What is the Red Knot Worth?: Valuing Human/Avian Interaction

Jeffrey Karnicky

ABSTRACT
Approximately at the turn of the nineteenth century, the visual encounter between humans and birds, which has been going on since both forms of life have existed, began to solidify into a hobby, into something that a middle-class citizen of American might spend a morning doing. Certain technologies--optics (binoculars), field guides, and later, automobiles--helped to enable this pursuit. In the twentieth century, bird watching became an immense industry. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, one report claims that in America “an estimated 70.4 million people now go out-of-doors to watch birds one or more times per year” (Cordell & Herbert, 2003, p. 3). Much has been written on how and why bird watching has grown in popularity during the last 150 years or so. This essay will look instead at the effects produced by the nearly infinite acts of looking inherent to a hobby that has been described as one of “Americans’ most-favored [outdoor] activities” (Cordell & Herbert, p. 3)

Twenty-first century bird watching has its roots in the nineteenth-century realm of the collector. The first bird guides were, in part, intended as guides to commodification; they told how to identify, kill, and mount specimens; they established exchange values for various birds based on their rarity and aesthetic appeal. Elliot Coues’ 1872 Key to North American Birds exemplifies this type of guide.

Birdskins are capital; capital unemployed may be useless but can never be worthless. Birdskins are a medium of exchange among ornithologists the world over; they represent value--money value and scientific value. (cited in Barrow, 1998, p. 27)
Although birdskins obviously no longer are traded for their “money value,” the question of the value of birds has not disappeared. As the technology and ethics of bird watching has changed immensely since the nineteenth century, so has the means of ascribing value to birds.

In the twentieth century, improved optical technology led to binoculars’ replacing guns as the primary tool of bird watching. The collecting guides of the nineteenth century have become the field guides of today that provide detailed illustrations and descriptions that will, provide,
…an understanding of how our impressions of the birds are shaped by the environment and the birds’ behavior. This understanding will allow you to identify the common species with greater speed and confidence, tackle some of the really difficult species, and enjoy a greater appreciation of the birds themselves. (Sibley, 2003b, p. 4)
Most field guides today also include at least a short section on ethics and conservation. Sibley (2003a) says that bird watchers, “must first consider the welfare of the bird….Tread lightly and encourage others to do the same” (p. 14). This change from collecting guides to more ecologically sensitive field guides clearly is part of a larger movement, during the last hundred years or so, away from the study of individual specimens and toward the study of ecology and ethology.

In short, bird watching accommodates birds to a human visual apparatus, to allow bird watchers to differentiate birds by species (and subspecies and population), age, and sex. With these differentiations in hand, twenty-first century bird watchers can know more about birds than nineteenth-century ornithologists could have dreamed of. They also can come to value the experience of human-bird interaction in ways that go well beyond Coues’ “money value and scientific value.”

“A Seeing of Something”
Jay (1993), in a wide-ranging study of visuality, writes that the development of “exosomatic organs” such as telescopes and cameras, has enabled the human eye “to accomplish its tasks at a far greater remove than any other sense, hearing and smell being only a distant second and third” (p. 6). With this “expansion” of the ability to see, technologies of visuality, Jay writes, have “been linked in complicated ways to the practices of surveillance and spectacle, which they often abet” ( p. 3). In other words, the technology-aided increase in the power of the eye leads to much more than the ability simply to see more of the world. Vision becomes a vector of knowledge and values situated in specific historical and cultural frameworks.

As I note above, one study claims that 70.4 million humans in America watch birds in the course of a year. As I begin to consider the effects of these millions of encounters, I want to focus on one specific act of looking: my watching shorebirds along the Delaware Bay shore on May 15, 2003. I do not mean to use this one act of watching as a representative of all acts of bird watching; rather, in its singularity, this one act corresponds to what Nietzsche (1956) calls “a seeing of something”:
…let us beware of the tentacles of such contradictory notions as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute knowledge,’ ‘absolute intelligence.’ All these concepts presuppose an eye such as no living being can imagine, an eye required to have no direction, to abrogate its active and interpretative powers, precisely those powers that alone make of seeing a seeing of something. All seeing is essentially perspective, and so is all knowing (p. 255) .

