them to us. As they went they rolled the net away to reveal more birds … It was very exciting! … and finally, I learned how to safely hold a shorebird in my very own bander’s grip!
Lindsay is describing how a serene, deserted beach instantly transforms into a high disturbance zone for shorebirds, with waves of people running toward them after the loud boom of cannon-fire and net falling out of the sky. Here it is important to pause and imagine how and why what McNamara describes as “exciting” must surely be terrifying for her bird subjects. Her repeated mention of how careful the biologists are to consider the birds’ safety and minimize risk is important, yet it is not the same as imagining or caring about their subjective experience as trapped individuals; rather, it preemptively serves to bracket off this line of consideration.

If the birds survive this initial moment of capture, under the net they pull toward the sky, sometimes injuring themselves. Immediate concern for the animals’ lives (in the moment threatened by those very tools of conservation) produces an intense atmosphere as birds are quickly removed. Potential injuries during this capture stage include bird muscle damage and “capture myopathy”: for instance fractures, sprains, bruising, dislocations, lacerations, eye trauma, crushing, excessive feather loss, shock, brachial paralysis, hyperthermia, and hypothermia (O’Brien et al., 2016). A cover is placed over the birds to keep them calm (Gratto-Trevor, 2004: 10). With caution, most birds survive this capture phase and are relocated into species-specific boxes covered with breathable fabric, until their bodies are further manipulated. The beach is converted into a busy space of knowledge production as biologists quickly set up equiptment tables and camping chairs under pop-up on the sand. With shorebirds now safe in their “keeping cages” (tupperware bins with holes and burlap covers), the urgency only somewhat dissipates. Because excessive handling and heat causes rapid weight loss (about 0.04 ounces per hour) and can be fatal (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2014), “technicians” handle birds quietly and efficiently. During “processing,” birds’ weights are noted and associated with other identifying characteristics. At all stages, their movements are entirely limited. Though a few birds might escape from a clumsy bander’s grip, effective resistance is unlikely: sandpipers cannot mount any serious challenge to their captivity.

Shorebirds must be captured, held, measured, sampled, and tagged because “fitness” metrics undergird shorebird conservation and land management decisions. Bird bodies are forced into cylindrical tube scales and weighed because poor body condition is understood as a determinant of mortality (Duijns et al., 2017). Later, weights will be aggregated by year into population-level narratives which characterize whole migration seasons as challenging or successful, with real impacts on land use. Low departure weights from the Bay signal the need for further environmental and regulatory intervention, justifying closures in subsequent years, effectively maintaining the territory of the state. Niles (2017) breaks down the logic of this association in his blog:
Our latest catch of red knots and ruddy turnstones two days ago (May 27) suggests 2017 to be one of the most challenging years of our 20 years of work on Delaware Bay. It challenged the birds for certain. For example, as of two days, ago (May 27th) average weights of red knots remain mired in the mid 160’s when it should be in the 180-gram range. This seems a minor difference but to red knots, it means a flight through the cold and often inhospitable north country of Canada and dropping out of the sky never to be seen again or landing znd [sic] never attempting to breed. We really don’t know for sure what happens to ill-prepared shorebirds, except they are less likely to be seen ever again. In 2017 most birds will be ill prepared.
The passage illustrates how a single metric such as weight is used to imagine migration and conservation success or failure more broadly. While weighing birds is an important practice, it is not the only practice performed upon the arrested bodies of shorebirds.

Information is assigned to and extracted from shorebird bodies at the banding station. All captured birds (dead or alive) are given USGS numbers. Using touch and visual inspection, birds are aged and “sexed.” Technicians measure bill length with calipers and evaluate feather molt. They blow on the birds’ breasts and assign each bird a “fat score” (a key measure of fitness). Blood samples are taken to trace the geographic spread of diseases, e.g. avian flu (Krauss et al., 2010), to measure environmental contamination levels (Burger and Niles, 2014), or to determine a bird’s biogeographical range. For example, biologists can identify birds’ use of sites—from southeastern USA to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego—through stable isotope ratios of carbon and nitrogen found in the blood of flight feathers (Atkinson et al., 2007; Hobson, 2005). Anticipating future episodes of contact (and re-traumatization) with biologists across the hemisphere, surviving shorebird bodies are loaded up with the signatures of encounter. Colored flags indicate banding location—geocoding the birds—interpellating them into a transnational tracking network (Howes et al., 2016). About one hundred or more shorebirds have been fitted with geolocating tracking devices on the Delaware Bay (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2014). After being processed, the birds are released, for the most part without lasting physical injury. But once brought under the manager’s technoscientific gaze, animals stay within it until they die or escape. Many will be captured or spotted again, such as B95 who has been resighted for more than 20 years and caught at least three times since first becoming enrolled as a conservation actor in 1995 (Hoose, 2012). Birds such as B95 embody the (success of the) shorebird conservation apparatus, serving as (forced) ambassadors for their species, illustrating the value of tags and tracking devices for transnational environmental governance.

