Article

Authentic Crows:
Identity, Captivity and
Emergent Forms of Life

Theory, Culture & Society

2016, Vol. 33(2) 2952
! The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276415571941
tcs.sagepub.com

Thom van Dooren

University of New South Wales

Abstract
For over a decade the Hawaiian crow (Corvus hawaiiensis), or alala, has been extinct
in the wild, the only remaining birds living their lives in captivity. As the time for
possible release approaches, questions of species identity in particular focused on
how birds have been changed by captivity have become increasingly pressing. This
article explores how identity is imagined and managed in this programme to produce
authentic crows. In particular, it asks what possibilities might be opened up by a
move beyond relatively static notions of how these birds ought to be, towards more
performative understandings of species identity. This shift in focus prompts us to ask
how we might take up the task of learning to be part of these birds own experiments
in emergent forms of crow-ness, so that we might begin to craft vital new forms of
polite conservation in this era of incredible biodiversity loss.
Keywords
conservation, humananimal relations, performativity

On the island of Hawaii, near the top of Kilauea, sits a small collection
of buildings that house some of the rarest birds on earth. Here, at the
Keauhou Bird Conservation Center (KBCC), forest birds like the Maui
Parrotbill and the Palila spend their lives in small wooded aviaries.1
These captive birds are simultaneously an insurance policy against further loss of genetic diversity and breeding populations producing young
to be released back into the wider world. Among the birds housed at
KBCC are around 60 Hawaiian crows, known locally as alala (Corvus
hawaiiensis) (see Figure 1). While all the birds at KBCC are rare, this
species is particularly so. Extinct in the wild since 2002, largely as a result
of habitat loss and recently arrived predators and diseases, this small
captive population along with another even smaller population at a
sister facility on Maui is now all that remains of the species. While the
Corresponding author: Thom van Dooren. Email: t.van.dooren@unsw.edu.au
Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
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Figure 1. A captive Hawaiian crow (Corvus hawaiiensis) at the Keauhou Bird Conservation
Center, Hawaii
Source: Photo by author.

alala project has certainly had its fair share of problems, and so far
release eorts have been unsuccessful, the simple fact is that without
these captive facilities this species would now be extinct like the vast
majority of other endemic Hawaiian birds.2
This article takes alala as a guide into some of the complex practical
and ethical dimensions of conservation. The particular focus is the captive breeding facility.3 Alongside programmes for alala and these other
Hawaiian birds, captive breeding and release programmes have also
sprung up in many other places around the world, in particular in the
last few decades. Despite their huge nancial costs and signicant practical diculties including very low success rates (Bowkett, 2009; Fischer
and Lindenmayer, 2000; Snyder et al., 1996) these programmes are
today an increasingly common response to conserving critically endangered species.4 In addition, with the growth of interest in cloning and
related de-extinction techniques, these facilities may well take on
increased importance in years to come (primarily because cloned animals
will often need to be bred and reared in captivity before release).
Working within this space, this article focuses on a particular set of
questions about identity: how it is imagined, valued and managed in the
captive breeding facility. Much is at stake in this seemingly simple set of
questions. In order for this project to have succeeded in conserving
alala for conservation to be conservation at all the birds that are
held within the facility, and hopefully one day released from it, must in
some sense be equivalent to those that went in. Otherwise, in an
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important sense surely conservation has failed and we are left with a new,
albeit similar, species. In this context, equivalence can be thought about
in a range of dierent ways, but my focus here is on behaviour. In particular, a high premium is often placed on ensuring that captive-bred
birds behave authentically that is, as their free-living ancestors once
did. Focusing on a few key discussions about eating and being eaten (or
rather, avoiding being eaten), this paper explores how alala behaviour is
imagined and managed to produce authentic crows.5
Finally, this article asks what it might mean to move beyond authenticity to explore more performative (Barad, 2003; Butler, 1990) notions of
species identity. How does the planned soft release of alala already
embrace more interesting notions of what these birds are and how they
might become with a little support from dedicated people? In asking this
question, the article explores some of the challenges and possibilities that
a polite conservation, in Vinciane Desprets sense of the term (2006,
2013), might open up for the increasingly popular practice of captive
breeding: what might it mean to do conservation in a way that takes
seriously what matters to the conserved, in a way that provides these
others with the space and the resources to craft their own vital new
forms of life for this era of incredible anthropogenic change and biodiversity loss?

