The Bird Ring: how colonial empire haunts contemporary bird research in the Tropics

Recent scholarship defines the digitalization of environmental data practices and governance as technological revolutions that have not just expanded but fundamentally transformed the technical, political, social, and historical structures that mediate environmental relations. The growing body of literature around digitalization of the environment usefully foreground transformation: specifically, the material, technopolitical, and economic changes that emerge out of and produce new calculative practices and infrastructural relations. What the digital turn fails to acknowledge is continuation, specifically, the way said transformations serve as vehicles for many of the same colonial relations and logics. This talk discusses one form of continuation, a data practice haunted by the specter of empire and conservatism: bird banding. This is the process of tagging birds with (typically) a metal ring engraved with serial numbers issued by a licensing authority. These bent metal strips are spectral apparatuses of power, encircling not only the leg of a trapped bird, but avian biology and the colonial histories it contains and preserves. One must acquire a license to participate in bird ringing – often, this same license is required to undertake any form of research that involves handling birds. In the UK, these licenses are issued by a charitable trust, solely on the basis of endorsement by “master” ringers – a cohort few in number and largely comprised of white, male, (semi-)retired, upper-middle-class hobbyists. This talk discusses the set of environmental data practices that led me to stumble upon the curious world of bird ringing and the implications of colonial continuation on the digitalization of bird research in Caribbean islands.