The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science, and Law)

by Thom van Dooren

which is, of course, also profoundly creative, depending on one’s perspective—prompts humans to innovate new forms of response, to which the crows in turn respond in an ongoing cycle of adaptation.

developed an innovative approach to opening tough walnuts: they use cars. The method is simple. It involves placing a nut in front of a car stopped at a red light and then waiting. Hopefully, the car will drive over the nut and open it (Nihei 1995). If the nut refuses to open and is simply displaced by the car, the crow will move it back. If a nut fails to come into contact with a car tire for some time, a crow might reposition it by a few centimeters to hopefully produce a better result (Nihei and Higuchi 2001). From their research, Nihei and Higuchi conclude that this behavior likely originated in the 1970s at, of all places, a driving school. From there, it slowly spread out into

(C. orru) who have developed new tick-removing relationships with introduced banteng (Bos javanicus) in Australia (see chapter 1) or the ravens (C. corax) who have developed hunting mutualisms with wolves, coyotes, and others (Heinrich 1999). But (some) humans and our infrastructures

that I had my first real experience of being followed by a crow.

On this occasion though, we were very deliberately and openly followed for several minutes.

As Matt put it: they are “extremely wary of all humans that pay them any attention” (Brown 2014).11 Now

region—but as Darryl noted, “it could very well be because they’ve seen the magpies doing it” and have

When looking for resources to help us think through the vision of community being articulated in this ideal of “natural balance,” it might be tempting to turn to the literatures of ecology. But doing so is a risky business. Ecology is, of course, in its own ways a discipline thoroughly grounded in human exceptionalism. Rather than being “anthropocentric,” many of the key debates and concepts of the field place humanity so far from the center that it is no longer even part of the picture. This absenting of “the human”—which is, of course, always only some humans—is itself born of an understanding in which “we” are inherently outside of ideal(ized) natural systems. Community, as an ecological concept, generally does not include humans; nor are we part of the forms of “balance” imagined. Instead, humans tend to figure in these discussions as external interlopers. As a result, these approaches can tell us very little about what a balanced multispecies community—composed of humans, crows, and others in an urban setting—might actually look like.

with them. As early as 1892, roughly seventy years after the founding of a permanent British settlement in the area (on what was Jagera Indigenous land), members of the newly formed Natural

Gisela Kaplan, perhaps the foremost expert on the Australian magpie has put it: “magpies are extremely polite and formal birds—they have real etiquettes and breaking them makes them frustrated, confused and sometimes angry.”34 At this stage at least, Brisbane’s crows seem to be doing things a little differently. Darryl believes that they are using only “warning swoops” (that is, not making physical contact) and relying on this gesture to make their intentions known. The effectiveness of such an approach remains to be seen; it rests in large part on the capacity

wild cattle that only arrived in Australia in 1849, introduced to this one small area as part of a failed British settlement (Bradshaw et al. 2006). In recent years, scientists have observed crows landing on the backs of resting banteng. The banteng will then roll onto its side and lift its upper legs (which is not a comfortable or easy posture for a banteng), so that the crow can access the area under the legs and belly. Moving into this space, crows have then been observed removing ectoparasites, likely ticks, from these exposed areas. It is not known where this behavior came from.

Frans de Waal (2008) has called “targeted helping.” In

Might these crows of the Cobourg Peninsula, in a similar way, simply/also be trying to help banteng out? We will,

not hard to see why Hawai‘i is regarded as one of the “extinction capitals” of the world.