In other words, no single act of vision can be viewed as transcendent. All seeing is a local seeing; all formulations of knowledge and values begin from specific perspectives, from “a seeing of something.”
Seen with only the naked eye, they look like a bunch of light brown spots moving around on a dark brown field. With a pair of binoculars, or better, a spotting scope, they resolve into 50 or so discrete birds feeding in a muddy tidal zone. Because this is May and the birds thus are in their breeding plumage, the Red Knots and Short-Billed Dowitchers are easy to identify: the knot with its bright red breast and the Dowitcher with its black belly feathers. The Semipalmated Plover, too, is easy to identify: It is the only plover species there, so it has a shorter beak and different body shape than do the others. Those 3 species account for about 75% of the birds present; All that’s left to identify are what is known collectively as the “peeps,” a group of sandpipers of similar size and coloration who can be difficult to distinguish from one another, especially by an amateur: the Least, Semipalmated, and Western. As Sibley (2000) writes,
Often appearing in distant mixed flocks, active and variable, Semipalmated, Western, and Least Sandpipers are always challenging to identify….It is no wonder that many birders simply pass them all off as peeps. Experience and careful study of plumage and shape is the surest way to identify peeps. (p. 187)

Before considering plumage and shape, the place and time of year—the Delaware Bay coast of New Jersey, May 15—tells you that it is very unlikely that Western Sandpipers would be here. So it is down to the Least and the Semipalmated. It is not very likely that the slight webbing between the toes that gives the Semipalmated its name will be visible; the yellow legs that would distinguish the Least from the grayish-black legged Semipalmated are covered with mud that makes all their tiny legs look an indistinct brownish-grayish-blackish color. The Semipalmated feeds in slightly deeper water than the Least, so the birds closest to shore are probably Semipalmated. To be certain, though, you can compare their beaks: The Least’s is slightly thinner, with a finer tip and a slight droop at the end. The Least is a darker chocolatey brown, the Semipalmated a bit plainer. In combination, all this information allows you to semi-confidently separate Least from Semipalmated.

All birds on the mudflats have been identified and written on to a year list (the list of birds seen in a given year). But so what? What kind of interaction is this? If the birds have any awareness of you, it is as a vague threat in the distance, to be fled if you get any closer. Nietzsche (2001) wrote of “just how pitiful, how insubstantial and transitory, how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature” (p. 874). This act of looking seems to have little tangible effect on either the human looking or the birds being looked at, excepting (a) a sense of satisfaction and pleasure on the human side and (b) a vague sense of increased stress for the birds. But what if this one act of looking gets multiplied by 70.4 million? And what if these acts of looking get situated in a complicated ecological and economic framework?

Valuing the Red Knot

Around the same time that bird watching was beginning to grow in popularity, Nietzsche (2001) was critiquing what he saw as the rational, scientific ordering of the world. He writes of the fundamental human drive to create order out of sensuous experience as,
…the construction of a pyramidical order based on castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, definitions of borders [that is]… something firmer, more general, more familiar, more human, and hence as something regulatory and imperative (pp. 878-879)
For Nietzsche, the seeking of any understanding from “within the territory of reason” could produce only an anthropomorphic view of the world. Any knowledge produced from looking at birds would be only knowledge of the “stupidity” of human consciousness. Bird watching, from this point of view, could be considered an act of assimilation, a means of reasserting the centrality of human thought in nature. The differences between a Least and a Semipalmated Sandpiper could be said to reside, not in the birds, but within the human mind. From this point of view, the differences of plumage and body shape between the two birds become an end in themselves.

These differences do not point toward a more thorough, if still human, understanding of the differences between the two species: They fill different niches within the same environment and they don’t interbreed. The birds, of course, “know” this difference in some way. But the human bird watchers, standing on the edge of the mudflat, mediating their encounters with binoculars and field guides, have no means of experiencing this difference as the sandpipers experience it. Simply--perhaps obviously--put, the technology of bird watching does not forge necessarily any strong connection between human and avian consciousness. On the contrary, bird watching might be considered as an act of assimilation: Through the act of looking, birds become a part of the human world.

