Moral Entanglements: The Emergence and Transformation of Bird Conservation in Great Britain and Germany, 1790-2010
In a best-selling book on his hunting expeditions in East Africa, first published in 1903, Carl Georg Schillings lamented the decline and extinction of wild animals. In Schillings’ view, something had to be done immediately. “I want to raise my voice,” he declared, “in order to involve all who have the power to do so, to save and to protect, what still can be saved.” By this he meant two things: “either the eventual preservation of the still existing treasures, or an immediate and intensive collection of exemplars of the single species for our places of popular knowledge, the museums.” Schillings went on to report with pride that he had endowed museums with animals of species that had by then been “crossed out from the book of life.”
How can we make sense of this strange advice to shoot endangered species in order to “save” and to “protect” them? This project conducts research into the emergence and transformation of concern for the conservation of wild birds in Great Britain and Germany from its beginning in the late eighteenth century to the present. The major focus of inquiry is on the work of the first voluntary bird and wildlife conservation organization in each country, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (1889) in Great Britain and the Bund für Vogelschutz (1899) in Germany. The work of these organizations was embedded in the major currents in developments in natural history museums and nature reserves, professional ornithology and amateur bird-watching, and the changing role of birds in forestry, agriculture, and gardening.
In the case of Great Britain, an initially dominant valuation of rare birds as collectors’ items displayed in private show-cases and public museums gradually gave way to the concern for the conservation of endangered bird species living in nature. With the introduction of binoculars and photo-cameras into the field in the second half of the nineteenth century, collectors’ interest in birds transformed from collecting bird bodies to collecting field-notes and photographic images of living birds. The practice of collecting with binocular and camera was a transformed form of the practice of collecting with the gun. Bird and wildlife photographers talked about how they “stalked” birds with the camera in order to make a “snapshot” and subsequently “mount” the exploits on the pages of their photo albums. Early photo-cameras designated for use in the field resembled guns and pistols. The developing concern for conservation focused on rare and endangered species as collectors’ items.
A different set of concerns prevailed in Germany. Here the development was driven by transformations of economic practices. With the industrialization of agriculture and forestry in the early decades of the nineteenth century the adverse economic effects of a diminished bird life became apparent. Bird protection as so-called “practical ornithology” had the aim to advance useful bird species, i.e. those devouring harmful insect pests, and diminish the number of the harmful ones, i.e. those feeding on the grain in the field and the fruits in the garden. Useful birds became referred to as “labor birds.” Concern was with the population levels of the most common and most useful bird species – the extermination of the rare, yet harmful ones was initially encouraged. Nest-boxes and bird-feeders were invented and distributed with the aim to increase population levels of useful birds, not to protect rare and endangered species.
The project investigates if differences in bird conservation between Great Britain and Germany up to the present can be explained by these different contexts of origin and their historical trajectories. In specific terms, it asks the question to what extent the statement of Carl Georg Schillings quoted above is not the opposite of the contemporary concern for conservation, but this very concern in the making.
