A knot in common: Science, values, and conservation in the Atlantic flyway

This dissertation asks, fundamentally, how it is that humans come to value and share nonhuman nature. More specifically, I follow the wildlife scientists and managers who have studied shorebirds throughout the Atlantic flyway, from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. The first two chapters are historical in nature, examining the ways in which shorebirds have been valued and conserved and drawing special attention to bureaucratic interventions in the early and late twentieth century: e.g. the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and the attention paid to shorebirds by state and federal fish and wildlife agencies. I then explore the creation of a public environmental controversy in the nineteen-nineties over the rufa red knot and its ecological connections to the Atlantic horseshoe crab—and therefore its connections to the horseshoe crab fishery. This controversy has ranged across a variety of state and federal-level agencies, as conservationists have sought to limit the horseshoe crab harvest in the Delaware Bay on behalf of shorebirds like the red knot. Chapter three is largely ethnographic, drawing upon interviews and my own experiences volunteering to band shorebirds in the Bay. I describe in detail the techniques of bird-banding as well as the affective and emotional relationships that these activities generate between wildlife researchers and their objects of study. The final two chapters look at the controversy over red knots in public and bureaucratic spaces, drawing on the voices of activists, scientists, managers, and fishers to explore the rhetoric and actions involved in the politics of shorebird conservation in the Delaware—particularly econometric arguments based on the value of ecotourism and the quantitative techniques of Adaptive Resource Management. Bureaucratic solutions to resource conflicts can be highly effective, but also highly reductive in the ways in which they reflect and mobilize the myriad ways that Americans value their environment. I end the dissertation, therefore, by ruminating on this imbalance and speculating on the ways in which conservation controversies might more fully incorporate the experience of nature