This act of assimilation by no means is limited to bird watching, and assimilation certainly is not the only, or even the primary, effect of bird watching. The large numbers of bird watchers in America constitute a political and economic force for conservation. Cordell and Herbert (2002) note: “Increasing numbers of birders and of interest in birding should reflect more people willing and eager to be active in the stewardship of this most precious of natural resources” (p. 7). One government report estimates that the activities of bird watchers have “generated $85 billion in economic benefits for the nation in 2001” (La Rouche, 2002, p. 18).
Despite (or perhaps because of) the latent economic and political power of as a group, populations of birds in American have been declining at an alarming rate. La Rouche (2002) states the following:

This growing awareness of birding comes at an odd time; birds are in jeopardy. According to 35-year trend data (1996-2001) from the U. S. Geological Service, almost one-in-four bird species in the United States show “significant negative trend estimates.” This decline is attributed primarily to the degradation and destruction of habitat resulting from human population growth and short-sighted environmental practices such as the razing of wetlands needed by migratory birds (pp. 4, 5)
The spring migration of shorebirds through the Delaware Bay area serves as a perfect example of the inverse relationship between the growing population of birders and the declining population of birds. As I note above, the differences among the various shorebirds at the bay would still exist without encountering human consciousness. “Regardless of mankind,” to use Nietzsche’s phrase, the Least Sandpiper and the Semipalmated Sandpiper still would have their differences; they would fill different niches, they would not interbreed, they would have other different behavior patterns, but they probably wouldn’t be on the verge of being endangered. The Red Knot, in particular, is threatened.

Ninety per cent of the Western Hemisphere population of the Red Knot pass through the Delaware Bay area each Spring (New Jersey, 2003, p. 3) to feed on horseshoe crab eggs. Starting in the late 1970s, and increasing dramatically in the 1990s, horseshoe crabs in the Delaware Bay were harvested in increasing and unsustainable number--to be used as bait to catch eel and whelk--which then can be sold on a growing world market. Since 1990, there has been a “nearly 10-fold decrease in horseshoe crab egg density on bay beaches” (New Jersey, p. 3). This decrease has led to the following:

[In] 20 short years, maybe only two or three generations of Red Knots, the birds have declined by more than 66 % on Delaware Bay, and by 57 % at their principal wintering grounds near Tierra del Fuego. (Sutton, 2003, p. 32)
There are no signs that this decrease in the population of Red Knots is turning around. One scientist (Sutton, 2003 who has closely studied the issue has said that

Our data are pretty grim. Using our best models, at the rate they are declining, the population of Red Knots using Delaware Bay will be extinct by 2010 unless we can turn it around. (p. 35)
Neither economic nor political logic can explain this decline. “The ecotourism value of the bird and crab aggregation alone” (Sutton, 2000, p. 33) has been valued at $34 million, whereas “the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the entire horseshoe crab harvest industry, from Maine to Florida is worth $11 million annually” (p. 34). Although some actions have been taken--both New Jersey and Delaware (the two states bordering the area of the bay where most migration Red Knots stop) have placed temporary caps on the number of horseshoe crabs that can be harvested--many say that these steps will stop neither the decline nor the eventual extinction of this population of the Red Knot.

One expert on the situation asks what I think is a key question regarding the shorebird migration issue: “With ecotourism clearly on the rise, and crabs plainly on the decline, why isn’t it a no-brainer that the horseshoe crabs that underpin the entire phenomenon should be protected?” (Sutton, 2000, p. 33). Economic data, for some reason, remains unconvincing to policy makers. La Rouche (2002) notes, “although there is a certain irony in people becoming enthusiastic about birds as they disappear, it also presents an opportunity: Birders may be the economic and political force that can help save the birds” (pp. 4-5). Another way to state this irony would be to say that bird watching is, in one sense, a watch on the progress of extinction brought on in large part by the activities of the species watching.

