In The Backyard Of Birds: An Exploratory Study In Avian More-Than-Human Relationships
In The Backyard Of Birds:
An Exploratory Study In Avian More-Than-Human Relationships
I think most birders (professional and non-professional alike) would agree that once a person starts noticing birds, it is very difficult to return to the prior state of inattention. Why would it be any different? After all, birds seem to have existed in the minds and lives of humans for a long time; painted more than 30,000 years ago on the walls of the Chauvet cave is the to-date oldest known avian painting, which is of an owl (Boria, 2021). The back of the owl’s torso has been drawn, but its head appears to have swiveled completely around. In this jarring posture, the owl sits facing the viewer (David, 2017, p. 38).
Some scholars take our affinity with birds a step further and interpret from the historical records that there were times and places where humans did little without first observing birds (Serres, 2016). This consultation could take place through augury (soothsaying) or ‘simple’ observation for the purpose of understanding climate and other surrounding conditions (Hinchliffe, 2016), for example.
As it turns out, just because some of us might be late or only just returning to the bird-watching party does not mean that birds have not been noticing us. Recent research indicates that crows, for example, don’t simply notice humans; they pay attention and act on their observations, remembering human faces and passing acquired information on to other crows (Marzluff et al., 2010).
Other studies on crows show that they follow our gazes and pay attention to what it is that we are looking at (Schloegl et al., 2007; von Bayern & Emery, 2009). In paying attention to the gaze of the more-than-human, we learn (or are reminded) that the more-than-human gazes back (van Dooren, 2019).
Sometime in the autumn of 2022, I began to look for and befriend the crows (Corvus corone) living in the trees and buildings around my house. To do so, I began to appear in the same locations, at the same times, and with a food item they responded to most: walnuts. After many months spent becoming familiar with one another, the crows began to seek me out when I walked through the neighborhood. Through movement they would let me know that they had seen me and would ensure that I saw them. While some crows simply made it a point to ‘hop’ from tree to tree, some crows would fly brazenly close past my head to overtake me, making sure to cross my line of sight. Knowing that crows are known to dive at competitors and enemies, the maneuver initially felt threatening, though I realized later it was more likely intended to catch my attention.
Similar to David Abram’s experience, once I began attending to birds, an anthropocentric veil lifted, and ‘my ears began to attend, in a new way, to the songs of birds— no longer just a melodic background … but meaningful speech in its own right, responding to and commenting on events in the surrounding earth’ (2017, p. 22).
This article is not an inquiry into the origins of an ‘anthropocentric veil’ or to speculate what caused personal onto-epistemological ruptures. Instead, the article applies and translates theoretical and philosophical works of thinkers from different disciplines to personal encounters with birds to build towards a multispecies reference framework.
Drawing in part from Massey’s feminist spatial onto-epistemology, birds are a fascinating point of inquiry into the manner of being here; being where spatial narratives meet up … the layers of our meeting intersecting and affecting each other, weaving a process of space-time’ (2012, p. 140). In paying closer attention to the birds in my surroundings, I noticed that a reflective process beyond the confines of the then and there occurred.
Inspired by Vinciane Despret’s idea of attunement (2004), I argue that increasing human awareness about the spatial milieux in and through which living beings encounter each other is crucial in providing the foundations for inter-species affinity and communication to emerge. To explore the implications of paying attention to the more-than-human and what this could mean for International Relations, this essay engages with scholarship through personal encounters.
In the spring of 2024, I noticed a pair of pigeons (Columba livia forma urbana) building a nest under the solar panels of a house across from the one I was residing in. I marveled at the adjustment of these birds to the environment they now lived in, compared to their origins.
Regarding the origins of the feral pigeons that are common in cities across Europe there are two hypotheses: the synanthropic (meaning ecologically associated with humans) hypothesis and the feralization hypothesis. The synanthropic hypothesis states that rock pigeons voluntarily joined grain-growing humans in the turn towards agriculture (Kösters et al., 1994), with this process possibly taking place in the Neolithic period 5,000 to 10,000 years ago (Goodwin, 1983). As such, urban pigeon populations are said to have formed not through direct selective influence of humans but rather evolved with humans (Rösener, 1999).
