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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
In the first days of spring, birds undergo a spectacular metamorphosis. After a long winter of migration and peaceful coexistence, they suddenly begin to sing with all their might, varying each series of notes as if it were an audiophonic novel. They cannot bear the presence of other birds and begin to threaten and attack them if they cross a border, which might be invisible to human eyes but seems perfectly tangible to birds. Is this display of bird aggression just a pretence, a game that all birds play? Or do birds suddenly become territorial - and, if so, why? By attending carefully to the ways that birds construct their worlds and ornithologists have tried to understand them, Despret sheds fresh light on the activities of both and, at the same time, enables us to become more aware of the multiple worlds and modes of existence that characterize the planet we share in common with birds and other species.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
First Chord
Counterpoint
Notes
Chapter 1: Territories
Notes
Counterpoint
Notes
Chapter 2: The Power to Affect
Notes
Counterpoint
Notes
Chapter 3: Overpopulation
Notes
Counterpoint
Notes
Second Chord
Counterpoint
Notes
Chapter 4: Possessions
Notes
Counterpoint
Notes
Chapter 5: Aggression
Notes
Counterpoint
Notes
Chapter 6: Polyphonic Scores
Notes
Counterpoint
Notes
Postscripts
A Poetic of Attention – Stéphane Durand
‘Slow down: work in progress’
In praise of slowing down
Gathering up the Knowledge which has Fallen from the Nest – Baptiste Morizot
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
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Living as a Bird
Vinciane Despret
Translated by Helen Morrison
polity
Originally published in French as Habiter en oiseau © Actes Sud, France, 2019
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
Epigraph from Nous sommes à la lisière by Caroline Lamarche © Gallimard 2019. Reprinted with kind permission of Gallimard.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4728-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Despret, Vinciane, author. | Morrison, Helen (Langauge translator), translator.Title: Living as a bird / Vinciane Despret ; translated by Helen Morrison.Other titles: Habiter en oiseau. EnglishDescription: Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2021] | “Originally published in French as Habiter en oiseau © Actes Sud, France, 2019.” | Includes bibliographical references.Identifiers: LCCN 2021016407 (print) | LCCN 2021016408 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509547265 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509547272 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509547289 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Birds--Territoriality. | Birds--Behavior. | Birds--Research. | Territoriality (Zoology)--Philosophy.Classification: LCC QL678 .D4713 2021 (print) | LCC QL678 (ebook) | DDC 598--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016407LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016408
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
For Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers
Acknowledgements
My thanks to:
Alexandra Elbakyan, whose tireless work in sharing and making available countless scientific articles made this research possible.
Stéphane Durand, who gave me the idea for this book, encouraged, supported, commented on and read my work with extraordinary generosity.
Baptiste Morizot, who gave the book its title, its momentum and many more invaluable things besides.
Marcos Matteos Dias for the melodic breathing.
Thibault De Meyer for everything he shares with me, for his notes which so pertinently understand and help others understand what matters, for his emails and his generous rereading.
Maud Hagelstein, not only for reading the manuscript with such extraordinary attention but especially for her enthusiasm and support, so precious in that perilous moment when you find yourself wondering if you should even have written it.
Isabelle Stengers, from the very beginning to the very last lines.
All the people who agreed to discuss my research and who often made me see things in an unexpected light: Serge Gutwirth and his team of researchers on ‘commonings’; my colleagues from the research centre ‘Matérialités de la politique’ at Liège University – in particular Florence Caeymaex, Édouard Delruelle, Jérôme Flas, Antoine Janvier and Ferhat Taylan; Sophie Houdart, Marc Boissenade, Élisabeth Claverie, Patricia Falguières, Élisabeth Lebovici from the Call it Anything collective; Tomas Saraceno, Ally Bisshop and Filipa Ramos.
Pauline Bastin and her decoys, Laurent Jacob, who reminded me about the disappearance of birds, for their welcome and their company.
Laurence Bouquiaux and Julien Pieron, for their interest and their friendship.
Roger Delcommune, Christophe and Céline Caron, Samuel Lemaire and Cindy Colette, and Lola Deloeuvre who, in one way or another, made my life, and Alba’s, so very much more comfortable while I was working.
My family, Jean Marie Lemaire, Jules-Vincent, Sarah and Elioth Buono-Lemaire, Samuel and Cindy once again, who supported me and reminded me that life is about more than just writing.
