Red Coats and Wild Birds

How Military Ornithologists and Migrant Birds Shaped Empire

Kirsten A. Greer

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469649849
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ökosysteme & Lebensräume

During the nineteenth century, Britain maintained a complex network of garrisons to manage its global empire. While these bases helped the British project power and secure trade routes, they served more than just a strategic purpose. During their tours abroad, many British officers engaged in formal and informal scientific research. In this ambitious history of ornithology and empire, Kirsten A. Greer tracks British officers as they moved around the world, just as migratory birds traversed borders from season to season. Greer examines the lives, writings, and collections of a number of ornithologist-officers, arguing that the transnational encounters between military men and birds simultaneously shaped military strategy, ideas about race and masculinity, and conceptions of the British Empire. Collecting specimens and tracking migratory bird patterns enabled these men to map the British Empire and the world and therefore to exert imagined control over it. Through its examination of the influence of bird watching on military science and soldiers' contributions to ornithology, Red Coats and Wild Birds remaps empire, nature, and scientific inquiry in the nineteenth-century world.

CHAPTER ONE

Red Coats and Wild Birds across the British Empire

In 1882, the Natural History Museum at South Kensington opened its doors to a new exhibition, Nesting-Series of British Birds. Located in the first room of the modern building, the display showcased a variety of avian species found within the British Isles (figure 2).¹ The exhibition was based on the collection of groups of birds, nests, and eggs in their natural state from England, Scotland, and Ireland, with each species (159 in all) displayed in separate glass cases and habitats in the museum’s bird galleries. In most instances, the birds and their nests were “exhibited with the actual tree, rock, turf and other support which was found with them,” as well as the details of the collector, the county, and the date.² Such species included the “Robin Redbreast,” one of Britain’s “most familiar and characteristic resident species … where legendary associations and its fearless nature have combined to make it a general favourite.”³

A number of British military officers contributed to the nesting series (figure 2), including a little tern by Willoughby Verner and a puffin by Colonel Paget Walter L’Estrange, Royal Artillery. L’Estrange was known for collecting birds during his military service abroad and gifting his bird skins to the Royal Artillery Institution at Woolwich.⁴ Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Howard Lloyd Irby prepared a British Birds: Key List (1888) and assisted in the formation of the life groups of British birds in the British Museum (Natural History), while Philip Savile Grey Reid obtained birds for the nesting groups of British birds series in the galleries at the British Museum. Others included Captain George Ernest Shelley, Grenadier Guards, who became a leading expert on African ornithology after serving on the Gold Coast and South Africa, and exploring in Central Africa.⁵

Army officers such as Irby and Reid were the most numerous members of the British Ornithological Union and assisted in the accumulation of knowledge of birds across the British Empire.⁶ These military men also sent bird skins to the Natural History Museum from these regions, which made up the ornithological collections in the museum’s back rooms. In the 1880s, Richard Bowdler Sharpe (1847–1909) of the British Museum urged the War Office to encourage and reward those officers who took advantage of “their opportunities for increasing scientific knowledge.”⁷ Today, many of these specimens continue to form part of the collections at the Natural History Museum, as well as other natural history museums across the United Kingdom and North America.⁸

FIGURE 2 Emily Mary Bibbens Warren, Nesting-Series of British Birds at Natural History Museum at South Kensington, London, 1888. Natural History Museum.

Dead birds circulated across the British Empire in a myriad of ways. Stuffed birds were sent as gifts in the slave trade; as part of the discourse of discovery and exploration; as songsters in aviaries in gardens; as treasures in private museums; as colonial objects at world fairs; and as scientific specimens in the emergence of the field of ornithology, the scientific study of birds. The collections and documentation of avian specimens bore witness to the “circuitry of empire”⁹ that extended across formal and informal parts of empire, including missionary work in the South Pacific, coffee plantations in Latin America, fur trade in British North America, timber commerce in Atlantic Canada, and military service in the British Mediterranean. Here, the avian imperial archive reflected the “movement of networks of knowledge, power, commodities, emotion and culture that connected the multiple sites of the empire to each other, to the imperial metropole and to extra-imperial spaces beyond.”¹⁰ It also brought into sharp focus the transimperial lives of the collectors and the relationship between empire and home.

