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Theory, Culture & Society

2016, Vol. 33(2) 2952

! The Author(s) 2015

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276415571941tcs.sagepub.com

Article

Authentic Crows:

Identity, Captivity andEmergent Forms of Life

Thom van DoorenUniversity of New South Wales

AbstractFor over a decade the Hawaiian crow (Corvus hawaiiensis), or alala, has been extinctin the wild, the only remaining birds living their lives in captivity. As the time forpossible release approaches, questions of species identity in particular focused onhow birds have been changed by captivity have become increasingly pressing. Thisarticle explores how identity is imagined and managed in this programme to produceauthentic crows. In particular, it asks what possibilities might be opened up by amove beyond relatively static notions of how these birds ought to be, towards moreperformative understandings of species identity. This shift in focus prompts us to askhow we might take up the task of learning to be part of these birds own experimentsin emergent forms of crow-ness, so that we might begin to craft vital new forms ofpolite conservation in this era of incredible biodiversity loss.

Keywords

conservation, humananimal relations, performativity

On the island of Hawaii, near the top of Kilauea, sits a small collection

of buildings that house some of the rarest birds on earth. Here, at theKeauhou Bird Conservation Center (KBCC), forest birds like the MauiParrotbill and the Palila spend their lives in small wooded aviaries.1

These captive birds are simultaneously an insurance policy against fur-ther loss of genetic diversity and breeding populations producing youngto be released back into the wider world. Among the birds housed atKBCC are around 60 Hawaiian crows, known locally as alal a (Corvushawaiiensis) (see Figure 1). While all the birds at KBCC are rare, thisspecies is particularly so. Extinct in the wild since 2002, largely as a result

of habitat loss and recently arrived predators and diseases, this smallcaptive population along with another even smaller population at asister facility on Maui is now all that remains of the species. While the

Corresponding author:Thom van Dooren. Email: [email protected]

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alal

a project has certainly had its fair share of problems, and so farrelease efforts have been unsuccessful, the simple fact is that withoutthese captive facilities this species would now be extinct like the vastmajority of other endemic Hawaiian birds.2

This article takes alal a as a guide into some of the complex practicaland ethical dimensions of conservation. The particular focus is the cap-tive breeding facility.3 Alongside programmes for alal a and these otherHawaiian birds, captive breeding and release programmes have alsosprung up in many other places around the world, in particular in thelast few decades. Despite their huge financial costs and significant prac-tical difficulties including very low success rates (Bowkett, 2009; Fischerand Lindenmayer, 2000; Snyder et al., 1996) these programmes aretoday an increasingly common response to conserving critically endan-gered species.4 In addition, with the growth of interest in cloning andrelated de-extinction techniques, these facilities may well take onincreased importance in years to come (primarily because cloned animalswill often need to be bred and reared in captivity before release).

Working within this space, this article focuses on a particular set ofquestions about identity: how it is imagined, valued and managed in the

captive breeding facility. Much is at stake in this seemingly simple set ofquestions. In order for this project to have succeeded in conservingalal a for conservation to be conservation at all the birds that areheld within the facility, and hopefully one day released from it, must insome sense be equivalent to those that went in. Otherwise, in an

Figure 1. A captive Hawaiian crow (Corvus hawaiiensis) at the Keauhou Bird Conservation

Center, Hawaii

Source: Photo by author.

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important sense surely conservation has failed and we are left with a new,albeit similar, species. In this context, equivalence can be thought aboutin a range of different ways, but my focus here is on behaviour. In par-

ticular, a high premium is often placed on ensuring that captive-bredbirds behave authentically that is, as their free-living ancestors oncedid. Focusing on a few key discussions about eating and being eaten (orrather, avoiding being eaten), this paper explores how alal a behaviour isimagined and managed to produce authentic crows.5

Finally, this article asks what it might mean to move beyond authen-ticity to explore more performative (Barad, 2003; Butler, 1990) notions ofspecies identity. How does the planned soft release of alal a alreadyembrace more interesting notions of what these birds are and how they

might become with a little support from dedicated people? In asking thisquestion, the article explores some of the challenges and possibilities thata polite conservation, in Vinciane Desprets sense of the term (2006,2013), might open up for the increasingly popular practice of captivebreeding: what might it mean to do conservation in a way that takesseriously what matters to the conserved, in a way that provides theseothers with the space and the resources to craft their own vital newforms of life for this era of incredible anthropogenic change and bio-diversity loss?

Captive Breeding: Conserving Behaviour?

Holding animals in captivity raises a range of significant problems.As the long history of private menageries and zoological gardens illus-trates so clearly, some animals simply will not live in captivity; others,like the giant panda, either will not reproduce at all, or will only do sowith great effort and expense on the part of both their human keepersand the animals themselves (Braverman, 2012; Chrulew, 2010). But get-

ting animals to survive and reproduce in captivity has always only beenthe first part of the struggle. If animals are to be held captiveover multiple

generations, then a range of additional problems arises. Foremost amongthem is inbreeding and the loss of genetic diversity, which is particularlydifficult to manage in small populations, as most highly endangered spe-cies are. In response, a variety of tactics are now deployed to ensure thatunder-represented genes are retained while over-represented genes arenot reproduced any further. These tactics include detailed cataloguingof pedigrees, circulation of animals and/or their gametes, artificial insem-

ination and forced pairings, and even the zoothanasia of those that aresurplus to a species needs (Bekoff, 2012; Chrulew, 2011; Friese, 2013;van Dooren, 2014a). In most cases, the goal of captive breeding pro-grammes in this area is simply articulated in numerical terms: retainingx percent of the remaining genetic diversity for the next x years.