The second hypothesis, feralization, assumes that urban pigeons evolved from domesticated domestic pigeons. (Haag-Wackernagel, 1993). Both hypotheses are likely true depending on the regional context. Though crows, pigeons are often considered the rats of the sky and are generally considered a nuisance now, throughout a significant part of European history, they were a close partner and cultural icon of humans, used to represent images like peace, love, the holy spirit, or to deliver messages (Jerolmack, 2007). Here they were, many millennia later, wedging twigs and brambles under the panels to bring forth and raise a new generation.
Several weeks pass, and by all indications, the pair of pigeons I had been observing had a few chicks stowed away under the panels. Occasionally throughout the day, the parents traipsed underneath to visit their chicks but otherwise remained stationed on nearby rooftops. On a late morning in mid-May, I notice a young crow strutting towards the solar panels. I recognized this young crow as last year’s offspring from a clan that lived in this section of the neighborhood, a clan that I was feeding at undetermined intervals. The year before, I had watched its parents teach it how to forage for food. Now I watched as the young crow ducked under the panels, where all was silent for a few moments, before a scuffle could be seen, then heard, as the crow pulled out one chick from underneath the panels. Admittedly, I eventually tried to distract the crow by throwing walnuts (that I knew it had previously enjoyed) onto a rooftop close to it. But the crow was undeterred; the pigeon’s dying moments were long, and it was a gruesome sight.
Despite the ‘rational’ understanding that this was no unnatural event, I was overcome by a sense of abjection and betrayal towards the crow but also towards myself, especially as I noticed for the first time that spring and summer that many crows appeared to prey on young pigeons. What was behind this feeling of abjection, of betrayal? As days and weeks passed, I began to reflect further on my experiences with the birds in who’s backyard I was living and moving in:
What role did my belief of crows being intelligent creatures play in why I sought them out and how I related to them? Was my regular feeding of the crows indirectly or directly to blame for the death I had witnessed? By feeding crows walnuts, was I interfering with the ‘natural’ by inadvertently bolstering the strength of one population to the detriment of another? Had I (in an effort to explore more-than-human relationships) replicated behavior that I had thought to be challenging?
Wanting to engage with these questions further, this article takes on Merton et al.’s typology of an exploratory study that intends ‘to raise questions rather than to answer them’ (1973, p. 504). The article first reviews scholarship that underlies this inquiry, such as works in posthumanism and environmental philosophy. Coupled with personal experiences, the inquiry continues engaging posthumanist and eco-philosophy through concepts of animal friendship, embodied knowledge, and emotions such as abjection and grief. The article concludes with a reflection on challenges to situate both the embodied experiences as well as the engaged theoretical and philosophical work in a broader context of political science scholarship.
Literature Review
Many theorists within environmental humanities and philosophy write on the need for a re-organization of human and non-human relationships and give room to horizontal kinship networks and relational ontologies (Abram, 2017; Badmington, 2000; Braidotti, 2013; Flint, 2022; Haraway, 2007, 2016; Kumm et al., 2019; Plumwood, 2001; Stengers, 2018; Tsing, 2000, 2010; van Dooren et al., 2016; Youatt, 2014). Posthumanism is one expression of reflection and re-organization of theories of knowledge and knowledge production within the academy and, as this essay aims to exemplify, also outside of it.
To understand the ambitions of posthumanism, it is helpful to review what posthumanist thought is in response to, namely the ‘historical moment when the Human has become a geological force capable of affecting all life on this planet’ (Braidotti, 2013, p. 5). As Haraway argues, ‘the need is stark to think together anew across differences of historical position and of kinds of knowledge and expertise’ (2016, p. 7).
Paying attention to more-than-humans can therefore surface new ways of thinking with and in a place, because it matters what we use to think with (Haraway, 2016, p. 12). To undo this form of anthropocentrism in International Relations would require rethinking not just who or what can participate in existing politcs and international relations but also what is actually meant by the term and study of ‘politics’ and ‘international relations’. Strausz argues that a quest to ‘re-root International Relations’ asks of scholars to imagine and experience knowledge beyond the brain, as knowledge that is deeply embedded in multispecies relations (2024, p. 209). I can only concur with the words of van Dooren, that once you start being attentive to the presence of a crow, ‘it is incredibly difficult to pretend to inhabit a world in which all else is passive background to human lives and dramas’ (2017, p. 2).
