Repose Amid the Pigeon Shit, or, Thinking with Flocks

• In Event: Enticing Infestations: Animal Encounters and Contested Belonging in American Literature and Visual Media

Abstract

Repose Amid the Pigeon Shit, or, Thinking with Flocks

If urban park pigeons are the avian pests of our own moment, in nineteenth-century North America, the passenger pigeon played that part. Before they were hunted to extinction in the early twentieth century, passenger pigeons swarmed over the United States with considerable drama: their flocks, composed of millions of birds, were as devastating as weather events. This paper considers the straining attempt to produce the pastoral in accounts of the passenger pigeon in the nineteenth century, even when, as the naturalist John James Audubon observed, pigeon shit is falling “in spots, not unlike melting snow,” accumulating endlessly all around.

Audubon famously represented birds at life size, and his domestic representation of a pair of passenger pigeons does not deviate from this practice. A gap emerges, however, between the blissful domesticity of his image and the terrifying masses of birds in his description. Taking this gap between description and image as an invitation, I argue that these flocks resist the violent urge to produce a singular entity with which human observers can identify. These flocks, roosting in such great numbers that trees collapse under their own weight, produce an image of a nature that destroys its own structuring units.

In a world where birds are weather and dung is supposed to be snow, accounts of the passenger pigeon model a politics of human-animal relations structured not around sympathy but instead around the suffocating excesses of an abundant nature. Taking seriously the ways animal bodies blend into and become indistinguishable from waste or weather, I suggest that these anti-sympathetic encounters mirror and participate in the difficulty of producing discrete individuals at all.

Author

• Julia Dauer, University of Wisconsin-Madison