The story of the Red Knot shows that birds can no longer, if they ever could, be thought of as outside a human frame of reference. Birds are part of the human world; they exist within a system of global capital. Birds cannot be considered “natural” in the sense that it is impossible for them to live in the twenty-first century without human intervention. Bird watching sometimes can serve to cover that up: It is too easy for a bird watcher to think that birds are some abstract presence in the world who might have a spiritual, mystical, or natural connection to humans. The benign--even celebratory--attitude toward birds voiced by the bird watching minority of humans obscures a larger human attitude that is at best indifferent or at most malevolent: Birds are a commodity, a thing with human use and exchange value. In short, birders are watching birds disappear. Economic analysis alone, for whatever reason, does not seem to be enough.

A Nagging Paradox
As I note in my discussion of Nietzsche above, human interactions with the “natural world” can reinforce the view that birds (and other forms of life) are things to be assimilated into a rational, human frame of understanding. Guattari (2000) makes a similar point in his consideration of the contemporary world. He writes that through today’s dominant technologies of subjectification, “Otherness tends to lose all its asperity” (p. 27). If bird watching is seen as assimilating birds to a human frame of reference, it could be said to contribute to this absorption of the other (birds) in the same (humans). Are there other ways of thinking about human and avian interactions that do not reduce to assimilation?

The ornithologists studying Red Knot populations know what should be done to stop the population decline. And the title of a pamphlet (New Jersey, 2003) distributed at one of the primary viewing spots of the Red Knot migration in Cape May shows that this knowledge is being communicated to bird watchers. The pamphlet argues that because “shorebirds are very sensitive to disturbance…we all need to modify our activities for the short time they are here” (p. 4). These short-term measures certainly do “help” shorebirds. Also, they highlight the same contradiction I note above: As birds become more familiar to humans they become rarer in the world. That is, the assimilation of birds compromises the relationship between avian existence and its exteriority. This contradiction that I note in bird watching, is, for Guattari (2000) a contradiction that exists everywhere.

Wherever we turn, there is the same nagging paradox: on the one hand, the continuous development of new technoscientific means to potentially resolve the dominant ecological issues and reinstate socially useful activities on the surface of the planet, and on the other hand, the inability of organized social forces and constituted subjective formations to take hold of these resources in order to make them work. (p. 31)

Guattari’s (2000) “nagging paradox” enlarges the scale of the question asked by the shorebird expert I cite above who asks why the solution to the problem is not a “no-brainer.” It is not a “no-brainer” precisely because it calls into question the basic means of self and other interaction. To resolve the paradox would mean to alter the ways that humans envision their every encounter with exteriority. In other words, ornithologists and interested bird watchers know exactly what should be done to ensure the continuation of the Red Knot. Outside this relatively small community, most humans probably do not know that a species of bird called the Red Knot even exists; certainly, knowledge that the Red Knot and other shore birds are imperiled is not widespread.
Guattari (2000) argues, “ecology must stop being associated with the image of a small nature-loving minority or with qualified specialists” (p. 52) if it is to bring about a change in the ways humans interact with the world. The specific encounter between the population of the Red Knot who migrate through the Delaware Bay and the humans who observe and study this migration clearly has affected the humans involved in this encounter. Can this change in understanding broaden to affect a significant portion of the human population that has little interest in birds and bird watching? Guattari (1995) asks a question that he says “returns with insistence:”
…how do we change mentalities, how do we reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity—if it ever had it—a sense of responsibility, not only for its own survival, but equally for the future of life on the planet? (p. 120)
Might bird watching become a vector for just such a large-scale change in human understanding and valuation of the world? Cordell and Herbert (2002) argue that bird watchers can work to bring about this change. They note that bird watchers have “a special and additional responsibility” (p. 7) to work toward a revaluation of birds
Increasing numbers of birders and of interest in birding should reflect more people willing and eager to be active in the stewardship of this most precious of natural resources (Cordell & Herbert, p. 7)
In other words, bird watchers can serve to raise awareness of the multiple ways that birds are valued in the contemporary world. As I note in the opening paragraphs of this essay, field guides today tend to emphasize the ecological value of birds over the “money value” that early guides established. This does not mean, however, that the economic valuation of birds has been forgotten. In fact, those interested in birds often see the economic value of birds as the strongest means for altering the ways that the wider public thinks about birds.