In humanism, Frantz Fanon sees an implicit will to see sameness wherever it looks, a distinctly European phenomenon and inseparable from imperialism. The will to find humanism in the non-human creates not just an anthropocentric but an objectively segregative framework that operates under a universalist mask (Fanon et al., 1967). That theoretical and philosophical works in posthumanism often resonate with people that live outside the socio-economic hegemony can then be easily understood and makes it an inclusive framework under which to theorize.
Environmental philosophy that does not make it a point to engage more-than-human existance struggles to extend beyond anthropocentricism. This is reflected in the fact that even figures assumed to be working for the protection or conservation of animals (or other more-than-human), the latter are still frequently understood as subjects to be managed within a human political framework. They are not seen as political actors in their own right (Youatt, 2014).
However by for e.g. considering animals solely as biological rather than biological and political beings, the anthropocentric boundaries of what and who is considered political has onto-epistemological consequences also, and unwittingly, for humans. The author brings to mind the administration of antibiotics as a way to manage the effects of intense livestock farming. I reflect on a local policy by the municipality of Groningen that uses a form of chemical birth control to manage the population of feral doves in the city park.i Similar to antibiotics or the docking of pig-tails, this population intervention addresses a ‘problem’ that did not originate with feral pigeons but the manner in which pigeons interacted with humans, as a result of how humans interacted with pigeons. The framing/assumption of the more-than-human as apolitical thus reifies the anthropocentric notion of approaching the more-than-human as something that can and should be governed and reconfigured if necessary (Youatt, 2014), as in the case of feral pigeons.
In the following sections, the research article moves from a broad engagement with environmental philosophies and posthumanism to a more targeted examination of concepts of animal friendship, embodied knowing, and the role of emotions.
Animal friendship
A critical interrogation into my own onto-epistemological position requires, first and foremost, questioning what caused my seeking out of the crows. While I consider myself fond of living beings in general, there evidently was a selection process that took place within my mind and body when I decided to ‘befriend’ crows versus pigeons. In candor, it was a selection process informed by the concept of intelligence: It was possible to strike a ‘friendship’ because I considered crows intelligent. This surfaces several questions, one of them being: What does it mean for myself and my role as a researcher when I must assert intelligence as a criterion for pursuing relational practice, and consider it a worthwhile endeavor?
Since Aristotelian times, the notion of friendship has been based on the premise of shared likenesses. According to Derrida, in Politics of Friendship, we inherited from ancient Greek dominant culture a notion that the friend is ‘our own ideal image’; the friend is the ‘same’ as me, and thus a true friend is the ideal double and other self, ’the same as self but improved’ (2005, p. 23). Anderson argues that underlying most conceptualizations of ‘animal friendship’ is an uncritical onto-epistemology that facilitates a hierarchical difference which retains human superiority (2022). Though befriend animals is often not intended as a humanist endeavor, many critiques valid for humanism apply in the context of animal friendships. The superiority maintained is facilitated by likening animals to humans, that occurs by denying the more-than-human certain characteristics believed to be unique to humans, such as speech or language.
Paradoxically, I attempted to dissolve boundaries between myself and the more-than-human by anthropomorphically befriending them and perpetuating a humanist continuity, thus reducing them to the same while also denying the more-than-human important characteristics or capabilities (Anderson, 2022). An alternative, horizontal kinship and relational ontology would require moving beyond the traditional notion of friendship, one characterized by symmetry and human superiority. Instead of friendship being guided by the seeking of likeness, an understanding of the more-than-human as having unknowable, uncontainable, and uncategorizable differences should take place.
Drawing from Anderson, this would create a friendship that is characterized by the vulnerability of differences and not knowing. This posthumanist approach offers the possibility to evade the humanistic values that reinforce anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism, and a dissolution of boundaries to the point of meaninglessness ii. What follows further from Anderson is the acknowledgment that all of us, humans and more-than-human, suffer and thus share vulnerabilities, which has profound effects for relating to the more-than-human but also ourselves. This posthumanist-guided reframing of friendship conceptually challenges the human friend, who is likewise anthropomorphized to the point of sameness, having to contend with a common internalized sense of a “true” friend being one who is stable and reliable through time, despite generously presuming ourselves to simultaneously possess unknowable differences.
Noticing Birds, Embodying Knowledge
Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty have been attributed a key role in advancing a different thesis for cognition (Shapiro & Spaulding, 2024). Today, proponents of embodied knowledge and epistemologies generally hold to be true that several factors play a role in cognitive capacities. The concepts are prominent in environmental philosophy and posthumanist schools of thought, because in challenging the Cartesian assumptions of who and what produces knowledge (and where), a world of new ways of understanding our senses unfurls.