Tracking technology is a double-edged art of conservation science and the more-than-human contact zone. Shorebird conservation is experiencing a paradigm shift thanks to advances in technology, such as tracking devices and remote sensing equipment (Benson, 2010; Bridge et al., 2011; Weidensaul, 2012). Pratt (1991: 37) explained that “arts of contact” are increasingly more “decipherable to those who once would have ignored them in defense of a stable, centered sense of knowledge and reality.” In this case, tracking is an art of contact which reveals the myriad experiences of animals in “radically heterogeneous ways that [researchers] were neither able nor entitled to prescribe” (39), disrupting the “stable centered sense” of any species or typical shorebird. For example, Niles (2007) admits that “With literally centuries of combined experience … we still kept guessing what would happen next throughout the season.” Tracking is a double-edged technology because as the shorebird crosses the hemisphere, the contact zone expands in space and time, colonizing and reasserting technoscientific, exclusive control over environments, not by controlling nature’s every move, but, more cost effectively, by thinking nature’s thoughts (Adams and Mulligan, 2003: 240). Tracking is supplemented and is scaled up with surveying/surveillance technologies, such as drones and crowd-sourcing websites like ebird.org and bandedbirds.org, which allow users to document bird sightings anywhere along the flyway. In similar ways, conservation has been “rendered technical”: as Li (2007: 7–8) explains, “experts are trained to frame problems in technical terms. This is their job. Their claim to expertise depends on their capacity to diagnose problems in ways that match the kinds of solutions that fall within their repertoire” such that “questions that are rendered technical are simultaneously rendered nonpolitical” or “antipolitical” (Ferguson, 1990; Scott, 1999). A contact perspective re-politicizes conservation technoscience by re-centering attention on the more-than-human, affective dynamics of encounter–-re-inscribing colonial histories of place and contextualizing these within expansive systems of environmental governance.

How might we evaluate the effects of these practices and new technologies within a decolonial ethic of conservation? Next, I consider the costs, benefits, and alternatives to banding practices.

Discussion: Harm as care—“conspicuous innocence”

Conservation may be ethically motivated by care and righteous anger for biodiversity loss, but that does not mean it is entirely virtuous and innocent. Invoking the contact zone, sensitive to Pratt’s original meaning and aim of decolonization, implies that uneven power and colonial violence characterize relations (Pratt, 2008). For the rest of this article, I weigh the costs and benefits of shorebird conservation practices, suggesting how they might be improved, assuming they should/will continue. I use a more-than-human contact perspective to analyze traces of animality/coloniality within conservation on the Delaware Bay.

Questioning certain elements of conservation research as “violent” works as intervention by critically focusing on the biopolitical mechanisms of animality/coloniality. Forced interspecies contact for conservation purposes is “conspicuous” because it is justified by questionable species logics which have raised serious ethical concerns. Focusing on touch personalizes conservation encounters, rendering other-than-human touched/touching subjects visible and implicating human actors as ethically responsible for their actions and positions. It extends and upscales Pratt’s (2008: 54) observation that, “The violence and destruction of the contact zone are glimpsed … in traces on bodies or in anecdotes”. It explains the conservation paradox harm as care (Srinivasan, 2014), where force is necessary because, as Manning (2007: 17) explains, “bodies must always be stilled to be characterized” since “When stilled, politics — and bodies — can be stabilized in the name of a larger system” (of coloniality).