And Alba, for her infinite patience.
FIRST CHORD
Counterpoint
There are more things between heaven and earth (the realm of birds) than our philosophy can easily explain.
Étienne Souriau1
It all began with a blackbird. My bedroom window had remained open for the first time for many months, a symbol of victory over the winter. The blackbird’s song woke me at dawn. He was singing with all his heart, with all his strength, with all his blackbird talent. From a little further away, probably from a nearby chimney, another bird replied. I could not get back to sleep. This blackbird was singing, as the philosopher Étienne Souriau would say, with all the enthusiasm of his body, as animals do when they are utterly absorbed in their play and in the simulation of whatever it is they are acting out.2 Yet it was not this enthusiasm that kept me awake, nor what an ill-humoured biologist might have called a noisy demonstration of evolutionary success. It was the sustained determination of this blackbird to vary each series of notes. From the second or third call, I was spellbound by what was transforming into an audiophonic novel, each episode of which I greeted with an unspoken ‘and what next?’ Each sequence differed from the preceding one; each was reinvented as a new and original counterpoint.
From that day on, my window remained open every night. With each successive sleepless episode like the one I experienced that first morning, I rediscovered the same surprise, the same sense of anticipation which prevented me from going back to sleep (or even wishing to do so). The bird sang. But never before had song seemed so close to speech. These were phrases. Recognizable as such. They caught my ear in exactly the same way as words themselves would do. And yet, in that sustained effort imposed by the urge to avoid repetition, never had song seemed further removed from language. This was speech, but taut with beauty and where every single word mattered. The silence held its breath and I felt it tremble in tune with the song. I had the most clear and intense feeling that, at that moment, the fate of the entire world, or perhaps the existence of beauty itself, rested on the shoulders of this blackbird.
Étienne Souriau referred to the enthusiasm of the body. The composer Bernard Fort told me that certain ornithologists use the word ‘exaltation’ with reference to skylarks.3 For this blackbird, the word ‘importance’ imposed itself above all else. Something mattered, more than anything else, and nothing else mattered except the act of singing. And whatever it was that mattered was invented in a blackbird’s song, suffusing it completely, transporting it, carrying it onwards, to others, to the other blackbird nearby, to my body straining to hear it, to the furthest limits to which its strength could convey it. Perhaps that feeling I had of a total silence, clearly impossible given the urban environment beyond my window, was evidence that this sense of importance had seized me so powerfully that everything outside that song had ceased to exist. The song had brought me silence. The sense of importance had imposed itself on me.
Perhaps also the song affected me so powerfully because I had recently read The Companion Species Manifesto by Donna Haraway.4 In this extremely beautiful book, the philosopher describes the relationship that she has forged with her dog, Cayenne. She explains how this relationship has had a profound effect on the way she relates to other beings, or, more precisely, to ‘relations of significant otherness’, how it has taught her to become more aware of the world around her, more closely attuned to it, more curious, and how she hopes that the experiences she has shared with Cayenne will stimulate an appetite for new forms of commitment with other beings who will one day matter in the same way. What Haraway’s book does, and I was struck by this in the context of my own experience, is to stimulate, encourage and bring into existence, to render attractive, other modes of attention.5 And to focus attention on these forms of attentiveness. It is a matter not of becoming more sensitive (a rather too convenient hotchpotch of a notion which could just as easily lead to allergies) but of learning how to pay attention and becoming capable of doing so. Paying attention here with an added sense of being attuned, of ‘giving your attention’ to other beings and at the same time acknowledging the way other beings are themselves attentive. It is another way of acknowledging importance.
The ethnologist Daniel Fabre would often describe his profession as one which focused attention on whatever prevented people from sleeping. The anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro came up with a very similar definition of anthropology, describing it as the study of variations of importance. He writes moreover that, ‘if there is something that de jure belongs to anthropology, it is not the task of explaining the world of the other but that of multiplying our world.’6 I believe that many of the ethologists who observe and study animals, following in the footsteps of the naturalists who preceded them and who took this task so much to heart, invite us to follow a similar path: that of becoming aware of, of multiplying ‘modes of existence’ – in other words, ‘ways of experiencing, of feeling, of making sense, and of granting importance to things’.7 When the ethologist Marc Bekoff says that each animal is a way of knowing the world, he is saying the same thing. Scientists cannot, of course, dispense with explanations altogether, but explaining can take many very diverse forms. It can, for example, be a way of reconfiguring complicated stories as the vagaries of life which stubbornly insists on trying out every possible variation, or it can mean trying to seek answers for puzzling problems, the solutions to which have already been invented by this or that animal, but it can also reflect a determination to find a general all-purpose theory to which everything would conform. Put another way, there are explanations which end up multiplying worlds and celebrating the emergence of an infinite number of modes of existence and others which seek to impose order, bringing them back to a few basic principles.
