I've been thinking lately a great deal about the politics of gender and expertise in online birdwatching exchanges. I've approached these questions from position which is immanent to them, that is I understand myself to be a birdwatcher - however much a novice I am to many of the imperatives of that practice. So I don't presume any particular expertise, but I also implicate myself, to some extent, in the logics I am critiquing.
Although sometimes a solitary activity, birdwatching is also a deeply social one, and its sociality - or at least the immediacy of its sociality, appear to have been changed significantly by internet-age communication technology, although i'm a bit skeptical of the facile technological determinism such a claim would imply. Contemporary birdwatchers make exhaustive use of email lists to notify each other of rare and unusual sightings. On Facebook groups, they discuss (and dispute) bird identification, spread news of sightings, discuss trends, mobilize for purposes of wildlife conservation, habitat protection, and socialize. In future posts, perhaps I'll get into the major critiques of conservation of wildlife and habitat as a distinctly conservative and indeed, some argue, racist and classist form of activism. Here, I'm more interested in thinking about the ways in which mechanisms of expertise and knowledge operate through an often gendered lens.
Birdsplaining, to steal a mode of neologizing from a well-read Rebecca Solnit piece, is ubiquitous. (Bird-related mansplaining might be a more accurate transmutation, but it doesn't roll off the tongue quite so easily.). Birdwatchers are, that is, constantly explaining things to each other in a variety of formats and fora, constantly evaluating and assessing each other's knowledge almost as often as they assess and evaluate the identification of particularly tricky species of birds. Although birdwatching depends heavily on an ethos of charity and mutual aid, an ethos motivated in no small part by anxieties over the social reproduction of the hobby and/as an environmentalist practice with an instrumental relationship to the preservation of the environment, and although most birdwatchers I've met have been deeply generous with their time, their car seats, and their knowledge, it is also a sphere in which anxieties over elitism, distinction, access, and propriety are omnipresent. Well-rehearsed debates concern alleged differences between the field habits of birdwatchers and of bird photographers, the ethics of playing recordings in the field, of reporting owl sightings or baiting owls with live mice (generally understood to be a big no-no), and the sanctity of private property, whose observation is less an objectivist fetish of individual ownership than it is an anxiety over continued access to rare birds in non-public places. There are guardians of these practices, collectively designated ones and self-designated ones, just as there are people who are collectively celebrated as experts, as authorities, as gurus, and people who understand themselves as such and wish to be recognized as such.
On state email lists like Massbird, posters run the gamut from people who rarely birdwatch beyond their backyard to world travelers and renowned naturalists like David Sibley, principal author and illustrator of the celebrated line of field guides. There are dedicated birders of all ages, college students and twentysomethings and pensioners, proletarians and hedge fund managers. You can birdwatch with a pair of sixty dollar nikons and do it pretty well, or you can buy $2500 Swarovski Optik Swarovisions, spend another three thousand on a spotting scope and eyepiece, and twenty five thousand on a DSLR and lenses. You can burn through gas tanks and plane tickets chasing rarities or confine yourself to wherever public transportation will take you. Some of the gradients of power are premised on experience - how many birds has a birdwatcher (or birder, a distinction I will get to in a bit) seen? How many years has she been birding? How familiar is s/he with the birds of a given area, their locations, habitats, behavior, movements? Other gradients may be similarly rooted in experience but also dependent on forms of knowledge obtained through more traditional means which depend on access to forms of Bourdieuean cultural and academic capital: knowledge of ornithological terminology and controversies, writing style, grammar, spelling, and punctuation in posts to email lists and Facebook groups; ability to explain the identification of difficult species to others; ability to identify and name subspecies - which most field guides don't explain, and so forth.