It is undeniable that suffering occurs during shorebird capture and processing. Because shorebirds have “no choice but to be there, to be encounterable and researchable” (Collard, 2013: 62), it is important to remember that Animal research subjects do not and cannot give consent; in fact they may demonstrate an active desire not to participate in research. This desire is usually overridden. It is hard to imagine a more pronounced power asymmetry between researcher and research subject. (Collard and Gillespie, 2015: 206). Such practices are defended by scientists as necessary disturbance which provides important scientific data about fitness and migration. For instance, Kathleen Anderson (in Webster, 1982) explained that because “You can’t tell how a wild bird or another animal lives except by studying it as an individual” capture and banding is needed “to get information they could acquire in no other way,” implying both that individuals are important and that biologists know to consider all other means first. Yet, Haraway (1997) reminds,
The messy political does not go away because we think we are cleanly in the zone of the technical, or vice versa. Stories and facts do not naturally keep a respectable distance; indeed, they promiscuously cohabit the same very material places (68).
It is thus conspicuous that conservation enrolls shorebirds as subjects with individual inherent worth yet disappears their subjective experiences. In this contradiction, we find animality/coloniality expressed within the ontoepistemology of wildlife management.

What is appropriate interspecies contact, whether and when it should be labeled “temporary discomfort,” “violence,” or even “abuse” is not (just) a technoscientific question. For instance, Groling (2014) argues that social pressures explain the compartmentalizing and moral distancing behaviors of researchers who cause pain to their animal subjects. Perhaps a better word to describe banding research encounters might be temporary “discomfort,” as suggested by one reviewer (who dismissed shorebird suffering experienced during banding as necessary and less severe than other threats, especially compared to the life-long suffering experienced by slaughterhouse animals). I reject that shorebird suffering is less worthy of critical attention and/or the label “violence” because: banding provides useful data; is experienced by small other-than-humans, for brief periods; and is mostly nonfatal. Such a spectrum of acceptable suffering would be an example of what Raymond Frey (1988) called the “unequal-value thesis,” which, in this case, would rank different sentient bodies and their suffering on a relative value scale, effectually re-asserting evaluative authority to the human judge of value. Questioning elements of conservation research as “violent”: (1) refocuses attention on the unwelcome quality of uneven encounters as such; (2) recalls Pratt’s definition of the contact zone as a place of “asymmetrical violence” and domination; (3) exposes the questionable species hierarchies and logics performed (i.e. animality/colonialy); and (4) in this case, it questions the paradox (harm as care). Compared to the brute violence and utilitarian defense of slaughterhouses/slaughter house work, calling banding “violence” dissolves the gloss of “conspicuous innocence” which sanitizes conservation banding zones and provides ethical cover to biologist captors.

I find Foucault’s distinction between “violent” relations versus simply “asymmetrical” power relations useful here. Foucault (2000) explains that
“A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks, it destroys, or it closes off all possibilities” whereas “[power] is exercised only over free subjects and only insofar as they are free.” (340–342)
Extending Foucault’s (humanist) definition to nonhumans, Palmer (2001: 354) described animals as a dominated group for which “even though resistance is possible, it is within the context of fairly stable regimes of inequality” which cannot be reversed by the animals themselves: she explains, “Where reaction is not permitted, the being is treated in this context as a thing – an object to which things are done – however much one might want to maintain that, in other contexts, the being is not just a “thing””. Putting aside other moments, contexts, and threats shorebirds might experience during migration, in conservation banding encounters, because the shorebird is physically arrested—treated as a thing not allowed to resist—according to Foucault’s definition and how it has been applied by critical animal studied scholars, the encounter can technically be read as “violence” despite being motivated by care. Therefore, a contact analysis finds that banders are personally/politically/ethically responsible for the violent quality and effects of forced contact with shorebirds. Reinert (2013: 10) urges readers to remember tagged birds “not just as species or emitters of signs who provide information, but as individuals who struggle to survive” adding that “the data ghosts that scatter as disembodied blips across the screen are still moored to physical bodies—bodies that remain frail, vulnerable, all too mortal” (Reinert, 2013: 10).