Within the context of the British army, imperial expansion provided opportunities for many British military officers to pursue natural history in colonies abroad; in fact, the British armed forces accounted for the largest number of bird collectors in the British Empire. Commissioned officers emerged as ideal observers and collectors in Britain’s formal and informal empire as they documented, listed, classified, and narrated their presence in the field. As evident in many British museums, the collecting practices of British military officers were integral to the establishment of many collections in Britain and contributed significantly to ornithological knowledge of different regions of the globe. Considering how the contributions of military officers to the development of field ornithology and zoogeographic knowledge of birds can be found in the documented traces and material remnants of their bird collections housed in Britain and its former colonies, how does one use them in tracing the lives of avian specimens and British military men?

This chapter examines the ways in which transimperial careers can be written not only with textual sources (e.g., journals, personal correspondence, published works) but also with traces and artifacts of material culture, specifically avian specimens as part of the “avian imperial archive.” In so doing, it brings a material-cultural methodological approach to bear on the life geographies of British military officers, who accumulated a variety of material culture, artifacts, experiences, and ideas from their transimperial travels, all of which made up the “avian imperial archive.”¹¹ In employing this term, inspired by Thomas Richards, this chapter inserts military ornithological sketchbooks, diaries, albums, and avian specimens into the “imperial archive.”¹² Like the imperial archive of which it is part, the “avian imperial archive” acted as “an ideological construction for projecting the epistemological extension of Britain into and beyond its empire.”¹³ As Emyr Evans has demonstrated, the material culture of the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers in Ireland consisted of material reports, maps, diaries, and books, which Evans termed “the temple of facts bequeathed by the bureaucracy of empire.”¹⁴ To his list we need to add natural history specimens, as the accumulation of avian geographic knowledge by British military officers also reflected the “service of state and Empire.”¹⁵

The “bodies of animals” have been, and continue to be, sites of political struggle over the construction of cultural difference and maintenance of dominant ideologies. They have been used to racialize, dehumanize, and maintain power in several ways.¹⁶ As tangible “things” from the past, the bodies of dead birds can be used as a site for an analysis of the intersection between British military culture and ideas and practices of ornithology in the nineteenth century, reflecting the ideological and collecting practices of a network of “servants of empire” dedicated to the scientific study of avian lives. According to Donna Haraway, “Behind every mounted animal … lies a profusion of objects and social interactions among people and other animals, which in the end can be recomposed to tell a biography.”¹⁷ Works in the history of science have therefore shed light on the cultural biographies of museums, natural history collections, their collectors.¹⁸ With a focus on the specimen as a scientific object, these studies reveal complex networks, biographies, and institutional histories as objects circulated through colonial, imperial, and private and public spheres.¹⁹

Geographers have devised creative ways in which to interpret the various “fragments” of the archives that often lie beyond the traditional sources of the historical record and, in this context, the scientific record.²⁰ These interventions help to conceive the stuffed bird specimens in my study not as “discrete entities” but as material forms “bound into continual cycles of articulation and disarticulation” that have the potential to reveal other histories, which include the “lived culture” of the animals in question.²¹ The ornithological specimens also reveal the historical geographies of scientific practice, military culture, and mobilities, linking animals to critical military geographies.²²

A focus on the “lives of specimens”²³ seeks to show how bird skins reveal networks of different actants (human and nonhuman) in the formulation of ornithological knowledge and zoological practices, including the transimperial movements of British military officers in different environments and cultures, and their connections to colonial officials, patrons, local assistants, and those who opposed them. By tracing the lives of military men through their bird collections, this approach takes into account the “life geographies” of soldier-naturalists. It also draws attention to the need for examining the different sites that scientists occupy during their careers and how these “places” influence scientific knowledge-making.²⁴ This research focuses primarily on the process of making science and such aspects as social context (structure) and personal creativity (agency); it concentrates on “lives lived” and not merely on the final results of the scientist.²⁵

As an approach, life geography need not ignore the birds themselves, their own movements and relations with other creatures—and their mysteries. Instead, this approach may attend to interactions with avian species as a means to include the lives of birds (alive and dead) as actants in transimperial networks and as living beings in their wider biogeographies connecting sites beyond borders and boundaries. As Adrienne Rich has articulated: “The Great Blue Heron is not a symbol … it is a bird, Ardea herodias, whose form, dimensions, and habits have been described by ornithologists, yet whose intangible ways of being and knowing remain beyond my—or anyone’s—reach.”²⁶

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