Bird Banding and the Environmental Humanities

This article tells a history of bird banding—the practice of catching and affixing birds with durable bands with the intent of tracking their movements and behavior—by focusing on the embodied aspects of this method in field ornithology. Going beyond a straightforward, institutional history of bird banding, the article uses the writings of biologists in the US Bureau of Biological Survey and the US Fish and Wildlife Service to describe the historical practices of bird banding and the phenomenological experience of banding, both for the scientists and the birds (via their banding interlocutors). The article then presents the career and research of Margaret Morse Nice as an exemplar of the embodied practice of banding for the purposes of understanding bird behavior. Finally the article uses the example and heritage of Nice as well as banders and scientists like her to discuss a phenomenological approach common to any number of observation-based field biology disciplines (including, especially, ethology) and deep connections between human and animal subjectivities. And these connections, in turn, have implications for the environmental humanities, environmental conservation, and the ethics of knowing the nonhuman world.

Changes of Bureau Chiefs in the National Administration of the United States, 1926–29

It is the purpose of this note to bring down to date an analysis of the selection and tenure of bureau chiefs in the national administration offered by the writer in this Review in 1926. A complete enumeration of the changes that have taken place at this crucial level in the civil service during an interval of nearly three years has suggestive value, at least in indicating the trend of our bureaucracy.The mode of approach in the original study was primarily biographical. The bureaus were classified with reference to the manner of selection and the nature of the prior experience of the bureau chiefs then in office. The same method and arrangement are used in dealing with shifts since 1926.First to be considered are the new bureau chiefs whose positions are in the classified competitive service under the supervision of the Civil Service Commission. Replacements in this group since 1926 have involved the amalgamated Bureau of Chemistry and Soils, the Bureau of Dairy Industry, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, the Bureau of Biological Survey, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Entomology, and indirectly the newly constituted Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration and the Plant Quarantine and Control Administration—all in the Department of Agriculture; also the National Park Service in the Department of the Interior. In two instances competitive examinations have been employed; in another, one has been ordered; in the remaining cases the new chiefs have been chosen by promotion from within the competitive classified service.