A long and intimate history of coevolution lies within these embodied affinities that bind together avian and botanical lives. Crows are nourished, plants are propagated, and in the process both species are, at least in part, constituted: their physical and behavioral forms, their ways of life,

As Donna Haraway (2014) has noted—drawing on work in developmental systems biology—we are all “lichens”: beings composed as, and out of, entanglements of diverse others, shaped by inheritances much more complex than a genetic blueprint. The “cultural” and the “biological,” the “evolutionary” and the “developmental,” cannot be neatly teased apart here. This is an understanding

contrasts with that of the so-called new synthesis of the early twentieth century, in which inheritance tended to be understood through an almost exclusive focus on the transmission of genetic material between generations and was largely divorced, conceptually, from developmental processes.

these inheritances are linear—from biological parent to offspring—but they are also more than this: they are radically multivalent and radically multispecies.6 Who we all are as individuals, as cultures, as species, is in large part a product of generations of co-becoming in which we are woven through

Extinction always takes the form of an unraveling of co-formed and -forming ways of life, an unraveling that begins long before the death of the last individual and continues to ripple out long afterward: hosts of living beings—human and not—are drawn into extinctions as diverse heritages break down or are otherwise transformed.7 There are no solid lines here between people, crows, and their environments, between evolutionary and cultural entanglements: relationships

much of this inheritance is not actively chosen: we are thrown into our heritage; in Derrida’s terms, it “violently elects us.” But this is not the end of the story. Derrida reminds us that in any act of inheritance there is also transformation. He is primarily interested in what it means to inherit traditions, languages, and cultures, and he notes that while all continue from generation to generation, they are living heritages not fixed once and for all. It is this “double injunction” at the heart of inheritance that Derrida emphasizes, describing the act of inheritance as one of “reaffirmation,

In this context, the fundamental structure of life is one of inheritance. Darwin knew something like this when he drew a comparison between language and biological species, with an emphasis on the way in which both are at their core genealogical: seemingly “individual” languages and “individual” species are in reality simply moments within longer historical lineages (Grosz 2004).

Inheritance is a productive concept for extinction studies and the broader environmental humanities. It is a concept with a long and rich history across the biological sciences and the humanities more broadly, including in diverse spaces of Indigenous scholarship and activism. Reading these literatures alongside and through one another, we are able to begin to develop an appreciation for entangled biocultural inheritances in which the movements of genes, ideas, practices, and words between and among generations are all tangled up with one another, unable to be isolated into separate processes or channels of inheritance. If we scratch the surface just a little, these entanglements are palpable in Hawai‘i’s shrinking forests: as the island’s biotic diversity continues its long role in helping nourish and shape local cultures, cultures that are, in turn, remaking those ecologies and the futures of their many inhabitants. Thinking in this entangled way draws us, inexorably, into an understanding of the ethical work of inheritance. While it may be a gift or a burden, a heritage is always a responsibility. Something to be dwelled with—to be honored and acknowledged, even if not always avowed—placing us in relationship, perhaps under obligation, to those who have come before as well as those who will follow after. Where species, ecologies, and cultures are in processes of ongoing and dynamic change, much of what is and is not passed on is not up to any of us. Where we can and do ...

This is what Deborah Bird Rose (2004, 24) has called “recuperative work,” work that begins from the conviction that: There is no former time/space of wholeness to which we might return or which we might resurrect for ourselves.… Nor is there a posited future wholeness which may yet save us. Rather, the work of recuperation seeks glimpses of illumination, and aims toward engagement and disclosure. The method works as an alternative both to methods of closure or suspicion and to methods of proposed salvation. In this context,

Ours is a time of mass extinction, a time of ongoing colonization of diverse human and nonhuman lives. But it is also a time that holds the promise of many fragile forms of decolonization and hopes for a lasting multispecies justice. Here, the work of holding open the future and responsibly inheriting the past requires new forms of attentiveness to biocultural diversities and their many ghosts. But beyond simply listening, it also requires that we take on the fraught work—never finished, never innocent—of weaving new stories out of this multiplicity. Stories within stories that bring together the diversity necessary to inhabit responsibly the rich patterns of