The blackbird had begun to sing. Something mattered to him, and at that moment nothing else existed except the overriding obligation to allow something to be heard. Was he hailing the end of the winter? Was he singing about the sheer joy of existing, the sense of feeling himself alive once again? Was he offering up praise to the cosmos? Scientists would probably steer clear of such language. But they could nevertheless assert that all the cosmic forces of an emerging spring had converged to provide the blackbird with the preliminary conditions for his metamorphosis.8 For this is indeed a metamorphosis. This blackbird, who had probably lived through a relatively peaceful winter, albeit a challenging one, punctuated from time to time by a few unconvincing moments of indignation towards his fellow creatures, intent on maintaining a low profile and living a quiet life, is now singing his heart out, perched on the highest and most visible spot he could find. And everything that the blackbird had experienced and felt over the last few months, everything which had, until that moment, given meaning to things and to other creatures, now becomes part of a new importance, one which is urgent and insistent and which will totally modify his manner of being. He has become territorial.
Notes
1.
E. Souriau,
Le Sens artistique des animaux.
Paris: Hachette, 1965, p. 92.
2.
Ibid., p. 34.
3.
Bernard Fort would moreover give the title ‘Exaltation’ to one of his electroacoustic compositions based on the songs of skylarks:
Le Miroir des oiseaux
(Groupe de Musiques vivantes de Lyon, produced by Chiff-Chaff records).
4.
D. Haraway,
The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness
. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
5.
Baptiste Morizot invites us to take a similar direction with his conception of tracking as an art and a culture of attentiveness which encourages us to re-examine the ways in which we cohabit with other species as well as with humans.
6.
E. Viveiros de Castro,
Cannibal Metaphysics
. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014, p. 196.
7.
D. Debaise,
Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible
. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017, p. 2. The speculative question which runs through his work, ‘how to grant due importance to the multiplicity of ways of being within nature’, is based on the acknowledgement of the ever-present influence of what Whitehead called the ‘bifurcation of nature’, the effects of which are still being felt, notably in the denial of plural forms of existence within nature. The ‘bifurcation of nature’, which determines our modern experience of the world, refers to a way of understanding for which our experience reveals only what is apparent, whereas the elements necessary for the process of discovery and understanding are always hidden and must be found elsewhere. As a result, nature ends up divided into two distinct systems.
8.
In the work of Louis Bounoure the expression ‘cosmic factors’ recurs repeatedly to indicate, in particular, the lengthening of daylight and the modification in temperatures. L. Bounoure,
L’Instinct sexuel: étude de psychologie animale
. Paris: PUF, 1956.
1Territories
Unicum arbustum haud alit
Duos erithacos
(A single tree cannot shelter two robins)
Proverb by Zenodotus of Ephesus
(Greek philosopher, third century BC)
Scientists have found themselves genuinely intrigued by this process of metamorphosis. And not just intrigued, but moved at the same time. How can these birds, some of whom have been observed quietly living together through the winter, flying in unison, seeking food together, sometimes squabbling over apparently trivial matters, somehow, at a given moment, adopt a completely different attitude? From that point on, they isolate themselves from other birds, select a particular place and confine themselves to it, singing ceaselessly from one of their chosen promontories. Seemingly no longer able to tolerate the presence of their fellow creatures, they furiously devote all their energy to a frenzy of threats and attacks if any of these dares to cross a line, invisible to our eyes, but which appears to represent a remarkably well-defined border. The strangeness of their behaviour is astonishing enough, but even more striking is the aggressivity, the utter determination and pugnacity of their reactions towards others and, above all, what will later be referred to as the incredible ‘profusion’ of songs and poses – colours, dances, flights, movements of the most extravagant nature, all of them spectacular, all of them elements of a veritable spectacle. And the equally astonishing repetition of the routines involved in the process of setting up a territory. In 1920, Henry Eliot Howard described how a male reed bunting, observed from his home in the English countryside of Worcestershire, set about establishing his territory. The bird chose a marshy area planted with small alders and willows. Any of these trees would have provided a suitable perch from which to survey the surrounding area, but the bunting chose one in particular, which would in a sense become the most important spot in the chosen area, the bird’s ‘headquarters’, as Howard would call them. This would be the base from which he would signal his presence by his singing, monitor the movements of his neighbours and go off in search of food. Howard observed a specific routine taking shape around what would become the centre of the bird’s territory: the bird would leave the tree, go and perch in a nearby shrub, then on a bulrush a little further away, before returning once more to the tree. These journeys would be repeated in all directions with remarkable regularity. Their endless repetition mapped out the territory and gradually established its limits.