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These concerns over genetic diversity have usually taken a centralplace within discussions of the challenges of the captive breeding ofendangered animals. Historically, the impacts of captivity on behavioural

development have been less frequently acknowledged, and have onlyrecently begun to be taken seriously (Curio, 1994: 164). In practice, thesocial and physical environments of captivity, alongside dietary andreproductive constraints and a whole range of other factors, usuallymean that animals reared in captivity simply do not behave in theways that free-living conspecifics do. Ultimately, behaviour is far toomiserly a term for what is at stake here. Depending on the species inquestion, a whole range of learned behaviours, vocal repertoires andsocial skills what some have referred to as animal cultures (Lestel,

2002) often require processes of interaction and learning that are not,and in some cases cannot be, conserved ex situ. Among many othersimilar programmes of re-education for captive reared animals, effortsto teach whooping cranes to migrate with ultra-light aircraft highlight

just how much is learned and how problematic ex situ conservation canbe when it comes to release (van Dooren, 2014a).6

But in the captive breeding of endangered animals for conservationpurposes, holding on to this thing called behaviour is absolutely central.Whether released animals will count as members of the given species, and

indeed whether they will survive long enough to establish a self-sustain-ing population (the standard goal of endangered species conservation), inno small part rests on whether and in what ways they retain their behav-ioural repertoire.7

Alal a offer an instructive example of the ways in which animals mightbe redone in the captive breeding facility. In an interview with AlanLieberman, who for many years oversaw the alal a project, I askedabout the challenges that this situation poses.

[The alal a is] a bird that is [evolutionarily] selected for learning

with a long period of parental care. We work with other birds that

know everything they need to know right out of the egg. It doesnt

matter if theyre with a parent, without a parent, you release them

and they do fine. They forage fine, they breed fine, and they die two

years later. Hard wired, all the way. Then you have the alal a that

learnsa lot. We put them into a learning environment as quickly as

we can. We never raise a bird alone; we raise them in a group; we

raise them in full view of adults all the time. We dont put them in

with the adults because the adults will harm them, but they can atleast see them, learn the calls and whatever else is available.8

Clearly, much depends on the species in question. Concrete differencesbetween species and their social and developmental makeups yield real




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differences in terms of what behaviours might develop in captivity, aswell as whether those that are lost might be recuperated through variousforms of exposure or training.

In many cases, however, behavioural losses are irreparable. Forexample, with all of the remaining alal a now in captivity, it is widelythought that the vocal repertoire or vocabulary of the species hassignificantly diminished; perhaps they have less to talk about, or perhaps

juvenile birds simply havent been exposed to enough chatter from theirelders. Whatever the cause, if these birds are to make it back into thewider world at some stage in the future, they will likely need to reinvent aworkable means of communication. It remains unclear whether or notthis diminished vocabulary will impact on these birds ability to socializeand survive after release for example, in their coordinated mobbing ofHawaiian hawks (io) and other predators. In the context of all thisuncertainty, it is understandable that where keepers have any controlover behavioural and cultural development a great deal of effort isnow often invested in ensuring that animals learn what they can andthat any significant behavioural changes are avoided.

The Authentic Crow?

At the heart of the way that behaviour is conceptualized and managed inthe captive breeding facility is a set of understandings oscillating aroundsome notion of the authentic animal. Authenticity is a complex domainbut in this context it aligns quite closely with stasis: alal a being releasedfrom KBCC are authentic if they are as similar as possible to those thatpreviously existed in the islands forests. But similarity, and so authenti-city, might be thought about and gauged in a range of different areas.This section explores what it means to be an authentic crow with regardto questions of eating and being eaten (or avoiding being eaten). In this

particular captive breeding programme these important topics have beencentral sites for some of the many discussions and decisions about whatkind of alal a conservationists ought to be trying to rear and release.

In my conversations with biologists, conservationists and others inHawaii, and in my reading of the relevant literatures, three broad rea-sons emerged as justifications for this desired similarity. On the face of it,the first reason is a pragmatic one: survival. Many of the behaviouralchanges experienced by captive animals will ultimately undermine theirchances of survival once released. Not knowing which foods to eat,lacking a complex vocal repertoire, tameness in the face of potential

predators (including humans), perhaps even having imprinted on ahuman keeper and now seeking out a human mate: all of thesecommon behavioural changes can be disastrous for released animals(and so their species). In this context, it makes a great deal of sense towork to ensure that change is kept to a minimum. Where changes that

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might threaten survival do occur, efforts are often made to undo them.For example, it now seems likely that in the lead up to their release, alal awill be required to undertake some form of predator avoidance training

to instil in them the knowledge that they ought to avoid the Hawaiianhawk.9 During the last attempted releases it seems that captive rearedalal a did not avoid io or work together to mob them as biologists sus-pect they once did. In this context, training is viewed as the reinstatementof a lost knowledge/behaviour.10

A second key reason for desired similarity is also broadly pragmatic:ecological function. Here, alala offer us another important example.During their time in captivity, these birds have been introduced to arange of native plants, seeds and flowers (Culliney et al., 2012). In part

this focus on the native seems to be grounded in a view that these arethe foods proper to alal a, but it seems that some conservationists alsoview this familiarity as a core part of ensuring that released birds resumethe important ecological role that their species once played in dispersingseeds for these plants.11 In acting as seed dispersers, these authenticcrows will help to maintain authentic Hawaiian forests.

The final broad reason for desired similarity is more nebulous. I referto it here as essence and, like most things with this label, it is hard topin down. Beyond practical concerns with the survival of the species andthe fulfilment of its ecological functions, this more essentialist perspectivevalues behavioural stasis for the simple reason that behaviour is a keypart of the identity of the species. If released alal a fail to act as theirforebears did, in what sense would they be the same species? This con-cern with identity came to the fore at a few key points in my conversa-tions with conservationists. For example, in a discussion about thecaptive breeding of alal a with John Marzluff, a former member of theofficial alal a recovery team and a recognized expert on crow biology andbehaviour, he noted that:

We made a conscious decision not to make those birds garbagebirds. We could have easily trained them to feed at the dumpster

down at Costco in Kona. But the committee, the recovery team,

made a very conscious effort to say this is not what were trying to

do here; were trying to make these crows as wild, and frugivorous,

and forest loving, as possible. And I think thats still the right

approach, but it does make it more difficult.12

Here, the conventional behaviour of the species may even be at odds with

survival, but it is valued because it is a core part of species identity ofwhat is unique and precious about alal a.