Conclusion: Unsettling anti-conquest

In this article, I used a variation of Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact” perspective to read bird banding closure sites on the Delaware Bay as more-than-human contact zones and multidimensional, colonial/frontier sites shaped by “animality/coloniality.” In ethical terms, I questioned banding practices as violent iterations of the conservation paradox harm as care. However, practical questions important within political ecology and decolonization (of environmental justice, access to and control of the land) remain open. After Adams and Mulligan (2003: 241), I conclude this article by asking, at this site,
Who should get to forge conservation policy? How should local needs and wider conservation interests be balanced? How can locally diverse ideas of nature be reconciled with national and global priorities for conservation? … Can we imagine a conservation that recognizes and allows nature to be wild? Or is conservation, in Thomas Birch’s words (1990: 8) ‘just another move in the imperial resource allocation game?’.
Claims to the Delaware Bay remain contested. By re-inscribing indigenous claims to the land and local histories of violence and resistance, I have described conservation here as an American, white settler, contemporary form of what Pratt called “anti-conquest.” Pratt (2008: 65) explained that anti-conquest requires a first violence, such as the original displacement of indigenous (Lenape) bodies on the Delaware Bay: since “Only through a guilty act of conquest (invasion) can the innocent act of the anti-conquest (seeing) be carried out”. For anti-conquest (i.e. conservation) to appear virtuous, its “aspirations must be represented as uncontested” so that “unlike the conquistador’s, his booty is not taken from anyone else” (Pratt, 2008: 56; see also Stanfield, 2015; Van Houtan, 2006). Since Lenape sovereignty over the area was never formally surrendered (Norwood, 2007), settler government control of the Bayshore today (for conservation or other purposes) reads historically as a period of uninterrupted colonial violence beginning with the first arrival of Europeans. As it continues EuroWestern imperial strategies of control, denying sovereignty to both nonhuman subjects and displaced indigenous peoples, conservation (often justified through global discourses of improvement) appears “guilty.”

Decolonizing conservation fully (in this settler context) is unlikely. Decolonization has been defined by indigenous scholars as “a call for justice and the return of stolen lands/waterways to the Indigenous peoples who maintain special relationships to these places” (Tuck and Yang, 2012: 4). It therefore requires the surrender of environmental controls. Conversely, for conservation broadly “the obsession has been to control nature, to ensure that its biodiversity is sustained, to provide it with special places – but, at the same time, to keep its wildness under control” (Adams and Mulligan, 2003: 241). Conservation thus operates according to an “ontological politics” (Blaser, 2014; Mol, 1999) of control over land and bodies, administered entirely by white settlers in this context. Such control is underwritten both by animality/coloniality writ large and specifically (in the New Jersey context) by the “Last Indian,” “None Left Behind,” and other colonial “fallacies” which allow “scholars and cultural enthusiasts to treat an area’s indigenous culture as a thing of the past and not as a living reality” (Norwood, 2007: 22). What Tuck and Yang call “settler moves to innocence” in this conservation case might include managers (1) divorcing ecosystems from their colonial histories; (2) presenting technoscience as apolitical and purely objective; (3) positioning conservation in vainglorious opposition to instead of expressive of neo-liberal globalization; (4) erasing the intimate violence of conservation encounters through euphemisms and morally distancing vocabulary, such as “twinkled” and bird “processing”; and (5) obfuscating bird individuality by using species logics, numbering animals, simplified narratives of migration, etc. However, it should be noted that in the ways that conservation aims toward partial/ecological decolonization (to restore ecosystems to a lightly modified, Pre-Colombian “baseline” ecological state), it is extra-capitalist and not fully antithetical to decolonization’s aims of undoing European influence on the landscape through the overturning of existing, white settler property claims.