From “Money Value” to Other “Universes of Value”?

The economic value of birds today is calculated in a much more sophisticated manner than it was in the days of Coues’ determination of the “money value” of bird skins. Economists take into account such things as the amount of money spent on travel to bird-watching destinations, on food and lodging, and on equipment such as binoculars and spotting scopes. La Rouche (2002) cites a U. S. Fish and Wildlife Services report that estimates bird watchers in 2001 contributed $32 billion “in retail sales” to the U. S. economy, as well as directly contributing to the creation of 863,406 jobs (p. 17). As Cordell and Herbert (2002) note, “if birding participation represented growth in the customer base of an industry, market analysts would tell us that industry is doing quite well” (p. 8). That bird watching benefits the U. S. economy is inarguable. How this economic valuation of birds affects human consciousness and human/avian interaction is more difficult to assess.

Quantifying the economic value of birds certainly helps to strengthen arguments for conservation of bird habitat; at the same time, economic valuation also might be seen as a risky conservation strategy when viewed from a different perspective. The economic transaction contained in human and avian interactions easily can overwhelm all other valuations. Indeed, in one sense, the growth of bird watching from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century goes hand in hand with the growth of capitalism over the same period. Jay (1993) argues,
…the placement of objects in a relational visual field, objects with no intrinsic value of their own outside of those relations, may be said to have paralleled the fungibility of exchange value under capitalism. (p. 59)

Jay is not talking about bird watching here. Nevertheless, he presents an interesting way of thinking about the history of human and avian interaction. Bird watching, considered as an industry, creates economic value out of birds precisely by placing them in a “relational visual field.” That is, the primary tools of bird watching--field guides and binoculars--serve precisely this function. Viewing birds attaches economic value to them. In this sense, bird watching has strengthened the connection between capital and the natural world.

Resisting this integration clearly would be a pointless act. Allowing it to become the primary means of intersubjectivity also seems dangerous. Hardt and Negri (2000) argue that modernization, via “mechanical and industrial technologies” has expanded over the “entire world,” leading to the result that “all of nature has become capital [italics added] or at least has become subject to capital” (p. 72). That is, capitalism does not just connect to nature, it transforms nature into capital. Reconfigured from a bird watching perspective, the danger of prioritizing the economic value of birds can be stated succinctly: All birds have become capital.

If indeed this has become the case, if birds have been assimilated totally by a capitalist point of view, then the survival of birds becomes purely a matter of economics. The “money value” of birds becomes the ultimate determining factor in conservation decisions. Adaptation into a system of pure exchange value seems like a risky strategy for survival--of course, this is a strategy in which the birds have no say. If land development pressures assert a more stable and more easily quantifiable monetary value, or if-- in the Red Knot’s situation--a new value for horseshoe crabs appears, economic analysis would then devalue birds. Such devaluation easily could lead to the extinction of this population of Red Knots.

Perhaps even more of a threat lies in the possibility that capitalism can become the dominant mode of subjectivity where all human interactions with the world are seen as a means of capitalist exchange. Guattari (2000) points out how such a “capitalist subjectivity” limits the ability to think in a different way.

Capitalistic subjectivity seeks to gain power by controlling and neutralizing the maximum number of existential refrains. It is intoxicated with and anesthetized by a collective feeling of pseudo-eternity. (p. 50)

Excerpts from Cordell and Herbert (2002) suggest that “capitalist subjectivity” places value only on one way of viewing the world. Other “existential refrains,” such as those that might focus on ecological, aesthetic, or evolutionary values that would situate humans in a specific temporal environment are granted little importance. “Capitalist subjectivity” gives no credence to “the ecological role and the sheer beauty and mystique of birds” (p. 7), precisely because these things are difficult to quantify monetarily.