Of course, the conservation community is a diverse one. Differentpeople take different approaches to these questions of stasis and authen-ticity. For some, any change is a change too much. For others, a little




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enhancement especially if it makes the difference between survival andextinction is a reasonable compromise. There are no firm answers here,

just an ongoing effort to negotiate perceived changes between a captive

population and an imagined archetype (often based on very imperfectrecords and observations). Nonetheless, however imperfectly mobilized,authenticity plays a powerful role here in determining which kinds ofanimals conservationists try to produce in captive breeding facilities.13

In these sites, practical survival, ecological function and essentialistpriorities and commitments are thoroughly interwoven with each other,unable to be teased apart in any conclusive way. This tight coupling ofideas was evident in an interview with Rich Switzer, the current head ofthe alal a programme and director of the San Diego Zoos Hawaii

Endangered Bird Conservation Program. When I asked Switzer aboutthe possibility of training or encouraging captive alal a to scavengehuman waste he replied:

I think that what they eat and what they do and how they behave

[is important]. This is also about the role that theyre fulfilling

in the ecosystem. [He went on to discuss the role that alal a

plays in the regeneration of the native forest as a seed

disperser.] . . . If you change the species, and you change its role

in the ecology, then it ceases to function as the species that it ispurported to be.

Underlying Switzers statement is a general sense that released alal aought to inhabit the worlds and live the lives that they once did.Conservation success hinges on these birds being roughly identical totheir most recent free-living (or wild) ancestors.14

In this context many of our more common definitions of biologicalspecies dont seem to adequately capture the kind of identity that is atissue for conservationists. Neither the biological species definitioncentred on reproductive possibilities (Mayr, 1996), nor more evolution-ary (genealogical/phylogenetic) definitions centred on separate lineages(Simpson, 1961) are at all concerned about where an alal a gets its food.These conventional definitions may work well for taxonomic purposes(although that too is debated),15 but when it comes to conservation itseems that at least part of what is important about a species a behav-ioural and perhaps cultural form of life is not registered. Alal a thathave been taught to scavenge human waste will reproduce with otheralal a just fine (although this change could eventually give rise to distinct

populations). Similarly, they will share a phylogeny with them. And yet,for some people at least, they would not be quite right. If we add in thefact that they may not avoid and mob predators or even sing and chatteras they once did, perhaps we are now talking about a bird that isdifferent in some fundamental sense.16

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In my conversations in Hawaii this point of view was expressed mostsuccinctly by Cynnie Salley, a passionate advocate for alal a. It was onher familys land that the last free-living birds made their homes. She

watched them closely for decades and was involved in conservationefforts though she has often disagreed with the approaches taken.From her perspective, the birds that now remain are not really alal aat all. Reminiscing about the crows that once lived on her property,and a past (unsuccessful) release attempt, she commented:

They were kind of like the kings and queens of the forest. They

chased the hawks and the hawks had a healthy respect for them.

As a matter of fact, it took four or five years of releasing young

birds [alal a] before the hawks realized that these were different thanthe ones that used to chase them around and that they had fair

game.. . . All of those birds that were originally wild are now gone.

All of the birds there [at KBCC] have been raised by puppets.17 So

I truly feel that whatever happens in the forest now with these birds,

its a different species.18

In large part Salleys view is grounded in concern for the birds. Shestrongly doubts that once released they will be able to survive and repro-

duce. But beyond these more pragmatic concerns, she is also mourning avibrant and charismatic presence in the forest that she believes will notbe restored even if captive reared alal a do make it back one day. As sheput it:

Whatever they release now is really starting at evolutionary ground

zero. Theyre going to have to relearn everything including

calls.. . . So, from their language on up theyre going to have a

huge learning curve. So its going to be a different bird.

I have significant sympathy with these concerns. Conserving species is, atleast in part, about holding on to evolved (even if still evolving) ways oflife (van Dooren, 2014a). Salleys position challenges reductive notionsof animals, highlighting that species are more than their DNA or repro-ductive potential. Ways of being in the world are at stake here, complexmore-than-human cultures.

However, there is also a lingering danger in these notions of authen-ticity. In their more extreme forms these demands for stasis for animals

who are behaviourally identical to their free-living conspecifics aregrounded in a problematic essentialism about species identity. Fromthis perspective, there is a singular, proper, way for alal a and otheranimals to be. Captive animals will usually fail to express this essence,and so fail to be authentic. This perspective threatens to undermine the




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legitimacy of the form of conservation conducted in the captive breedingfacility.

These notions of a fixed and essential species identity and its poten-

tial undermining in captive environments find support in numerouscritiques of the zoo. Philosopher Bernard E. Rollin, for example,argues that:

an animal is defined by its telos, the set of powers constitutive of its

nature the pigness of the pig, the lion-ness of the lion. The

animal is what it does, following its nature as predator, or rooter,

or burrower. The tiger in the Mirage window [a hotel/casino in

Las Vegas] is not a tiger, but the body of a tiger, not hugely different

from a stuffed tiger. (Rollin, 2010: 1078)

As Ralph Acampora (2010: 13) notes, Rollins argument here centres onnotions of authenticity and inauthenticity. Only some of the living beingsthat a biologist would callPanthera tigris tigrisare really tigers. The restare inauthentic imitations: anatomical tigers lacking in an essential,behavioural tigerness.