Drawing from these schools of thought, I advocate here for understanding knowing as emerging from the mind, the body, and beyond; as a complex, integrated state of cognition not limited to the brain. If, in order to challenge anthropocentric belief systems, there is a need to broaden and thicken our onto-epistenological role, then a move towards more-than-human attunement calls for re-embedding selfhood within relational processes not just towards our own senses and their stimuli, but also to other objects and agents (Duvernoy, 2022, p. 4). Because both the act of noticing as well as birdwatching involves a suite of embodied activities - eyes scan, breathing slows, posture and gait become more calculated - I argue that noticing birds can function as an embodied way of knowing and of becoming known to the more-than-human.
Psychological research posits that humans rarely see what we are gazing at unless we actively direct attention towards it. Birdwatching thus not only assumes attentiveness; it requires it; becoming an explicit and embodied decision to attend to what one is seeing (Watson, 2010). I return to the research mentioned in the introduction, in which it is argued that some birds actively notice us. From personal encounters, I know that besides crows other birds also paid attention to me. Having noticed in remarkably short time that I was regularly providing the crows with nuts, magpies chattered loudly and trailed behind me if they saw me leave the house. With luck, there would be a few minutes before the crows caught on (either through the communication of the magpies themselves or through their own observation) and they could retain some walnuts for themselves before the crows arrived.
What this encounter, in combination with scholarship, suggests is that since not just humans hold the capacity to pay attention to others, a plausible hypothesis arises that the more-than-human are able to recognize others as other subjects to enter into relationships with (van Dooren, 2019). This would necessarily implicate the establishing of a politics and ethics of how we might come to horizontally know and relate to others. This in turn emphasizes the iterated need to (re)craft modes of living (and dying) in a shared, often relational world (Tsing, 2010; van Dooren et al., 2016).
Emotions as Embodied Knowledge
In another attempt to reflect on my onto-epistemological relation with the more-than-human sphere in my knowledge practices stems the recognition that ‘knowledge arises … from feeling’ (Strausz, 2024, p. 412), Since emotions are felt in the body, they are included in many posthumanist and eco-philosophy works. However, attributing emotions as active agents in scientific inquiry is still prone to discreditation. In this regard, and ‘to decolonize IR, we must not only recognize the role of emotions’ but should treat them as vehicles into multiple worlds outside the self, thereby also shaping our experiences with the more-than-human and requiring recognition (Ling, 2014, p. 580). For brevity the article will consider only the emotions that surfaced in the observation of a crow killing a pigeon chick: abjection and grief.
Abjection
Developed by Julia Kristeva in a psychoanalytical context, abjection is defined as a visceral rejection of things that are or have been part of the self, a rejection made for the purpose of [re]establishing the self. (Biggs et al., 2021). It is an emotional feeling that surfaces in moments of shame, embarrassment, or some form of awareness. Timothy Morton puts forward a transformed sense of abjection, ‘ecognosis’ (2016, p. 123). Ecognosis can present as a depressing sense of ecological awareness that can’t be shaken off, due to being surrounded and embedded in entities that we separate ourselves from. It is the feeling of disgust and dismay after watching a news item or film that exposes the reality and extent of living within and under anthropocentricism.
Nevertheless, as Biggs et al. argue, in certain ways this abjection facilitates the (re)discovery that prevailing dichotomies (human/non-human, etc.) are false, and that there is just a human rejecting parts of itself that it feels it must reject to construct a current concept of human ‘culture’ (2021, p. 11). In interrogating my visceral feeling of abjection as I watched the young crow kill to feed itself, a moment where I wanted to separate myself from the crow killing the pigeon chick, I can now understand that this abjection could not have taken place without the preceding humanist premise of animal friendship. The anthropomorphic and human-centered foundation was ruptured because in that moment I no longer saw or felt ‘likeness’ with the crow, pointing to a need to reframe how and why I relate to others, both human and more-than-human.