Shorebird conservation on the Delaware Bay can be made more environmentally just as well as respectful of nonhuman agency. Respect is overdue to Native American history and culture in New Jersey, especially by those in conservation who claim to stand for environmental justice and who daily challenge anthropocentric, capitalist ruination of the land. The following harm reduction strategies of reconciliation (Tuck and Yang, 2012) are measures immediately available for practitioners to address the problems presented above: (1) registration of more Native American historic, sacred places and restriction of capitalist-commercial land uses there; (2) including historic examples of indigenous Lenape land uses in conservation texts and public signage, signaling to visitors the history of the area as nonwhite space; (3) publishing and re-inscribing Lenape toponyms on maps and in print; (4) inviting Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape community members to share their histories and contemporary struggles for recognition online and in person, for instance at New Jersey Audubon or Wetlands Institute events; (5) implementing the recommendations of the Commission on American Indian Affairs, as mandated by Governor Corzine’s (2008) Executive Order # 122; and (6) having dedicated staff to coordinate efforts between The New Jersey State Commission on American Indian Affairs (established in 2006) and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the Division of Fish and Wildlife. Changes in practice for shorebird conservation to better respect the sovereignty of nonhumans might include: (1) banning the use of sometimes deadly capture methods such as canon nets in the United States; (2) instituting a zero mortality standard for capture techniques; (3) relying only on visual surveys; (4) reducing the number of birds caught each year and per catch significantly; (5) investing in research and development of nonviolent survey technologies (such as radar and hidden cameras); (6) deploying many more or only smart tags (instead of metal bands which require recapture/re-traumatization), etc. Though enforcement may be more challenging, from a local resident’s environmental justice perspective, shorebird conservation on the Delaware Bayshore could be made more equitable by (1) rotating or eliminating some closure sites during the season and from year to year; (2) allowing for limited uses at all times by the dunes or at low tide when beaches are significantly wider, bird activity is reduced, and crab spawning is at a lull; (3) providing greater financial and administrative support for the Celebrate Delaware Bay outreach program within WHSRN; and (4) nurturing political partnerships between birders, local residents supportive of conservation, local small-scale fisherfolk, and aquaculturists. New mechanisms might also be considered: for instance, offering WHSRN certifications for wildlife-friendly fishing operations, voter referendums, and/or instituting taxes on birding equipment to funnel additional monies into shorebird habitat restoration, open space, Native American historic preservation and community empowerment. In these ways, the aims of decolonization may be supported within ongoing conservation efforts in New Jersey and beyond.

I argue that before concluding, a “contact” analysis of environment knowledge production also implicates (de/postcolonial) critical conservation/environment studies by white settlers and EuroWestern scholars as forms of re-colonization and “anti-conquest.” Tuck and Yang (2012: 15–16) observe that less obvious, contemporary settler colonizers are often “a first environmentalist and sentimentalist, nostalgic for vanishing Native ways … an eco-activist, naturalist, and Indian sympathizer”. Those authors reject metaphors of decolonization, explaining that
The easy adoption of decolonization as a metaphor (and nothing else) is a form of [settler] anxiety, because it is a premature attempt at reconciliation … The desire to reconcile is just as relentless as the desire to disappear the Native; it is a desire to not have to deal with this (Indian) problem anymore (9).
I see such settler moves to innocence as gestures of anti-conquest. Pratt used the term “anti-conquest” to explain how European colonization, after an initial violent “first invasion,” continues through (sometimes intellectual) appropriation and expansions across new frontiers. EuroWestern and white settler scholars in the global north engage in more refined modes of anti-conquest and settler moves to innocence through their/our efforts to align their/ourselves with indigenous causes and cosmologies, as they/we assemble the multispecies cosmopolitical body and/or pine about the “pluriverse.” It may be argued that it is a new mode of coloniality to draw everyone and everything into a (singular) “body politic” or “parliament of things” (Blaser, 2016; Collard, 2012; Collard et al., 2015; Latour, 2004). Multispecies models and discourses of entanglement (Haraway, 2008), “more-than-human” hybrid geographies (Whatmore, 2002), the Earth as “rambunctious garden” (Marris, 2011; see arguments against in Wuerthner et al., 2014), “postnatural” descriptions of nature as “dead” (McKibben, 2006) or “domesticated” (Whitney, 2014), found for example within “new conservation” (Caro et al., 2012; Collard et al., 2015), exemplify this settler/colonizer anxiety and expansive appropriation. Such reformulations support the universalizing “dark pastoral” imaginary of the Anthropocene (Sullivan, 2017); that which indigenous and de/postcolonial scholars have rejected as what John Law called “the one-world world: a world that has granted itself the right to assimilate all other worlds and, by presenting itself as exclusive, cancels possibilities for what lies beyond its limits” (described in Blaser and de la Cadena, 2018: 3; see also Reiter, 2018; Todd, 2016). I return to Collard et al. (2015), who insist that such theoretical reformulations are insufficient because “domination should be resisted. The domination of nature and other-than-humans by particular human groups is ruinous. Acknowledging entanglement is not enough to shift us away from further animal death and exploitation.” In this spirit “compassionate conservation” (Bekoff, 2013) recently presented itself as a challenge to harmful conservation research practices. However, “compassionate conservation” did not do away with domination, but rather repackaged it in ethical, emotional terms of multispecies solidarity; disciplining, yet supporting the same/continued rule of global expert conservation practitioners while disappearing issues of indigenous sovereignty, land claims, consent, and resistance. Such examples can be read as settler moves to innocence and/or anti-conquest that operate through obfuscation and revised terms of discourse, often in sympathy, as allies with subaltern groups, but always without settlers having to change or give up anything substantial. Yet decolonization is ever-simple; it continually directs us back to the question: who controls (access to) the land and the bodies/minds of its inhabitants, and why them? When and if critical environment reformulations preserve the exclusive authority of Anglo-Europeans who disproportionately control land, bodies, and the terms (not) under discussion, they can be read as re-colonizing forms of anti-conquest—“incommensurable” with the strictest requirements of decolonization which rejects half-measures and metaphors (Todd, 2016; Tuck and Yang, 2012). Decoloniality with a focus on contact helps to reveal these uneven power structures, ontologies, and relations of animality/coloniality at work / in place.