In a recent chapter on life in the zoo, Matthew Chrulew takes up thisquestion of behavioural change and diminished forms of life. He refer-

ences Keekok Lee, who in a criticism of the institution of the zoo notesthat zoo animals are not wild, but might better be understood as bioticartifacts (Chrulew, 2010: 32930). Chrulew is himself highly critical ofthe institution of the zoo and the animal subjects that it produces, but isreluctant to accept that these kinds of interactions with humans arenecessarily taints that undo the animalness of the animal. Instead, hisposition is one of careful attentiveness to the multiple forms of becomingthat are made both possible and impossible in captivity. The point here isnot simply to note that there are, in general, often significant behaviouraldifferences between captive and free-living animals of the same species,but to pay attention to how those differences take shape, and with whatconsequences for whom. As he puts it: understanding that zoo animalsare ontologically altered by captivity should be the beginning, not theendpoint, of analaysis (2010: 330).

Strongly essentialist notions of species dont invite this kind of ana-lysis. Instead, they disavow the dynamism and change that is an inherentpart of evolutionary and adaptive life forms. Over evolutionary time-scales, species are always changing, always becoming other than them-selves (van Dooren, 2014a). As Elizabeth Grosz notes, from an

evolutionary perspective being is transformed into becoming, essenceinto existence, and the past and the present are rendered provisional inlight of the force of the future (Grosz, 2004: 7). But even over muchshorter ontogenetic timescales, through the duration of an individualorganisms life, crows and other animals are involved in processes of

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learning, adaptation and development, responding to new threats andopportunities.

In short, each alal a, like all living beings, is the product of (what we

might think of as) ecological, evolutionary and developmental processes,playing out in their own particular ways. In this context, behaviour is notsomething that is simply retained between generations. Rather, behav-iour is a relational and developmental achievement (as are all aspects ofbiology when it comes down to it, as work in Developmental SystemsTheory (Oyama et al., 2001) and Ecological Developmental Biology(Gilbert, 2001) highlights so well). While there are certainly aspects ofan organisms developmental becoming that are more or less inherited,more or less flexible, everything that is arises through interactions that

are never fixed and guaranteed once and for all. As Donna Haraway hasput it:

Developmental unrolling into whatever it is that critters are

throughout their lifetime, turns out to be a becoming-with not a

becoming. A sympoetic engagement not an autopoetic one. So that

organism, after organism, after organism, turns out to need partners

to be at all. (Haraway, 2014)

In this context, the simple fact of inter-generational difference cannotbe so easily read as the loss of anything, certainly not an ideal authenticstate. Instead, our attention is drawn towards the agencyof non-humansin the shaping of their own individual and species identities: as crowsaround the world move into cities and learn new ways of life, they con-duct experiments in emergent forms of crow-ness. Far from any singulartelos, individuals and species are engaged in multiple forms of becoming,all of them reiterative and ongoing, all of them co-constitutive and col-laborative (even if unequal). The jungle crows in Japan that have learnedto use moving traffic to open tough nuts (and red traffic lights as a meansof safely retrieving their contents), are just one example of what it mightmean to be a crow in the 21st century (Marzluff and Angell, 2005).19

These are spaces of relational sociability (Buller, 2013) in which iden-tity is achieved through the interactions between crows, but also withtheir humans, a range of other species and the wider environment. In thiscontext, KBCC is, like the farms that Buller (2013: 167) describes, amore-than-animal place, a more-than-human place, a place of constantlyshifting multispecies interactions, practices, relations and adaptations.While the freedom that alal a have to explore new forms of crow-ness is

currently curtailed in many ways by their captive life, there is no reasonthat their inter-generational differences shouldnt be understood in asimilar light to those of jungle crows. Species and individual organismsalways become with others including human others within diversefields of freedom and constraint (indeed, what counts as freedom for




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whom is part of what is produced in these entangled co-becomings).20 Inthis context, co-becoming with people doesnt make current alal a (ortheir Japanese counterparts for that matter) not real crows in fact, the

behavioural plasticity, the capacity to adapt to and make use of humansand the changed environments we produce, is itself a key part of what itis to be an intelligent generalist like a crow.21

Alan Lieberman may have been heading in this general direction inour discussion. Reflecting on Cynnie Salleys views on real alala (the twoof them are old friends), he noted that:

she feels that once theyve lost the wisdom of their elders the alal a

will never be an alal a again. I agree. It will never be what it was,

because that culture has been lost. We havent been able to transferthe alal a culture from one generation to the next. But well do the

best that we can and well create a new culture.

Loss is only part of the story that Lieberman wants to tell. Adaptationand change facilitate the creation of something new. While this situationis far from desirable from Liebermans perspective, ongoing crow-ness isstill possible. But what kind of crow-ness, what kind of identity, wouldthis be?

Performative Species Identities

The understanding of identity that I have in mind here is a performativeone, an understanding that might get us outside of the discourses ofauthenticity that can function in some conservation contexts to positionparticular identities as false or derivative, and others [as] true and ori-ginal (Butler, 1999: viii). Species identity understood as performative isnot an essence but a doing, as Karen Barad (2003: 822) has succinctly

put it.

22

Like Barad, the notion of performativity that interests me is athoroughly material one what she terms posthumanist performativity in which the constitution of material bodies and their identities occursthrough reiterative processes of materialized refiguration (Haraway,1994). Bodies and identities are remade, but they are not made purelyout of social and discursive practices that are too often imagined to besolely human affairs.