Captive Breeding: Conserving Behaviour?

Holding animals in captivity raises a range of signicant problems.
As the long history of private menageries and zoological gardens illustrates so clearly, some animals simply will not live in captivity; others,
like the giant panda, either will not reproduce at all, or will only do so
with great eort and expense on the part of both their human keepers
and the animals themselves (Braverman, 2012; Chrulew, 2010). But getting animals to survive and reproduce in captivity has always only been
the rst part of the struggle. If animals are to be held captive over multiple
generations, then a range of additional problems arises. Foremost among
them is inbreeding and the loss of genetic diversity, which is particularly
dicult to manage in small populations, as most highly endangered species are. In response, a variety of tactics are now deployed to ensure that
under-represented genes are retained while over-represented genes are
not reproduced any further. These tactics include detailed cataloguing
of pedigrees, circulation of animals and/or their gametes, articial insemination and forced pairings, and even the zoothanasia of those that are
surplus to a species needs (Beko, 2012; Chrulew, 2011; Friese, 2013;
van Dooren, 2014a). In most cases, the goal of captive breeding programmes in this area is simply articulated in numerical terms: retaining
x percent of the remaining genetic diversity for the next x years.
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These concerns over genetic diversity have usually taken a central

place within discussions of the challenges of the captive breeding of
endangered animals. Historically, the impacts of captivity on behavioural
development have been less frequently acknowledged, and have only
recently begun to be taken seriously (Curio, 1994: 164). In practice, the
social and physical environments of captivity, alongside dietary and
reproductive constraints and a whole range of other factors, usually
mean that animals reared in captivity simply do not behave in the
ways that free-living conspecics do. Ultimately, behaviour is far too
miserly a term for what is at stake here. Depending on the species in
question, a whole range of learned behaviours, vocal repertoires and
social skills what some have referred to as animal cultures (Lestel,
2002) often require processes of interaction and learning that are not,
and in some cases cannot be, conserved ex situ. Among many other
similar programmes of re-education for captive reared animals, eorts
to teach whooping cranes to migrate with ultra-light aircraft highlight
just how much is learned and how problematic ex situ conservation can
be when it comes to release (van Dooren, 2014a).6
But in the captive breeding of endangered animals for conservation
purposes, holding on to this thing called behaviour is absolutely central.
Whether released animals will count as members of the given species, and
indeed whether they will survive long enough to establish a self-sustaining population (the standard goal of endangered species conservation), in
no small part rests on whether and in what ways they retain their behavioural repertoire.7
Alala oer an instructive example of the ways in which animals might
be redone in the captive breeding facility. In an interview with Alan
Lieberman, who for many years oversaw the alala project, I asked
about the challenges that this situation poses.
[The alala is] a bird that is [evolutionarily] selected for learning
with a long period of parental care. We work with other birds that
know everything they need to know right out of the egg. It doesnt
matter if theyre with a parent, without a parent, you release them
and they do ne. They forage ne, they breed ne, and they die two
years later. Hard wired, all the way. Then you have the alala that
learns a lot. We put them into a learning environment as quickly as
we can. We never raise a bird alone; we raise them in a group; we
raise them in full view of adults all the time. We dont put them in
with the adults because the adults will harm them, but they can at
least see them, learn the calls and whatever else is available.8
Clearly, much depends on the species in question. Concrete dierences
between species and their social and developmental makeups yield real
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dierences in terms of what behaviours might develop in captivity, as

well as whether those that are lost might be recuperated through various
forms of exposure or training.
In many cases, however, behavioural losses are irreparable. For
example, with all of the remaining alala now in captivity, it is widely
thought that the vocal repertoire or vocabulary of the species has
signicantly diminished; perhaps they have less to talk about, or perhaps
juvenile birds simply havent been exposed to enough chatter from their
elders. Whatever the cause, if these birds are to make it back into the
wider world at some stage in the future, they will likely need to reinvent a
workable means of communication. It remains unclear whether or not
this diminished vocabulary will impact on these birds ability to socialize
and survive after release for example, in their coordinated mobbing of
Hawaiian hawks (io) and other predators. In the context of all this
uncertainty, it is understandable that where keepers have any control
over behavioural and cultural development a great deal of eort is
now often invested in ensuring that animals learn what they can and
that any signicant behavioural changes are avoided.