The declaration of the Anthropocene is explicitly about the global and the long term: anthropogenic marks inscribed in Earth’s strata for countless generations to come. But this chapter argues that paying attention to the Anthropocene is about more than “zooming out” to larger temporal and spatial scales. This is certainly part of what the Anthropocene requires but by no means all of it. The Anthropocene’s placetimes are more complex than this. As Michel Serres notes, “every historical era is … multitemporal, simultaneously drawing from the obsolete, the contemporary, and the futuristic. An object, a circumstance, is thus polychronic, multitemporal, and reveals a time that is gathered together, with multiple pleats” (Serres, Latour, and Lapidus 1995, 60; Bennett and Connolly 2012). As such, beyond simply zooming out, the Anthropocene, like any other era, demands that we pay attention to the way in which specific moments, specific situated circumstances—like these crows in this place at this time—are haunted, structured, and shaped by legacies of the past and the anticipation of what is to come. Imagined futures “are not merely geometrical extensions of time. They haunt our presents, obeying architectural laws that look more like Gaudí than Euclid” (Rosenberg and Harding 2005, 4). Drawing these threads together, this chapter asks about contemporary modes of gathering up times and places in Hoek van Holland. Which futures are being imagined or denied? How are connections bei...

or, worse, welcoming the other in order to appropriate for oneself a place” (Derrida 1999, 15). In short, to welcome is itself sometimes an act of appropriation, while in other contexts one is simply able to welcome because of a prior, more or less violent, appropriation (although perhaps these

But these house crows remind us that imagined futures are also important, arguably more important, in determining which of the literally thousands of “out-of-place” species will actually be targeted for eradication, that is, which will be rendered lethally unwelcome.4

At its core, the Anthropocene might be understood as an effort to draw attention to the current period as one in which humanity has profoundly marked planet Earth. Of course, there are often significant problems associated with attributing actions or characteristics to an amorphous “humanity,” a point I will return to below. For now, however, I want to dwell with this central notion of the Anthropocene, a term that, in Ben Dibley’s (2012, 139) words, “vividly captures the folding of the human into the air, into the sea, the soil.” In contrast to Foucault’s classic image of the end of “man,” “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,” Bronislaw Szerszynski (2012, 180) notes that in the Anthropocene “the fate of ‘man’ … is not that he will be erased, but that he will be made immortal, as a trace preserved forever in the rock.” From the perspective of stratigraphers, debating the formal adoption of the term, the Anthropocene is entirely about these anthropogenic marks, signs laid down in rock that might be visible to future geologists: new minerals, new strata (including new disruptions to old strata), new chemicals, new abundances and absences in the fossil record (Zalasiewicz et al. 2011). There is an odd practice of “speculative stratigraphy” at work here: imagining a future geologist, imagining future Earth strata, and taking a best guess at what they might say to each other. Like the imagined futures that ground the reception of the (potential) guest, the...

Whether or not the term is formally adopted by the scientific community, it is undeniable that the planet is currently undergoing a period of massive transformation. Many current changes will leave lasting scars, but many others may not. Whether these incredible marks end up being “good enough” for the purposes of hypothetical future geologists, doesn’t necessary say anything at all about what kinds of changes they are for living beings, either now

Returning to the language of hospitality, it is this approach to the world that makes “us” the hosts and others, permanently, guests in our space, by our grace. From this perspective the phrase “Welcome to the Anthropocene”—the headline of the Economist’s issue on the topic—might be read as both deeply troubling and thoroughly appropriate. Just who is doing the welcoming here—humanity, the magazine, the particular economic community that it represents—and who is being welcomed remain characteristically unclear. What is clear, however, is that the act of welcoming is here coupled with the appropriation of the world. In the very first line of the leading article in the issue we are told: “The Earth is a big thing; if you divided it up evenly among its 7 billion [human] inhabitants, they would get almost 1 trillion tonnes each” (Economist 2011). It was

In the intervening years, this same logic has been deployed in a range of different ways. For some proponents of global management, the profound contemporary transformation of the world is read as an indication of human ingenuity and skill (even if not always perfectly realized). In this context global management is a case of humanity assuming its rightful place and taking up the Baconian mandate—or is it an Edenic decree?—to produce a “garden planet” in which