In short, biology avian and otherwise and other forms of materi-ality,matter. The cognitive and emotional competences that alal a inheritfrom their parents and others open them into some possible worlds and

not others, some ways of being and not others.23 Only some big blackbirds can be alal a. American crow eggs brought from the mainland andreared by alal a will not become alal a in some significant senses whilethey certainly may in others. The point here is not that biology andmateriality place limitations on how we become, but rather that they

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too are part of the field of agencies that are at play in the particular(entangled) processes of materialization (Barad, 2003) that producebodies and worlds.24

A similarly performative notion of species is embraced by SarahWhatmore and Lorraine Thorne (2000) in their discussion of elephants,and by Kersty Hobson (2007) in her discussion of moon bears rescuedfrom a bile farm in China. In both cases, what is at stake is an under-standing of what it means to be a particular kind of animal that movesbeyond static and fixed identities to embrace an attentiveness to the wayin which these animals themselves exert their own agency in remakingwhat counts as natural behaviour for a being of their kind (?). Here, wesee that natural behaviour is like most things with the designation

natural always up for grabs, always being remade and newly piecedtogether, and not just by people. The task here is not to look deeper anddeeper for the real natural behaviour and so essential identity but torecognize that these identities are always being performatively reiteratedin ways that dip into and out of our knowledge.

Vinciane Despret (2008) offers a complementary account of animal lifein her discussion of Irene Pepperbergs work with Alex, a grey parrot ofGabon. Despret insists that Alex, who learned to talk working withPepperberg, does not authorize some sort of new understanding ofwhat, or who, parrots fundamentally are.

I cannot . . . affirm that all parrots talk, nor that all the grey parrots

of Gabon talk. Alex is not representative of parrots; no parrot could

be. The givens appear to us instead as a means of sketching out the

competences that can, with the appropriate environmental support,

figure in the list of capacities of the species. Here then is not what

parrots are but what they might be rendered capable of. (Despret,

2008: 127)

For Despret, as for Pepperberg, what a parrot is, what Alex is, is notfixed once and for all, but the emergent achievement of interwoven his-tories of interaction over evolutionary and personal timeframes, historiesthat are by definition ongoing. Here, an assemblage constructed by aparticular human, a particular parrot and a range of other experimentaldevices creates a specific environment (an apparatus in Desprets terms).In this context, Alexs speech is no longer expressed in terms of whatparrots are, but in terms of the possibilities that the apparatus couldactualize (Despret, 2008: 128).

One important consequence of this understanding of identity is that itthrusts us into the realms of politics and ethics. As Arun Agrawal (2005:171) notes: It is this recognition of contingency that introduces the regis-ter of the political in the creation of the subject. In this context, thequestions that emerge are not about authenticity or even how much




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change is acceptable, but are rather centred on the practical labour oflearning to be part of the constitution of flourishing forms of crow-ness;learning to ask what matters to and for others (Despret, 2013), what

forms of life are possible for (once) captive animals within the breedingfacility and beyond its walls.The first thing to note in this context is that notions of the wild will be

of no help to us. Although the wild is deployed in a wide range ofdifferent ways, it pretty much always stands in contrast to the (civilized)human (Palmer, 2010). While the wild is in some ways preferable to thewilderness (Cronon, 1995), both share a core dualistic orientation inwhich the human is the (anti-) measure of all things: when it comes toanimals or landscapes, to be wild is to be (relatively) uninfluenced by

people. A simplistic preference for wild birds (in this sense of the term)positions humans as intruders, outside of the best/preferred/natural setof interactions that produce birds how they ought to be their mostauthentic selves. But control and influence are everywhere in entangledrelations of co-becoming. In some cases a great deal of human involve-ment will be required to form and maintain flourishing communities andways of life; in other cases some or all of our particular forms of presencemay undermine these possibilities for other animals. In short, the devil isalways in the detail. A blanket preference for the wild in the form ofminimal human involvement wont always yield the best of possibleworlds.

In addition, the wild only asks us to pay attention to one kind ofinfluence or power: human power over others. At the same time, a focuson the wild covers over the incredible diversity within human forms ofinfluence and involvement in others lives. Instead, what is needed is anattentiveness to diverse forms of power and influence, human and non-human, in the shaping of bodies, lives, worlds and their possibilities forflourishing. Having said that, however, this article focuses primarily onthe specific roles that humans do or might play in interactions withendangered crows in part because people are just so central toanimal life in captive environments, but also because I am interestedspecifically in how those people involved might learn to be part of flour-ishing forms of crow-ness.

With the wild behind us, perhaps the best entry point into this topic isan attentiveness to the delicate interplay of distance and proximity in ourrelations with non-human others. In recent work Matei Candea (2010)has explored the balance between engagement and detachment inhumanmeerkat relations. For him, these two terms are not opposites

(or at least dont have to be), rather, ethical humananimal relationsmight often require the cultivation of inter-patience, of relationshipsgrounded in careful and deliberate forms of detachment. Hugo Reinert(2014) has taken up a similar theme in his discussion of Sami reindeerpastoralism, focusing on the dynamics between proximity and

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distance, intimacy and detachment. In recent work on the captivebreeding of whooping cranes, I have explored the use of costumes byhuman keepers in an effort to be intimately present in the day-to-day

lives of young birds while also remaining visually and ontologicallyabsent so as to end up with cranes more capable of flourishing livesafter release (van Dooren, 2014a).

In different ways, each of these approaches presents a non-dualisticunderstanding of human/animal entanglements where all being is co-becoming and human presence is not necessarily a polluting force thatundermines how animals ought to be. And yet, in each case there is alsoa commitment to some effort to hold back (in some ways in someplaces), some effort to provide respectful distance that will enable

others to become on their own terms (even though absolute autonomyis both impossible and undesirable). As Val Plumwood (1993) taught us,this is one of the fundamental and ongoing challenges of multispeciesrelations: recognizing and respecting both sameness and difference,continuity and separation, within the context of a largely relationalworld view.

In recent work Reinert has provided another helpful glimpse into thisspace of what we might call autonomy-within-relationship. In his dis-cussion of the diverse technologies and practices of surveillance thatunderlie the conservation of the lesser white-fronted goose (Anser ery-thropus), he is concerned by intensive forms of conservation in which aspecies might be conserved, while its way of life in a fuller sense may stillbe lost. Here we are:

held in the pressured space between extinction (as a limit on num-

bers and time) and the fragile wild (as a limit on intervention). Fail

to intervene, and the object is lost; intervene, and the object may

also be lost, although in other ways. (Reinert, 2013: 22)

In this space, successful perhaps ethical conservation must beachieved through what Reinert terms a constitutive withdrawal. Putsimply, this is a relationship grounded not in abandonment but ratherthe opposite, a powerful and highly productive investment which,through its paradoxical absent-presence, offer[s] a solution (of sorts) tothe double bind. Engage with the birds, but in a manner that approxi-mates absence (Reinert, 2013: 22).