The Authentic Crow?

At the heart of the way that behaviour is conceptualized and managed in
the captive breeding facility is a set of understandings oscillating around
some notion of the authentic animal. Authenticity is a complex domain
but in this context it aligns quite closely with stasis: alala being released
from KBCC are authentic if they are as similar as possible to those that
previously existed in the islands forests. But similarity, and so authenticity, might be thought about and gauged in a range of dierent areas.
This section explores what it means to be an authentic crow with regard
to questions of eating and being eaten (or avoiding being eaten). In this
particular captive breeding programme these important topics have been
central sites for some of the many discussions and decisions about what
kind of alala conservationists ought to be trying to rear and release.
In my conversations with biologists, conservationists and others in
Hawaii, and in my reading of the relevant literatures, three broad reasons emerged as justications for this desired similarity. On the face of it,
the rst reason is a pragmatic one: survival. Many of the behavioural
changes experienced by captive animals will ultimately undermine their
chances of survival once released. Not knowing which foods to eat,
lacking a complex vocal repertoire, tameness in the face of potential
predators (including humans), perhaps even having imprinted on a
human keeper and now seeking out a human mate: all of these
common behavioural changes can be disastrous for released animals
(and so their species). In this context, it makes a great deal of sense to
work to ensure that change is kept to a minimum. Where changes that
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might threaten survival do occur, eorts are often made to undo them.
For example, it now seems likely that in the lead up to their release, alala
will be required to undertake some form of predator avoidance training
to instil in them the knowledge that they ought to avoid the Hawaiian
hawk.9 During the last attempted releases it seems that captive reared
alala did not avoid io or work together to mob them as biologists suspect they once did. In this context, training is viewed as the reinstatement
of a lost knowledge/behaviour.10
A second key reason for desired similarity is also broadly pragmatic:
ecological function. Here, alala oer us another important example.
During their time in captivity, these birds have been introduced to a
range of native plants, seeds and owers (Culliney et al., 2012). In part
this focus on the native seems to be grounded in a view that these are
the foods proper to alala, but it seems that some conservationists also
view this familiarity as a core part of ensuring that released birds resume
the important ecological role that their species once played in dispersing
seeds for these plants.11 In acting as seed dispersers, these authentic
crows will help to maintain authentic Hawaiian forests.
The nal broad reason for desired similarity is more nebulous. I refer
to it here as essence and, like most things with this label, it is hard to
pin down. Beyond practical concerns with the survival of the species and
the fullment of its ecological functions, this more essentialist perspective
values behavioural stasis for the simple reason that behaviour is a key
part of the identity of the species. If released alala fail to act as their
forebears did, in what sense would they be the same species? This concern with identity came to the fore at a few key points in my conversations with conservationists. For example, in a discussion about the
captive breeding of alala with John Marzlu, a former member of the
ocial alala recovery team and a recognized expert on crow biology and
behaviour, he noted that:
We made a conscious decision not to make those birds garbage
birds. We could have easily trained them to feed at the dumpster
down at Costco in Kona. But the committee, the recovery team,
made a very conscious eort to say this is not what were trying to
do here; were trying to make these crows as wild, and frugivorous,
and forest loving, as possible. And I think thats still the right
approach, but it does make it more dicult.12
Here, the conventional behaviour of the species may even be at odds with
survival, but it is valued because it is a core part of species identity of
what is unique and precious about alala.
Of course, the conservation community is a diverse one. Dierent
people take dierent approaches to these questions of stasis and authenticity. For some, any change is a change too much. For others, a little
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enhancement especially if it makes the dierence between survival and