Other descriptions are possible. These would quickly follow, since Howard had clearly opened the floodgates to a whole stream of research in this area and was widely acknowledged by all the scientists working in this field as its genuine founder. His book Territory in Bird Life, published in 1920, not only provides meticulously detailed descriptions but also sets out a coherent theory which provides the explanation for these observations. According to Howard, the birds are engaged in securing a territory which will enable them to mate, build a nest, protect their young and find enough food to provide for their brood.
I should point out, first of all, that Howard was not a professional scientist but, rather, a naturalist who was passionate about observing birds, an activity to which he devoted the first hours of each day, before going to work. But scientists would quickly follow in his footsteps, acknowledging him as the true pioneer of this new field of research. Territory, as Howard understood it, could now be regarded as a valid scientific subject and could be explained in terms of the ‘functions’ it sustained in relation to the survival of the species. Moreover, in order to signal the arrival of this subject in the scientific domain, ornithologists would refer to a ‘pre-territorial’ period, indicating any theoretical speculations which preceded Howard. Secondly, it should also be pointed out that Howard was not in fact the first person to have associated territorial behaviour with the functions it could sustain and with the demands of reproduction. Two other writers had done so before him, notably Bernard Altum, the German zoologist who, in 1868, in a book which would not however be translated until considerably later, had developed a detailed theory of territory, and another amateur, Charles Moffat, a journalist with a passion for natural history, whose writings, published in 1903 in the relatively obscure Irish Naturalist’s Journal, would escape the notice of scientists. If Howard is acknowledged as the true pioneer of research in this area, it is first of all because he was the first writer, among those read by English and American ornithologists, to propose a detailed and coherent theory in a domain hitherto dominated by a great many speculative hypotheses.1 In addition, Howard was responsible for the growing popularity of a new method focusing on the life stories of individual birds. This is significant in that it was a matter not just of telling the story of birds but of becoming familiar with their ‘lives’. We should not forget that, until then, many ornithologists and amateurs studied birds largely by killing them or by taking their eggs to form collections or to draw up categories.
What scientists refer to as the ‘pre-territorial period’ in relation to the theory of territory therefore indicates the fact that any observations tended to be relatively fragmentary in nature and lacked any real theoretical structure. The proverb from Zenodotus cited as an epigraph to this chapter, for example, would be revived at a later stage in connection with the theory that robins like solitude. Before Zenodotus, Aristotle had observed, in his Historia animalium, that animals, and, more specifically, eagles, defend the area which constitutes their feeding ground. He also observed the fact that, in certain areas, where food was in short supply, only one pair of ravens would be found.
For others, territory would first of all be associated with rivalry between males over females. The defended area would either enable the male to ensure exclusive access to any female who settled there, and would therefore amount to a problem of jealousy, or it would provide him with a ‘stage’ on which to sing and perform displays in order to attract a potential partner. This would be one of Moffat’s theories. In such a case, territory counts not as a space but as a behavioural whole.
Not surprisingly, the hypothesis of the robin’s love of solitude failed to gain a place in any scientific writings. The theory arguing that a territory enables a bird to guarantee exclusive access to the resources necessary to its survival would, by contrast, long be considered a pertinent one and would gain favour with a great many ornithologists. The argument that territory is associated with a problem of competition around females would, however, dominate the pre-territorial scene for a considerable time (and was notably favoured by Darwin). Controversial as it was, it would not be completely abandoned and would recur frequently, in one form or another, in scientific writings – no doubt encouraged by the attraction certain scientists have for the high drama often involved in competition and in others (sometimes involving the same people) because of a reluctance to abandon the notion that females are simply resources for males. Howard, however, vigorously challenged this theory of competition around females because it failed to fit certain of his observations. He wrote moreover that it held only for as long as it was believed that such confrontations exclusively involved males. In fact, as he pointed out, in certain species females fought with other females, couples with couples, or even sometimes a couple of birds might attack a solitary male or female. And what explanation might be given for the fact that, in species which travel to breeding sites, the males sometimes arrive considerably in advance of the females and immediately engage in conflict? Territorial behaviour nevertheless remains a predominantly male affair. As Howard points out, if the females behaved in the same way and isolated themselves, birds would never succeed in getting together!
