Stefan Bargheer

The paper presents an inquiry into the emergence of the concern for the conservation of wild birds in Great Britain in the time from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It is argued that bird conservation as the earliest and most vigorous expression of the concern for nature conservation did not develop in form of a revolution in the history of ideas, but as a gradual transformation of long established practices and institutions caused by technological innovations in the field of natural history collecting.

The paper employs the conceptualization of the relationship between means and ends first formulated in the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey in order to analyze this process of technology induced cultural change. At the heart of the argument is the assumption that means and ends can neither be empirically separated nor analytically distinguished, but are constituting each other reciprocally in a given course of action and institutional context. Every course of action and every institutional context has in consequence an inherent transformative potential that can be brought about by changes of either technological “means” or motivational “ends.”

The concern for the conservation of birds in Great Britain developed in form of such a transformation of the means-ends relationships in the practices and institutions of bird collecting. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century the study of natural history had gained unprecedented popularity and this study involved the systematic collection of natural objects such as birds for the purpose of both classification and display. Initially, birds had been collected with the gun and preserved as mounted specimens in private show-cases and public museums.
With the innovation and diffusion of prismatic binoculars and photo-cameras since the late nineteenth century bird collecting transformed from the accumulation of dead bodies into the production of sight-records and photographic images of living birds. Natural history collectors began to turn from an interest in the anatomy and classification of dead birds towards the study of bird behavior (ethology) and the relation of birds to their particular environment (ecology). With the beginning of the twentieth century sight records, the so-called “life-list” in the case of the private collector, i.e. birdwatcher, and the “bird atlas” in the case of the professional collector, i.e. ornithologist, had taken over the role previously played by the collection of mounted bird specimens and study skins. With the change in technologies the museum as the dominant institutional locus for collecting dead birds gave way to the bird sanctuary and the nature reserve as institutional arenas for collecting living birds.

The assessment of the timing, outlook, and success of bird conservation is based on two years of archival fieldwork. The paper ties together sociological and historical methods advancing an historical ethnography for the understanding of this peculiar process of long-term cultural change. It shows how the emergence of the contemporary concern for conservation was driven by technological innovations in the context of the very practices and institutions that had previously contributed to the destruction and decline of birds and other wildlife.