extinction is a reasonable compromise. There are no rm answers here,
just an ongoing eort to negotiate perceived changes between a captive
population and an imagined archetype (often based on very imperfect
records and observations). Nonetheless, however imperfectly mobilized,
authenticity plays a powerful role here in determining which kinds of
animals conservationists try to produce in captive breeding facilities.13
In these sites, practical survival, ecological function and essentialist
priorities and commitments are thoroughly interwoven with each other,
unable to be teased apart in any conclusive way. This tight coupling of
ideas was evident in an interview with Rich Switzer, the current head of
the alala programme and director of the San Diego Zoos Hawaii
Endangered Bird Conservation Program. When I asked Switzer about
the possibility of training or encouraging captive alala to scavenge
human waste he replied:
I think that what they eat and what they do and how they behave
[is important]. This is also about the role that theyre fullling
in the ecosystem. [He went on to discuss the role that alala
plays in the regeneration of the native forest as a seed
disperser.] . . . If you change the species, and you change its role
in the ecology, then it ceases to function as the species that it is
purported to be.
Underlying Switzers statement is a general sense that released alala
ought to inhabit the worlds and live the lives that they once did.
Conservation success hinges on these birds being roughly identical to
their most recent free-living (or wild) ancestors.14
In this context many of our more common denitions of biological
species dont seem to adequately capture the kind of identity that is at
issue for conservationists. Neither the biological species denition
centred on reproductive possibilities (Mayr, 1996), nor more evolutionary (genealogical/phylogenetic) denitions centred on separate lineages
(Simpson, 1961) are at all concerned about where an alala gets its food.
These conventional denitions may work well for taxonomic purposes
(although that too is debated),15 but when it comes to conservation it
seems that at least part of what is important about a species a behavioural and perhaps cultural form of life is not registered. Alala that
have been taught to scavenge human waste will reproduce with other
alala just ne (although this change could eventually give rise to distinct
populations). Similarly, they will share a phylogeny with them. And yet,
for some people at least, they would not be quite right. If we add in the
fact that they may not avoid and mob predators or even sing and chatter
as they once did, perhaps we are now talking about a bird that is
dierent in some fundamental sense.16
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In my conversations in Hawaii this point of view was expressed most

succinctly by Cynnie Salley, a passionate advocate for alala. It was on
her familys land that the last free-living birds made their homes. She
watched them closely for decades and was involved in conservation
eorts though she has often disagreed with the approaches taken.
From her perspective, the birds that now remain are not really alala
at all. Reminiscing about the crows that once lived on her property,
and a past (unsuccessful) release attempt, she commented:
They were kind of like the kings and queens of the forest. They
chased the hawks and the hawks had a healthy respect for them.
As a matter of fact, it took four or ve years of releasing young
birds [alala] before the hawks realized that these were dierent than
the ones that used to chase them around and that they had fair
game.. . . All of those birds that were originally wild are now gone.
All of the birds there [at KBCC] have been raised by puppets.17 So
I truly feel that whatever happens in the forest now with these birds,
its a dierent species.18
In large part Salleys view is grounded in concern for the birds. She
strongly doubts that once released they will be able to survive and reproduce. But beyond these more pragmatic concerns, she is also mourning a
vibrant and charismatic presence in the forest that she believes will not
be restored even if captive reared alala do make it back one day. As she
put it:
Whatever they release now is really starting at evolutionary ground
zero. Theyre going to have to relearn everything including
calls.. . . So, from their language on up theyre going to have a
huge learning curve. So its going to be a dierent bird.
I have signicant sympathy with these concerns. Conserving species is, at
least in part, about holding on to evolved (even if still evolving) ways of
life (van Dooren, 2014a). Salleys position challenges reductive notions
of animals, highlighting that species are more than their DNA or reproductive potential. Ways of being in the world are at stake here, complex
more-than-human cultures.
However, there is also a lingering danger in these notions of authenticity. In their more extreme forms these demands for stasis for animals
who are behaviourally identical to their free-living conspecics are
grounded in a problematic essentialism about species identity. From
this perspective, there is a singular, proper, way for alala and other
animals to be. Captive animals will usually fail to express this essence,
and so fail to be authentic. This perspective threatens to undermine the