In captive breeding and ex situ conservation programmes more gen-erally we are drawn into precisely this double bind. In cases like that of

the alal a, where most or even all of the remaining individuals of a speciesare in captivity, this is particularly so. Here we are reminded that in atime of extinctions, a constitutive withdrawal often needs to take place inour relations not just with individual animals but with entire species.In these contexts the captive breeding facility is a site of condensed




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co-becoming, of enhanced and intensified inheritance which is always aprocess of simultaneous carrying forward and leaving behind (Derridaand Roudinesco, 2004; van Dooren, 2014b). In such a space the future

trajectory of a whole species is shaped and formed, for better or worse.The approach that I am suggesting here grounded in an attentivenessto autonomy-within-relationship doesnt fit neatly into either of BrunoLatours principal camps: that of the (traditional) environmentalistsfixated on pure wilderness, or that of the post-environmentalists ima-gining a complete breakdown of borders between humans and a widermore-than-human world.

Environmentalists say: From now on we should limit ourselves.

Postenvironmentalists exclaim: From now on, we should stop fla-gellating ourselves and take up explicitly and seriously what we have

been doing all along at an ever-increasing scale, namely, interven-

ing, acting, wanting, caring. (Latour, 2011: 26)

While I am certainly in agreement that ecology does not need, and wouldin fact be better off without, nature, there is an equal danger in thecelebration of human presence and involvement. We dont need to buyinto a simplistic nature/culture dualism to believe that some creatures,some places, would be better off in a range of different ways if we care-fully and deliberately limited our involvement with them. What is rele-vant here is not wilderness or the wild, but the particular dynamics ofdiverse forms of human relationship with specific non-human others, andthe consequences for the development and flourishing of individuals andspecies.

It is far from clear what form this kind of relationship might take indifferent contexts.25 Outside of essentialism, however, what emerges isthe possibility that conservation might become a practice grounded in aneffort to cultivate and support diverse forms of becoming for a changingworld. In this context, perhaps the most important and challenging ques-tion that we need to learn how to ask is: what kinds of relationships and

forms of life are crows themselves interested in taking up?How would theylike to perform their own crow-ness now and into the future? And, howmight we support and make room for them to explore these possibilities in captivity and beyond?26

For (soon to be) free-living members of highly social species, likealal a, these are questions that cannot really be asked of individualbirds in isolation. Despret is helpful here. Her work moves our attention

away from the question of whether an animal in her discussion a lion that has been changed through its interactions with humans would nolonger be lion enough to teach us anything on the subject of lioness(Despret, 2008: 126). Instead, Despret (2008: 126) proposes that a moreinteresting question than whether people would recognize this lion as a

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lion, is whether other lions would: What matters, from the point of viewof a lion, to make it say to another lion you are still one of us.27

Posing the question in this way reminds us that a performative under-

standing of identity is one in which the agency of not only individualanimals, but that of their broader social circles, comes to matter pro-foundly. As humans involved in these processes of becoming, makingroom for others to explore and perform their own identities in companywith others of their kind (as determined by them) is an important partof a polite conservation (Despret, 2006). Despret espouses the virtue ofa particular form of politeness in our experimental interactions with non-human animals. This politeness is grounded in a practice of asking whatcounts for others? (Despret, 2006, 2013). Desprets focus is on experi-

mental interactions aimed at producing knowledge about/with animals(and their scientists), but this virtue of politeness might also be employedin the kind of experiments for life being undertaken in captive breedingand release programmes around the world.

To some extent current release plans for alal a enable precisely thesepossibilities. In interviews both Switzer and Lieberman emphaticallynoted that released groups of alal a would need to be given space andsupport to adapt to and learn about their new environment. In the caseof past releases this kind of support hasnt always been provided and staffare now planning a soft release for the future. In Liebermans words:

Instead of just closing the aviary and saying Now youre an alal a,

be free, if they get sick they [will] know that they can come back

and get food. The first generation is going to be a real interesting

generation. Like school kids going to school for a long time. Its not

a three-month release but a three-year release.

This process requires significant preparation and investment. Accordingto Switzer, as part of the soft release we have them in aviaries for a few

weeks. They get fixed on that spot and they know that its a food source.After release the aviary is left in place and supplementary food is madeavailable to birds. In addition, it is likely that the alal a programme willalso offer veterinary care to released birds, requiring staff to live out inthe forest for a time at the release site. This more intensive form of softrelease is not yet mainstream, as Switzer put it: It is amazing how littlepost-release veterinary care has been considered in a lot of species recov-ery programmes. But Switzer would like to go further still:

A few years down the track, if youve got an alal a nest with threechicks in it, why not move a food pan to the bottom of the tree so

that the parent can come down and feed their chicks the perfect

alal a diet? Giving them the best chance of survival. Or, if one of

those chicks is struggling, how about bringing it into a quarantine




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facility here, give it some antibiotics, then start it on a hand rearing

regime, and release it later on.

This is a kind of involvement, or intervention, that may go a step too farfor some. But at the heart of this proposed approach is a recognition thatalal a is a fluid identity the goal is not to rush towards some vision ofthe authentically wild bird. Switzer doesnt want birds behaviour or dietsto be changed to suit human whims and convenience, but he is alsopractical about the need to make allowances in a changing world tofind ways to support alal a while they make new lives in a new landscape.