I feel that I should again note the tremendous generosity that birdwatchers often show each other. In the year or so that I've been regularly birdwatching, I've been the recipient of such generosity on many occasions. A half dozen or so people picked me up during my long walks through the Parker River national wildlife refuge, offered me rides to the train station, and sometimes helped me find birds. In Central Park, a spring migration "hotspot", several very experienced birders helped me find several dozen species i'd never seen before. So birders help each other. They help each other break their own big year records, they help novices to see and identify new species, they share knowledge, time, automobiles, optics, and advice. During the year that I lived in Massachusetts, when I first encountered many of the social aspects of the birdwatching community, I wondered about the racial limits of the incredible generosity folks were showing me. Had I been a young African American man walking along a lonely dirt road adjoining a swamp, I'm sure I would have had a more difficult time getting rides, from the almost universally white motorists who drive the six mile stretch between Sandy Hook State Park and the PRNWR visitors' center, in winter one of the best places on the east coast to see Snowy Owls (don't get me started, though, on the fetish of the white bird, a fetish I think is less the product of birdwatchers than of a more generalized racial nomos.) Not all of the birders I have met are white. The NYC birding scene has a lot of East Asians, and a very small number of Latinos, South Asians, and African Americans. But, despite the widespread commodification of birdwatching as part of the broader expansion of ecotourism globally and within the US, to birdwatch is often to make use of public and private spaces in ways which non-birdwatchers may at first find suspect - parked cars along the sides of roads in rural residential or agricultural areas alight suspicions that racialized bodies may be less able to defray than might white men and women, and access is not the only problem. During the summer after my first year of college I had a low-paying job netting and banding birds on Northern Arizona's Mogillon rim. It tempered my enthusiasm for birdwatching for a while, in part because I didn't know what I was doing, and in part because of what I read as problematic racial dynamics between a few of the white deputy project leaders and some researchers and volunteers from Colombia, Peru, and Argentina. I've noticed similar logics in things I've heard white birders say since I found my way back, ten years later. In a world where "race" is still, for some, a synonym for "subspecies" and a long-tailed duck remains an "oldsquaw", birding can at times become a distinctly if unintentionally racial project, linking discursive whiteness to the North American wild, positing a chthonic spiritual connection to the natural world in spaces that are always already mediated not only by human labor (one of the great insights of Jeffrey Kimball's film Birders: The Central Park Effect) but also by the traces and continuing presence of colonial appropriation and racial genocide. I think about this a lot in relation to places like the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge, on the U.S.-Mexico border, where birdwatchers have struggled with jingoists and the federal government over the impact of border militarization, yes, but which stands too as monument to the ways in which the state values migratory birds far more than migratory people on land carved from the country from which many of the refuge's treasured avian vagrants and many (human) migrants originate during a mid-eighteenth century war of conquest for the expansion of the slave power in North America.
Class distinctions matter too, determine, to some extent, auto- and other forms of mobility, and in multiple senses, what it is that birders see when they see birds.there is a gulf between the $50 pair of Bushnells and the far more expensive Carl Zeiss HD binoculars that come with names like victory and conquest which make clear the connections between the birder gear market and hunting, manhood, "the two fisted birder" against the feminized and ridiculed figure of the birdwatcher, a name some are actively trying to reappropriate) and, (maybe this is a stretch) the neocolonial logics which make possible and undergird ecotourism's geography of difference, its relation to what Anibal Quijano has termed "the coloniality of power."
But I said I was going to talk about gender - itself a problematic proposal for birdwatching, where gender is so often presumed to be a biological fact that can be recognized by plumage, brood patches, and in-hand measurement. Female raptors and falcons and owls, after all, are always much larger than males of their species. Gender is often treated, at least for birds, for the ornithological gaze, as something that can be empirically known and mapped on to particular bodies through a correct alchemy of observation and, if necessary, manipulation. But bird gender is more metaphor than anything else, a metaphor for all the stories we tell each other about human gender. In so many of the ways naturalists discuss avian mating behavior and reproduction, they construct a representation of bird domesticity, of the nest as a humorously atavistic mirror of the nuclear family. The male brings home the bacon (or bugs, squirrels, fish, pigeons, nuts, seeds, etc) while the female incubates and protects the homebound offspring. The transposition of the narrative tropes of the bourgeois nuclear family as framing mechanism for bird reproduction seems to me an even stronger indication of the social construction of avian gender than the extant examples of "reversal" (e.g., phalaropes, in which the "male" raises the young after the more colorful "female" does a dance to "attract" "him" or transgression - The periodic stories of "gay" zoo penguins, which insert their subjects into a deeply homonormative recapitulation of said bourgeois domesticity.* To talk about gender in birding milieus is to talk about people, people who engage in spectacular macho bullying like the anonymous individual who emailed a member of the Massbird list a couple weeks ago to accuse her of being a phony and in the lower echelons of the Massachusetts birder hierarchy; people whose gendered entitlement to confirmation of their own expertise goes undiagnosed and uncontested, people who post exasperated grandiose self-aggrandizing comments on Facebook pages and email listserves; people who attempt to represent and practice birdwatching as exercise in mastery/masculinity and therefore as an exercise in commodity fetishism, the bird as a "tick" on a list.
I don't want to essentialize a gender binary where one is fluid and permeable. But there is something interesting about the anxieties which surround birdwatching's apparent passivity, it's closeness to but not conquering of, and therefore it's deeply feminized -in an admittedly essentialist characterization of femininity- relationship to nature, one which both renders women birders somewhat invisible except as a testament to American Exceptionalism (i.e. in conversations about how historically male "twitching" is in the UK) and devalues the labor they perform which sustains birders' organizations and bird populations (keeping and watching feeders, for instance.). These gendered conflicts limn -and police- the boundaries between citizen science and hobby, academic ornithology and Internet nerd trollwar. I suspect that I am not the first to have written on this subject. I will likely have more to say on the subject later.
*The queer theorist and historian Lisa Duggan defines homonormativity as "a politics which does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption."
