Military Ornithology in Place

The concluding chapter demonstrates how the accumulation of their avian collections and documentation served as an ideological force in imagining control over universal knowledge and, in turn, the British Empire and its territories, as officers studied birds as part of surveying, mapping, and surveillance. It analyzes how military ornithologists encountered different local cultures (with different attitudes toward hunting, birds, and field science) and different local natures (with different climates, avian populations, and environments), and how imperial knowledge was contingent on local networks and of different trajectories across the British Empire.

Leonard Howard Lloyd Irby

Chapter 4 analyzes the ways in which ideas, practices, and performances of ornithology helped to sustain territorial maintenance and British imperial place-making in the Strait of Gibraltar by focusing on the work of Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Howard Lloyd Irby (Ninetieth and Seventy-Fourth Regiments). Located in the Mediterranean, the island-like territory of Gibraltar emerged as a strategic geopolitical position in the preservation of the British Empire and served as part of the “artery of empire” that linked Britain to India. It was also an important landmark in the British imagination as a result of the Great Siege (1783) and its resonance for Horatio Nelson in the Napoleonic Wars. This chapter demonstrates how narratives of wild birds and scientific performances surrounding the British military officer attempted to legitimize Gibraltar as an imperial, noble, and masculine pillar of empire, and to extend imperial interests into Morocco and Tangier.

Thomas Wright Blakiston

Chapter 2 examines the production of the scientific war hero in British military culture in the mid-nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the Crimean War (1853–56) as an important event in securing Britain’s ascendency over Russian aspirations in the Mediterranean region, and in the emergence of the military-scientific hero. The chapter also highlights the military-scientific hero as a product of conducting fieldwork in the Crimean theater of war and collecting specimens as scientific trophies of war for a British audience at home. Here, the focus is on Ordnance officer Captain Thomas Wright Blakiston, Royal Artillery, who collected numerous birds while serving with his regiments, published works in the Zoologist, and sent specimens to British museums, including the Museum of the Royal Artillery Institution at Woolwich.

Philip Savile Grey Reid

Chapter 5 investigates how, back “home” in Britain, British military officers’ production of ornithological knowledge in the British Mediterranean helped reformulate notions of nation and “British birds.” It focuses on Captain Philip Savile Grey Reid (1845–1915), Royal Engineers, as a homeward-bound officer to Aldershot, Hampshire, to understand how ideas and practices of ornithology circulated back to Britain. Designated as “home of the British Army,” Aldershot was an integral site in the transimperial network of military garrisons across the British Empire, connecting England to the Mediterranean, India, British North America, South Africa, and the West Indies. The home station became an important posting for the reunion of family, friendship, military, and ornithological networks in England; its location in Hampshire allowed imperial military officers to ramble in the English countryside, fostering temperate cultures of nature through proper conduct in the collecting and documenting of British birds. Central to this chapter is an understanding of transimperial processes in the shaping of British military culture and the designation of national birds.

Red Coats and Wild Birds across the British Empire

Chapter 1 situates the contributions of British military officers to the development of field ornithology from the traces and material remnants of their bird collections and specimens housed in museums across the British Empire, especially in Britain. Untangling the avian imperial archive explores how transimperial careers can be written using not only textual sources (e.g., biographies and personal correspondence) but also traces and artifacts of material culture, specifically bird skins as part of the avian imperial archive. By unraveling the avian imperial archive, the contributions of British military officers to the emergence of the field of zoogeography—a branch of biogeography concerned with the distribution of animal species across the globe—are put into sharp relief, illustrating the multiple avian-human entanglements in different parts of the British Empire, including in the Mediterranean. As both a fantasy of empire and a reflection of transient lives, avian scientific specimens in historical geographic research enrich our understanding of the intersections between science, empire, and the military.

Afterword

While the subject of birds might seem benign in comparison with the more overt acts of colonial violence of slavery and famine, this afterword reflects on the importance of a self-awareness and sensitivity of one’s position in the world as a result of the institutions, practices, and identities that emerged from the British Empire is still needed in order to deconstruct and challenge the “colonial amnesia” of cultures of nature in particular places, such as in Malta. The annual presence of British “moral” birdwatchers as a means to combat the “savage” Maltese pothunter will not resolve the migratory bird hunting issue in Malta—it only repeats a stereotype and enlivens old tensions within a British colonial culture of nature that marginalized lower-class Maltese in the nineteenth century. As this book demonstrates, the stereotype of the colonial Maltese pothunter continues to circulate in Europe. A critical historical geography of empire can help to trace some of the genealogies of colonial cultures of nature in particular places such as the Mediterranean, and to contextualize tensions among different actants in conservation efforts dedicated to migratory birds.

Introduction

The introduction situates the importance of the book within current politics of nature in the Mediterranean. For the few last decades, there has been talk of a “war” on European migrant birds in the southernmost point of the European Union (EU) and former British colony—Malta. Located in the Mediterranean Sea, Malta has long been viewed as a bridge between Europe and North Africa, with its proximity to Tunisia and Libya in the south and Sicily to the north. Each spring and autumn, thousands of European migrating birds use the Maltese Islands as a resting place for their long journeys to and from their wintering grounds in Africa. While some people have claimed that the EU is another form of imperialism now imposed on the Maltese, what is missing from this understanding are the ways in which bird protection in Malta, the production of the Maltese “pothunter,” and environmental ideas of British migrant birds and semitropicality are rooted in part in Britain’s imperial past in the Mediterranean region. Moreover, Malta’s so-called unnatural relationship with birds has been put into sharp relief in comparison to Britain’s other previous Mediterranean colony—Gibraltar. Once a monument to empire, the British overseas territory is now promoted as a model of nature conservation and ornithological study in the Mediterranean.

Andrew Leith Adams

Set in Malta, chapter 3 follows the military medical career of Andrew Leith Adams, military surgeon with the Twenty-Second Regiment of Foot, whose military and scientific networks and travels to northern India, Malta, Egypt, and New Brunswick, British North America, helped him to conceive ideas of tropicality, semitropicality, and the temperate. To Adams, temperate martial masculinity was both a physical and mental state and a climatic zone important in the maintenance of a British military career across the British Empire. His ornithological investigations also allowed him to contemplate the zoological connectivity between Europe and North Africa.