Switzer, Lieberman and others are particularly mindful that alal a arenot returning to a pristine wilderness (whatever this might mean). Nor

are they returning to the forests that the species occupied 100 or even30 years ago. Instead, these are landscapes in which food will be scarce in particular due to introduced ungulates like pigs who have grazed downthe understory in most of the islands forests (van Dooren, 2014b). At thesame time a range of new predators like cats and mongoose have arrivedin the islands, along with new diseases like avian malaria and toxoplas-mosis (to which alal a have little resistance). Despite ongoing efforts torecover habitat in some key sites, things will be tough for released birds.And so, while the ultimate hope is still to have a viable population outthere long term with minimal human involvement (Switzer), it is readilyacknowledged that this may require support for years to come.

In part, staff see such efforts as an attempt to buy time for the forestecosystem to recover and hopefully become better suited to alal a needs.But this is not a vision of a forest changing around a static bird. At thesame time this support is seen as enabling birds to adapt and develop newways of life. Part of this adaptation will be physiological (e.g. developingdisease resistance [Lieberman]), but much of it will also be behavioural learning to forage for both old and new foods (including, perhaps, arange of introduced fruits), to rear young, to enliven the forests with anew vocabulary of raucous sounds.

How far this kind of thinking will be taken in the release of alal aremains to be seen. There is, however, great promise in the work that thisprogramme is doing to explore what it might mean to provide the sup-port necessary for alal a to take up new possibilities, to craft new ways oflife. In this context, soft release might be about creating an environmentand a set of relationships that enable alal a to be interesting in the sensethat Despret (2006), following Barbara Smuts, deploys the term.Thinking in this way requires us to pay close attention to the fact that

different spaces and relationships hold open or foreclose, encourage ordissuade, different possibilities for becoming especially when we aretalking about highly adaptive beings like alal a who are keen socialand environmental learners. With this in mind, perhaps what polite con-servation in this era of incredible biodiversity loss requires is a wider set

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of practices that seek to create the conditions for other species to exploreand develop their own emergent forms of life. This is work that willalways be situated in a difficult space of constitutive withdrawal that

negotiates diverse forms of involvement and absence, of holding on andletting go, with all of their many consequences (Reinert, 2013).Importantly, it is also work that only becomes conceivable once welearn to value and understand species like alal a as adaptive, emergent,ongoing achievements more than their genes or any given behaviouralrepertoire. It is only in this way that we can begin to seriously take up thechallenge of thinking with alal a about how we might help them to stickaround in the world a little longer.

AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank the people in Hawaii who agreed to share their ideas and

insights, in particular Alan Lieberman, Paul Banko, Cynnie Salley, Rick Switzer and the

many other staff at the Keauhou Bird Conservation Center. This article also benefited

from input from a number of colleagues including Deborah Bird Rose, Eben Kirksey and

Matthew Chrulew. An earlier draft of this article was presented at a workshop on cryo-

politics at the University of Melbourne, organized by Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal

(Defrost: New Perspectives on Time, Temperature, and Survival). This research was

funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP110102886).

Notes

1. KBCC is run by the San Diego Zoo and funded by the zoo, the StateGovernment of Hawaii and the US Federal Government.

2. Of the 113 endemic bird species present just prior to human arrival in theislands, almost two-thirds are now extinct. Of the 42 species that remain, 31are federally listed under the Endangered Species Act (Leonard, 2008). Withthese statistics in mind it isnt hard to see why Hawaii is considered to be oneof the extinction capitals of the world.

3. I have written in detail elsewhere about some of the many other political andethical aspects of Hawaiian conservation (with a particular focus on thealala). See, for example, van Dooren (2014a, 2014b).

4. For example, Snyder et al. (1996) report that in the early 1990s captivebreeding was recommended by the International Union for theConservation of Nature (IUCN) for half of the worlds parrot species, aswell as in 64 percent of all approved recovery plans for threatened and endan-gered species in the USA. Also see the current work of the ConservationBreeding Specialist Group of the IUCN (http://www.cbsg.org/).

5. Although this article seeks to contribute to a broader conversation about the

work of captive breeding, its focus is this particular project. Each captivebreeding programme has its own complexities. The chances of successfully re-establishing free-living populations differ markedly, depending on the devel-opmental nature of the species in question and the possibility of managingwider threats to the species in the release environment, including possiblethreats from human communities, as in this case (van Dooren, 2014b).


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6. For obvious reasons, this potential for loss is even clearer in the case ofextinct species for which banked DNA is all that remains. In this context,viable storage of DNA is one thing; reanimation in the basic sense is another(perhaps achievable through SCNT [somatic cell nuclear transfer] or arelated technology); getting from a single individual to a viable geneticallydiverse population is then another obstacle. But even if all of these chal-lenges can be met, will the resulting animals act and live as their forebearsdid, will they possess the necessary behaviours to survive? Depending on thespecies in question, a great deal of this diversity simply is not coded in theDNA. In this context, the simplistic but popular notion that cells providecomplete instructions for an organism of that species as recently stated byOliver Ryder, the Director of Genetics at the San Diego Zoo is a key partof the problem (see: http://longnow.org/revive/tedxdeextinction/genetic-rescue-and-biodiversity-banking).

7. The term retain is very problematic in this context, implying that there isan authentic blueprint of each species (morphological and behavioural)that is in each case either realized or not in the next generation.Nonetheless, this is the way that behaviour is normally spoken about inthis context. I will revisit this framing in a more critical mode below.

8. All references to Lieberman refer to an interview conducted by the authorwith Alan Lieberman, then Director of Regional Conservation Programs atthe Institute for Conservation Research, San Diego Zoo, on 1 December2010.

9. Interview with Rich Switzer. All references to Switzer refer to interviewsconducted by the author with Rich Switzer on 18 December 2011 and22 January 2013. Switzer is an aviculturist who was at the timeheading the alala captive breeding programme as part of his more gen-eral coordination of the San Diego Zoos Hawaii Endangered BirdConservation Program.