In the ways described above, de/postcolonial perspectives challenge the conspicuous innocence of both normative and critical environment research (including conservation, including this article). Tuck and Yang (2012: 35) explain that these challenges are necessary and overdue, and that pathways forward “will not emerge from friendly understanding, and indeed require a dangerous understanding of uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics - moves that may feel very unfriendly”. This perhaps uncomfortable confrontation is part of the decolonization process and it should be welcomed within environmental geography and applied within conservation/practices on the Delaware Bay. Settlers should not stop trying to restore and protect the world’s biodiversity just because they/we are settlers, especially because they/we bear significant and disproportionate responsibility for environmental degradation. But, as outlined above, there is certainly room for improvement in practice. Future research should include “respect for local differences, suspicion of theories and values that claim absolute authority, and commitment to ongoing dialogue with formerly repressed cultural knowledge” (Armstrong, 2002: 415). Alice Hovork urges “ontological and epistemological plurality that takes disparate positions, experiences and claims of all humans and all nonhumans seriously without privileging any-one presumptively” as a first step toward “radically reconstructing ‘our relationships with each other, with animals, and the earth outside of domination’” (citing Kim, 2015: 21). Decolonization does not prescribe what comes after the dismantling of colonial structures of control. Mary Louise Pratt (2008) teaches us that confrontations in the contact zone can be productive, even liberatory, to the extent that they are allowed to incite transformation, birthing new selves through different relations. As demonstrated above, more-than-human applications of Pratt’s contact perspective within environmental studies can support decolonization by radically demanding more reflexive research and symmetrical relations between different others.

Highlights

Using a more-than-human variation of Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact” perspective, coastal conservation zones are read as frontier sites of asymmetrical, multispecies contact.

Conservation technologies including tracking devices are imagined as new “arts of the contact zone” which extend rule across species, space, and time.

Recognizing elements of conservation research as “violent” interrupts what I call “animality/coloniality”—reductive conceptions of “the animal” which underpin both coloniality and conservation.

The conservation paradox harm as care is discussed as one example of conservation’s “conspicuous innocence.”

Conservation in this context is described as a neocolonial mode of “anti-conquest”, identified by what can be read as practitioners' and Anglo-European critics' “settler moves to innocence.”

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Editors Rosemary-Claire Collard and Leila Harris as well as Mary Louise Pratt for their support of this project and mentorship over the last three years. Many thanks also to the reviewers and to my Dissertation Advisor Richard A. Schroeder, as well as to Committee Members Kevin St Martin, Asher Ghertner, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, and Maan Barua. Finally, I thank the Rutgers University Geography Department for supporting my work. Shortcomings and omissions are entirely mine.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

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The “bander’s grip”: Reading zones of human–shorebird contact

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Background: The Delaware Bayshore as multidimensional frontier site

Multispecies ethnography: Hands-on conservation work

Delimiting disturbance

Making contact

Discussion: Harm as care—“conspicuous innocence”

Conclusion: Unsettling anti-conquest

Highlights