Grief
Many of my experiences of noticing birds are either interspersed or followed by a sense of grief. I experienced grief in the observation that the local Egyptian goose pair (Alopochen aegyptiaca) lost many of their chicks in the weeks after they hatched and in the observation that a crested coot (Fulica cristata) residing in the nearby pond had a visibly infected foot due to an embedded fishing hook and was evading all attempts to be caught and brought to a wildlife veterinarian. In Western onto-epistemologies, grief and mourning have largely been considered experiences unique to humans. However, research increasingly points to evidence that grief and mourning are also experienced and carried out by the more-than-human (van Dooren, 2014). Drawing again from my observations, I am left to wonder what kind of political and ethical implications arise when we then consider the pigeons on birth control who are treated for problems that do not stem from themselves. Do they grieve when they notice that the life cycle (one they surely experienced or see elsewhere) does not take place?
This, in my opinion, is made more complex by research that shows that American crows have been known to avoid places where one of their kind has been killed for over two years, sometimes changing whole flight paths to avoid flying over such a place (van Dooren, 2014). It can be justifiably argued that crows ‘simply’ interpreted danger from the death of their kin, but if the death of a single crow signals a danger significant enough to avoid a place for years, to alter flightways and daily foraging routes – then what does the death during this sixth extinction event communicate to attentive observers? Coupled with the notions presented in earlier sections of this article, that at least some more-than-human notice and interact with us relationally and drawing further from van Doornen’s research on grieving corvids, the shared experience of grief we have with the more-than-human only emphasizes a fundamental necessity to work towards and in a multispecies framework.
Conclusion
“To be one is always to become with many.”
(Haraway, 2007, p. 2)
Understanding ourselves as inherently (but not uniquely) relational beings challenges the conventional boundaries of identity, agency, and ethics – many of which lie at the core of the study of political sciences and International Relations. A relational ontology not only reshapes how we perceive ourselves but also redefines our responsibilities to the broader web of life, many of which are studied and then deliberated in the formal spheres of political relations. It has been suggested that a multispecies reference framework for the study of international politics would not focus on whether the more-than-human should be included, iii but how an empirically accurate and continuously reflexive study of political relations of the more-than-human can take place (Youatt, 2014).
Central to my argument is that the embodied practice of knowing birds (bird watching) offers a valuable opportunity not only to practice an intertwined relation to the more-than-human but also to reflect on dominant and personal onto-epistemological positions that affect my role as a researcher in International Relations. Building an attunement in the form of noticing reveals Massey’s theory of a spatial complexity in which layers of being(s) intersect and mutually affect and relate to one another. By embracing this existential relational interdependence, it becomes possible to foster a precise awareness that human actions, stories, and systems shape the more-than-human world, which in turn shapes us. It is known that our actions, stories, and systems matter, but as the article has tried to demonstrate, they don’t inherently matter. These acts matter because they are in relation to other matter (Barad, 2003). As explored in earlier sections, an awareness of likeness through difference then opens the door to new forms of ethical political engagement, grounded in humility and reciprocity rather than unchallenged, unspoken hierarchies and separation.
Of course, acknowledging this interconnectedness is not without its challenges. It asks of us to challenge deeply ingrained habits of thought and calls for action in systems that often resist change. As with most interdisciplinary research, this kind of research draws from many schools of thought and makes use of concepts that cannot easily be transplanted into different contexts. The arguments in this research article are limited in many ways, not least because of frequent superficial engagement with philosophical and theoretical traditions that are not easily summarized. Furthermore, the incorporation and reflection of embodied experiences in research should be supported by a theoretical and methodological framework, even if both must be (re)constructed for the specific research.
Despite these challenges, the perspectives engaged in this article offer strengths and material for future research. By incorporating personal experiences and ‘applying’ selected scholarship, the article encourages one to reimagine human potential not as an isolated force but as part of a dynamic, multispecies collaboration. By cultivating relational awareness, we begin to see the possibilities for creating a world that values not just human well-being but the flourishing of all life.
Ultimately, to see ourselves as part of an interconnected whole is a step towards posthumanist co-creation, since both recognition and non-recognition of our shared existence reverberate through the web of life. Albeit complex and challenging, this sort of theoretical and philosophical engagement holds the hope of a more ethical and meaningful way of being in and with the world.
Written by Samira Feissali
Samira Feissali is a research master student in Modern History and International Relations. Currently, she is investigating memory in post-WWII German publics, whilst aiming to integrate post-humanist and archaeological relational theories.
i. This information was communicated to me via email by a spokesperson of the Groningen municipality in December 2024.
ii. Also a critique of ecologist Andreas Malm (2020) regarding new materialism.
iii. According to Youatt, the more-than-human are already included, but as mute and mechanistic figures.
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