10. In reality, however, things are more complex than this. In many cases, spe-cies have ended up in these dire situations precisely because their previousbehaviours were not working for them. In some of these cases, conserva-tionists have introduced training regimes that aim to teach captive animals

better roosting strategies or anti-predator behaviour (especially importantwhen a new predator has been introduced to an environment and the endan-gered species has no effective way of living with it). Here survival requireschange, not stasis, but these kinds of approaches are usually minimal andoften controversial (largely because survival is not the only imperative guid-ing this desire for stasis).

11. This statement draws on interviews with several biologists/conservationistsconducted by the author in January and February 2013, including RichSwitzer, Paul Banko and staff at KBCC.

12. Unless otherwise specified, all references to Marzluff refer to an interview

conducted by the author with John Marzluff on 13 November 2010.Marzluff is a professor in the School of Environmental and ForestSciences at Washington University.

13. There are some important similarities between the ways that authenticnotions of species identity and authentic notions of human cultural identityare often understood and managed. In both cases there is a tendency to

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valorize perceived stasis and purity at the expense of more complex anddynamic forms of identity. Assumptions that in order to be legitimate andauthentic, indigenous culture and traditional and customary practices need tobe identical to those of the past, disavow the possibility of ongoing changethat is at the heart of all forms of inheritance. As James Clifford (1986: 10)famously put it: Cultures do not hold still for their portraits. Similarly, legaldefinitions of indigeneity are often bound up with assumptions about par-ticular kinds and quantities of biological relatedness. In Hawaii, for exam-ple, a strong emphasis has been placed on the need for authentic, trulynative individuals, to have a specific percentage of native Hawaiian blood(Kauanui, 2008). This approach similarly fails to come to terms with thedynamic nature of identity which cannot be located and measured in asingle ingredient and its unchanging transition between generations.

14. I will return to the value of the wild as a conceptual category below.15. For an insightful ethnographic take on some of the many ways that species

emerge through complex scientific practices in different biological domains,see Kirksey (forthcoming).

16. These questions take on new dimensions in de-extinction projects. Recentproposals to effectively piece together a passenger pigeon genome by spli-cing relevant genes into the genome of its nearest extant relative the band-tailed pigeon offer an interesting example (the allele replacement tech-nique). At each stage of the process, hybrid pigeons would be produced totest the successful expression of any given trait (i.e. longer tail feathers).

Even once all of these traits are assembled in a single bird, to what extentis it an actual passenger pigeon? Jamie Shreeve has suggested the termproxy passenger pigeon for the reconstructed birds that are not genomi-cally identical to the original but will hopefully embody its most significantcharacteristics (see: http://longnow.org/revive/passenger-pigeon-workshop).

17. In many avian captive breeding programmes puppets and costumes are used toavoid birds imprinting on, or becoming habituated to, their human keepers.For a fuller discussion of the practicalities and ethics of this situation in thecontext of the captive breeding of whooping cranes see van Dooren (2014a).

18. All references to Salley refer to an interview conducted by the author withCynnie Salley on 29 January 2013. As noted above, Salley is a passionateadvocate for alala and has been actively involved in their conservation onher property and beyond for several decades.

19. For a related discussion of wild experiments see Lorimer and Driessen(2014).

20. For example, canine freedom is not everywhere the same. Freedom for awild wolf is very different to the kinds of freedoms that make life good fora domesticated dog although, perhaps, not as different as we might atfirst assume (Tnnessen, 2010).

21. Although alala are certainly more specialized in many ways than manyother corvids, they are no less intelligent and, given time, presumably

no less adaptable.22. Rollin also refers to what an animal does, but clearly means what an

animal should do, or would do if it were free of human (and perhapsother?) interference.


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23. Inheritance is always also about all of our multispecies ancestors(van Dooren, 2014b).

24. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it: the biological induces the cultural rather thaninhibits it . . . biological complexity impels the complications and variabilityof culture itself (Grosz, 2004: 4). (So much so that the distinction betweenbiology and culture itself loses any real solidity.)

25. In particular, it is worth remembering that the forms of life and so thehumananimal relations that might foster them that work well for somecontexts will not necessarily work well for others, even within the samespecies. For example, the birds best adapted to a flourishing life in captivity(which is where many of them will remain) are likely to be very differentfrom those birds that are best adapted for release. I have explored some ofthese important differences in my recent work on the conservation andcaptive breeding of whooping cranes (van Dooren, 2014a). Teasing apartwhat works well where is a practical labour of care (unavoidably mixed withviolence); it is about taking the time to practice the kind of epistemic carethat comes with genuine curiosity about and for others (Haraway, 2008).

26. The environmental philosopher Freya Mathews recently presented a similarproposal when she noted that we should give wild animals the opportunityto adapt to a human-mediated environment and let them choose for them-selves. Perhaps such a choice should be seen as the ultimate exercise of wildsovereignty (Mathews, 2013). I am not sure that sovereignty really helps ushere, but certainly Mathews is also seeking a way of valuing non-humanautonomyand agencyin a world of relational becoming that has become alltoo human.

27. In a related vein, Eben Kirksey reminds us that it isnt just humans whoinvolve themselves in (often complex) practices of paying attention to bio-logical similarities and differences: Frogs create shared bubbles of happi-ness when they recognize each other as beings in common worlds. In otherwords, members of the same frog species grasp each other against the back-drop of a cosmopolitical unknown (Kirksey, forthcoming).

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Thom van Doorenis an environmental philosopher and anthropologist inthe Environmental Humanities programme at the University of NewSouth Wales, Australia. His current research focuses primarily on the

ethics and politics of extinction and conservation. His most recent bookis Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2014). He is also co-editor of the international, open-access, journal Environmental Humanities. Further information on hiswriting and research is available atwww.thomvandooren.org.

http://www.thomvandooren.org/http://www.thomvandooren.org/

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