Guattari (2000) worries that capitalist subjectivity, “destroys specific value systems and puts [them] on the same plane of equivalence: material assets, cultural assets, wildlife areas, etc.” (p. 29). In other words, capitalist subjectivity runs the risk of flattening out all value so that everything becomes exchangeable for anything else. Wildlife areas, to use Guattari’s example, would be no more or less valuable than the material assets that they represent. If all value exists on “the same plane of equivalence,” then bird watching can function as an important aspect of capitalist subjectivity by showing that birds have a quantifiable economic value. At the same time, if humans see birds only as an exchangeable commodity, then human/avian interaction serves only to solidify the “plane of equivalence” that reduces all value systems to the same field of exchange.

Bird watching possibly can serve to break up this “plane of equivalence” by focusing on other systems of value. To watch birds certainly is to watch more than an economic system at work. In addition to capitalist values, bird watching connects to ecologic, aesthetic, spiritual, and intellectual values. These values easily can be dismissed as insubstantial from within the dominant mode of capitalist subjectivity. However, they also can be viewed as part of the construction of what Guattari (1995) calls “other Universes of value” (p. 134) that can alter human understanding of, and interaction with, the world.

Economic valuation can be seen not as an end in itself but as a starting point for an alteration of human subjectivity. Birds such as the Red Knot do have economic value; the hope of those who champion ecotourism seems to be that ecotourists will come to value birds differently, to exchange money for the possibility of seeing the world differently, of interacting with the world differently, and of valuing the world differently.

In conclusion, bird watching helps to create different ways of seeing and valuing the world. As the case of the Red Knot shows, these different ways are not just of theoretical importance. They raise key questions for interspecies subjectivity: Are there ways of revaluing the Red Knot within a human system of understanding? Is twenty-first century capitalist humanity capable of seeing and thus valuing another order of understanding? Does economic valuation exclude other ways of valuing? Does thinking of the Red Knot in a monetary system mean simply that losing monetary value equals extinction? If it does, it seems that birds are doomed; if bird watching is itself a tool primarily of economic valuation, the future of the Red Knot, and all birds, will be extinction. If other ways of valuing can gain prominence, the future of birds, and of human and avian interactions, might be different. Can 70.4 million pairs 23. of eyes create other universes of value? For the sake of the Red Knot, and for the sake of humans, I hope so.

Notes
* Jeffrey Karnicky, Millersville University


References
Barrow, M. V. Jr. (1998). A Passion for birds: American ornithology after Audubon. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cordell, K. & Herbert, N. G. (2002). The popularity of birding is still growing. Birding, February, 2-16.
Guattari, F. (2000). The three ecologies. (I. Pindar & P. Sutton (Trans.). London and New Brunswick, NJ: The Athlone Press. (Original work published 1989).
Guattari (1995). Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. (P. Bains & J. Pefanis, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Original work published 1992).
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Jay, M. (1993). Downcast eyes: The denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought. Berkeley: University of California Press.
La Rouche, G. (2002). Birding in the United States: A demographic and economic analysis. Addendum to the 2001 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildllife-Associated Recreation. Division of Federal Aid, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services: Washington, DC. http://fa.r9.fws.gov. (accessed December 18, 2003).
New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. (2003). Imperiledshorebirds on the Delaware Bay: What you can do to help them. Pamphlet.
Nietzsche, F. (1956). The birth of tragedy and the genealogy of morals. (F. Golfing, Trans.). New York: Doubleday and Company.
Nietzsche, F. (2001). On truth and lying in a non-moral sense. (R. Speirs Trans.). In V. Leitch (Ed.), The Norton anthology of literary theory (pp. 874-884). New York: Norton.
Sibley, D. A. (2003a). The Sibley field guide to birds of eastern North America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Sibley, D. A. (2003b). Sibley’s birding basics. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Sibley, D. A. (2000). The Sibley guide to birds. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Sutton, C. (2003). An ecological tragedy on Delaware Bay. Living bird, 22 (3), 30-37.

 

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