Abstract

Using a recent environmental controversy on the U.S. east coast over the conservation of red knots as a lens, I present a history of North American efforts to understand and conserve migratory shorebirds. Focusing on a few signal pieces of American legislation and their associated bureaucracies, I show the ways in which migratory wildlife have been thoroughly enrolled in efforts to quantify and protect their populations. Interactions between wildlife biologists and endangered species have been described by some scholars as “domestication”—a level of surveillance and intervention into nonhuman nature that constitutes a form of dependence. I pause to reflect on this historical trajectory, pointing out the breaks and continuities with older forms of natural history. Using the oft-mobilized Foucauldian metaphor of the panopticon as a foil, I question the utility and ethics of too-easily declaring “domesticated” wildlife an act of “biopower.” Instead, I argue that Jacob von Uexküll’s “umwelt” from early ecology and ethology, and more contemporary Science and Technology Studies analyses emphasizing multiple ontologies, offer more illuminating accounts of endangered species science. Neither science, conservation, nor history are well-served by the conflation of wildlife “surveillance” with the language of Foucauldian discipline.