The notion that birds could establish living spaces and would then protect their exclusive right to such zones is not a new one and had already been observed by Aristotle, Zenodotus and some later writers. However, the term ‘territory’ was not mentioned and would appear for the first time with reference to birds only in the course of the seventeenth century. In her book on this subject, published in 1941, Margaret Morse Nice, an American ornithologist, indicates that the first reference to territory occurs in a book by John Ray (1627–1705) entitled The Ornithology of Francis Willughby and published in 1678. As the title suggests, Ray’s book focuses on the work carried out by his friend Francis Willughby (1635–1672). With reference to the common nightingale, Ray cites another writer, Giovanni Pietro Olina, who published a treatise on ornithology entitled Uccelliera, ovvero, Discorso della natura, e proprietà di diversi uccelli in Rome in 1622. This treatise turns out to be a book on the various ways of catching and looking after birds in order to set up aviaries: ‘It is proper to this Bird at his first coming (saith Olina) to occupy or seize upon one place as its Freehold, into which it will not admit any other Nightingale but its mate.’ Ray also mentions the fact, again according to Olina, that the nightingale ‘has a peculiarity that it cannot abide a companion in the place where it lives and will attack with all its strength any who dispute this claim.’2 But according to ornithologists Tim Birkhead and Sophie Van Balen,3 another writer, Antonio Valli da Todi, in fact preceded Olina in 1601 with a book on birdsong, and it is highly likely, given how similar the observations are in both books, that the latter may have copied his predecessor. He describes, for example, how the nightingale ‘chooses a freehold, in which it will admit no other nightingale but its female, and if other nightingales try to enter that place, it starts singing in the centre of this site.’ Valli da Todi would estimate the size of this territory by observing that its extent corresponded to a long stone’s throw. It should be noted incidentally that Valli da Todi himself derived much of his information from a work by Manzini, published in 1575. This latter does not, however, discuss the issue of territory.
We could of course allow ourselves to reflect on a coincidence here in that the term ‘territory’, with its very strong connotation of ‘the taking over of an exclusive area or property’, first appears in ornithological literature in the seventeenth century – in other words, at the very moment when, according to Philippe Descola and a great many legal historians, the Moderns reduced the use of land to a single concept, that of appropriation.4 Descola emphasizes that this conception is now so widely accepted that it would be very difficult to abandon it. In short, this notion first took shape under the influence of Grotius and the concept of natural law,5 although it is in fact rooted in sixteenth-century theology. It redefines the right of ownership as an individual right and is based in part on the idea of a contract which redefines humans as individuals and not as social beings (the ‘ownership’ of Roman law came about as the result of a process of sharing and not of an individual act, a sharing sanctioned by the law, the customs and the courts). In addition, it drew both on new techniques for evaluating land, which meant that any land would be delineated and its possession assured, and on a philosophical theory of the subject, that of possessive individualism, which reconfigures political society as a mechanism for the protection of individual property. We are all too aware of the dramatic consequences of this new conception of ownership, of those it favoured and of those whose lives were destroyed as a result. We are familiar with the history of enclosure, the expulsion of peasant communities from land over which they had previously exercised commoners’ rights and the ban which prevented them from taking from the forests the resources essential to their survival. With this new conception of ownership came the eradication of what is generally referred to today as the ‘commons’ and which represented land given over to the collective, coordinated and self-organized use of shared resources, such as irrigation ditches, common grazing grounds and forests6 … In England, writes Karl Polanyi, ‘in 1600, half of the kingdom’s arable land was still in communal use. By 1750, that figure had fallen to only a quarter and amounted to almost none at all in 1840.’7 Of the many different ways of inhabiting and sharing the land which had been invented and cultivated over the course of centuries, all that would remain would be the right of ownership, admittedly sometimes limited, but always defined as an exclusive right to use, and indeed abuse.
