Everywhere Summer Tanagers Fly: An Ethnography of Birds, Birding and Ecotourism

• Other Authors: Belden, Jackson Fletcher, Traube, Elizabeth G., Weiss, Joseph, 1985-
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Birding; Ecotourism; Ornithology; Arctic
• Online Access: https://digitalcollections.wesleyan.edu/islandora/everywhere-summer-tanagers-fly-ethnography-birds-birding-and-ecotourism; https://doi.org/10.14418/wes01.1.2700; https://digitalcollections.wesleyan.edu/sites/default/files/2023-07/33834-Thumbnail%20Image.png

Tim Ingold offers us an abstracted portrait of the world as ¿a meshwork of interwoven lines of growth and movement¿ (Ingold, 2010: 3). His concept of meshworks builds from Bruno Latour¿s Actor Network Theory, which proposes that our collective material and social worlds are not the result of an agency held exclusively by human actors, often imagined as held by societies leading figures, but rather emerge from connections. Likewise, power is not a force exerted from above, but rather a physics flowing across these networks, although inequitably distributed (Latour, 1988). Therefore, humans and non-humans can never be understood in isolation. Rather, we are all caught up in an immeasurable complexity of interconnections. Even the concrete and steel of modern life is made vital by the Rock Pigeon and House Sparrow¿s nests. Birds are busy connecting the world through their movements. In movement they disperse pollen and then seeds and connect seemingly distinct realms of the world. The seabird connects the deep ocean to the island. The songbird connects the tropics to the arctic as they rush north for the boreal summer. The Cattle Egret connects the pasture to the heron rookery. And they connect humans to the non-human worlds surrounding us, as well as to other, distant human worlds where those birds travel. Birds, at least most of them, fly. While their songs, calls and plumages are accessible to direct human experience, their lifeworlds are deep and broad beyond human comprehension, though that only provokes us to try harder. We come to understand birds and their greater-than-human flows of life in what I call shining moments - events in which our worlds overlap, and we become entangled. Everywhere humans go there are birds. They are there in the background, and at times the foreground of every human life. But some of us seek moments in which they are brought into focus. In their search for entanglement, birders have worked to forge new connections, human and non-human, and learned to draw birds in and sustain ...