In this way, the Anthropocene discourse is being enrolled into projects of ever-increasing control and management: the scale of the impacts, the marks, demands an equivalent grandiosity in terms of mastery, and so we get projects to geoengineer the climate and remake Earth’s prehistoric ecosystems. These are projects grounded in what Gerda Roelvink and Magdalena Zolkos (2015, 47) have called a “hyper-humanism which seeks to manage and ultimately master

If the world is not first and foremost “for us,” then we are required to think more expansively about the nature of “problems” like these house crows. For example, the huge toll that intensified agriculture, habitat loss, and ongoing hunting have taken on avian diversity in the Netherlands and Europe more generally (EEA 2015) needs to be part of this conversation. If house

Crows fumigate. This is an odd and admittedly speculative proposition. It is, however, one too enticing to leave unexplored. Over the last few years I have come across several scattered references to interactions between crows and smoke in which the former seem to be deliberately bathing in the latter.

In 2003, in an aviary in Vermont, on the other side of the United States, Thomas Bugnyar and

From the foundational work of Hegel and J. G. Fichte onward, philosophers have emphasized the significance of intersubjective recognition and the way in which our understandings of ourselves are influenced by others’ ways of seeing us, including misrecognitions and a lack of recognition. Identities are at stake here, alongside much broader possibilities for flourishing forms of life (Honneth 1995, 169).27 In this context too, recognition is explicitly not a question of preformed subjects entering into relationship with one another. Hegel’s thought in this area worked in explicit opposition to the atomistic notions of the self-forming individual that dominated philosophical thought in his day (and still do in many ways). In contrast, his emphasis on recognition was grounded in the understanding that, as Nancy Fraser (2003, 10) has put it, “social relations are prior to individuals and intersubjectivity is prior to subjectivity.” In other words, subjects are made and remade in their relatings, reaching into one another, mutually imbricated from the outset.28 Paying attention

in these acts of gift giving? Of course, there are many instances in which this seems not to be the case at all, with crows offering—sometimes with remarkable persistence—unwanted and inappropriate gifts, including dead animals, in whole or in part. Another equally fascinating and disturbing example can be found in the writing of the biologist Konrad Lorenz, who tells of a tame jackdaw (Corvus monedula) who tried unsuccessfully, again and again, to feed him worms, eventually giving up on getting them into his tightly shut mouth and settling for stuffing them into his ear (1952, 129–30).1 In other cases, however, is there perhaps an attunement of some sort between giver and receiver, crow and human? Certainly, on the human side, many crow feeders are paying close attention to the needs and desires of their corvid friends and adjusting their gifts accordingly.2 Are crows doing likewise, tailoring gifts to the imagined desires of human others? Studies of crows and crow feeders have identified complex “interspecific semiotics” in which both parties seem to be paying attention to, understanding, and responding to the other in sophisticated ways (Marzluff

The social-media buzz that surrounded these gift-giving crows in Seattle is perhaps predictable. Part of me wants to ask why this possibility was so interesting, so surprising, to so many people. Was it the sheer fact that an animal might give a gift? Or was it perhaps the possibility for interspecies gifting? Either way, why are so many of us still so surprised by the creative, social, intelligent capacities of nonhuman others? But another part of me wants to hold onto the miraculousness of this act, to the image of a crow or perhaps a group of crows who might be paying attention

This book is a response to precisely these kinds of challenges, a response to the profound difficulties and uncertainties that seem to characterize our time. The Wake of Crows is grounded in the conviction that we all have multiple, overlapping accountabilities to others: to diverse people, to crows, to the countless others that comprise the wider webs of living and dying that hold us all in shared worlds. But more than the simple acknowledgment of multiple accountabilities, this book arises out of the understanding that none of these accountabilities can really be taken up well in isolation: cultivating flourishing worlds requires modes of attention tuned to thick, multiplicitous, biocultural relationalities, with all of their complex histories and possible futures. It requires that we do not turn away from those processes of wreckage that are shaping so much of our contemporary world (Rose 2006) but instead turn toward them, that we learn to attend to the shifting, profoundly consequential ways in which we are all caught up with and at stake in one another—that we turn into the wake, with ever more care, humility, and appreciation