Returning to birds, to nightingales and to robins, I am not however entirely convinced that very much can be learned from this historical coincidence. That would be going rather too fast. It would mean, for example, neglecting the fact that the term ‘territory’ was not used in a random way with reference to animals but only in the description of the methods used to confine birds within aviaries, methods involving appropriation admittedly, and which involved the uses of cages and confinement but also methods intended to deterritorialize birds in order to have them live ‘with us’, in what constitutes ‘our’ territories. If I am to use this coincidence as a starting point from which to explore the story of territory, should I not also point out that the aviary originates from the desire to protect harvests from birds? And, at the same time, should I not emphasize that, as a result, it was linked to the art of hunting and falconry, an art that required cunning and an intimate knowledge of the habits of the various birds? Thus, for example, in the fourteenth century, pheasants were hunted with a mirror as a consequence of the observation that ‘a male cannot abide the presence of another’ and would immediately provoke a confrontation. A mirror would be hung from a string and the pheasant, convinced that what it was seeing in its reflection was one of its own kind, would attack the mirror, crashing into it and triggering the release of a cage which would then fall down and act as a trap. But if I am indeed to tell this story, I should also point out that it was precisely in the seventeenth century that aviaries ceased to be associated with falconry and that, instead, birds would be captured on a large scale no longer purely with the intention of killing them but for the pleasure of living alongside them and hearing their songs.8 This unprecedented enthusiasm for aviaries tended to focus on songbirds in particular – that is to say, in the vast majority of cases, territorial birds. This led to a spate of treatises describing their habits, their uses, the different ways of catching them and of keeping them alive. And I would no doubt need a great many more stories in order to consolidate this coincidence, to come up with other ways of linking these two events, to breathe life into a world I know little about but which – particularly in the context of this investigation – I have inherited. But if I am unable to do this, and if I must leave this coincidence as an open question, I can still be grateful for the fact that this process encourages me to be vigilant: ‘territory’ is by no means an innocent term, and I must not allow myself to lose sight of the violent forms of appropriation and of the destruction which has been associated with some of its current manifestations. It is a term which could bring in its wake certain habits of thinking as impoverished as the multiple uses which had characterized the reality of inhabiting and sharing the earth from the seventeenth century onwards.
Caution is therefore required. And curiosity. I have of course come across some examples of terms which are at the very least ambiguous, such as the fact that a male ‘claims’ a space, that he establishes ‘possession’ or that hummingbirds defend a ‘private hunting ground’. The fact that, in the context of territorial behaviour, aggressivity should be so prevalent and apparently so specific has also attracted a certain type of attention, particularly since observers, associating it with the usual patterns of competition, have tended to interpret it quite literally, emphasizing its aversive effect. The words used by some ornithologists to describe specific behaviours speak volumes: conflicts, combats, challenges, disputes, attacks, chases, patrols, territorial defence, headquarters (frequently used in reference to the central point of the territory from which the bird sings), war paint (to describe the colours of territorial birds) … But, at a very early stage, certain ornithologists challenged these terminological practices, not because they anthropomorphize birds but because they tend to focus attention on competitive and aggressive behaviour associated with territorialization, to the detriment of other dimensions which seemed to them of crucial importance.
That apart, as I was to discover in the course of my investigation, few ornithologists favour an approach based on ‘ownership’. The majority would prefer the definition proposed in 1939 by the American zoologist Gladwyn Kingsley Noble, ‘Territory is any defended area.’ This at least had the merit of being a relatively simple one, capable of describing almost all territorial situations. Depending on the various theories, a variety of functions would also be identified: a site can be defended in order to ensure subsistence, to protect birds from interference during the reproductive period, to provide a ‘stage’ for ‘promotion’ (a term encompassing all forms of exhibition, displays and songs), to ensure exclusive rights over a female or guarantee the stability of the same meeting place from one year to another, along with various other functions which will be examined in chapter 2. Very quickly, ornithologists realized that there was no one single way of establishing a territory but instead multiple forms of territorialization. This definition of an ‘actively defended area’ would be subject to a great many nuances as more discoveries on the subject came to light and as the multiplicity of different ways of becoming territorial were revealed. The boundaries would turn out to be far more flexible, negotiable and porous than early observations might have indicated, and, surprisingly perhaps, certain researchers would reach the conclusion that, for many birds, territories had other functions beyond simply that of protection against intrusion and ensuring exclusive use of a site. All of that will be examined in what follows.