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legitimacy of the form of conservation conducted in the captive breeding

facility.
These notions of a xed and essential species identity and its potential undermining in captive environments nd support in numerous
critiques of the zoo. Philosopher Bernard E. Rollin, for example,
argues that:
an animal is dened by its telos, the set of powers constitutive of its
nature the pigness of the pig, the lion-ness of the lion. The
animal is what it does, following its nature as predator, or rooter,
or burrower. The tiger in the Mirage window [a hotel/casino in
Las Vegas] is not a tiger, but the body of a tiger, not hugely dierent
from a stued tiger. (Rollin, 2010: 1078)
As Ralph Acampora (2010: 13) notes, Rollins argument here centres on
notions of authenticity and inauthenticity. Only some of the living beings
that a biologist would call Panthera tigris tigris are really tigers. The rest
are inauthentic imitations: anatomical tigers lacking in an essential,
behavioural tigerness.
In a recent chapter on life in the zoo, Matthew Chrulew takes up this
question of behavioural change and diminished forms of life. He references Keekok Lee, who in a criticism of the institution of the zoo notes
that zoo animals are not wild, but might better be understood as biotic
artifacts (Chrulew, 2010: 32930). Chrulew is himself highly critical of
the institution of the zoo and the animal subjects that it produces, but is
reluctant to accept that these kinds of interactions with humans are
necessarily taints that undo the animalness of the animal. Instead, his
position is one of careful attentiveness to the multiple forms of becoming
that are made both possible and impossible in captivity. The point here is
not simply to note that there are, in general, often signicant behavioural
dierences between captive and free-living animals of the same species,
but to pay attention to how those dierences take shape, and with what
consequences for whom. As he puts it: understanding that zoo animals
are ontologically altered by captivity should be the beginning, not the
endpoint, of analaysis (2010: 330).
Strongly essentialist notions of species dont invite this kind of analysis. Instead, they disavow the dynamism and change that is an inherent
part of evolutionary and adaptive life forms. Over evolutionary timescales, species are always changing, always becoming other than themselves (van Dooren, 2014a). As Elizabeth Grosz notes, from an
evolutionary perspective being is transformed into becoming, essence
into existence, and the past and the present are rendered provisional in
light of the force of the future (Grosz, 2004: 7). But even over much
shorter ontogenetic timescales, through the duration of an individual
organisms life, crows and other animals are involved in processes of
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learning, adaptation and development, responding to new threats and

opportunities.
In short, each alala, like all living beings, is the product of (what we
might think of as) ecological, evolutionary and developmental processes,
playing out in their own particular ways. In this context, behaviour is not
something that is simply retained between generations. Rather, behaviour is a relational and developmental achievement (as are all aspects of
biology when it comes down to it, as work in Developmental Systems
Theory (Oyama et al., 2001) and Ecological Developmental Biology
(Gilbert, 2001) highlights so well). While there are certainly aspects of
an organisms developmental becoming that are more or less inherited,
more or less exible, everything that is arises through interactions that
are never xed and guaranteed once and for all. As Donna Haraway has
put it:
Developmental unrolling into whatever it is that critters are
throughout their lifetime, turns out to be a becoming-with not a
becoming. A sympoetic engagement not an autopoetic one. So that
organism, after organism, after organism, turns out to need partners
to be at all. (Haraway, 2014)
In this context, the simple fact of inter-generational dierence cannot
be so easily read as the loss of anything, certainly not an ideal authentic
state. Instead, our attention is drawn towards the agency of non-humans
in the shaping of their own individual and species identities: as crows
around the world move into cities and learn new ways of life, they conduct experiments in emergent forms of crow-ness. Far from any singular
telos, individuals and species are engaged in multiple forms of becoming,
all of them reiterative and ongoing, all of them co-constitutive and collaborative (even if unequal). The jungle crows in Japan that have learned
to use moving trac to open tough nuts (and red trac lights as a means
of safely retrieving their contents), are just one example of what it might
mean to be a crow in the 21st century (Marzlu and Angell, 2005).19
These are spaces of relational sociability (Buller, 2013) in which identity is achieved through the interactions between crows, but also with
their humans, a range of other species and the wider environment. In this
context, KBCC is, like the farms that Buller (2013: 167) describes, a
more-than-animal place, a more-than-human place, a place of constantly
shifting multispecies interactions, practices, relations and adaptations.
While the freedom that alala have to explore new forms of crow-ness is
currently curtailed in many ways by their captive life, there is no reason
that their inter-generational dierences shouldnt be understood in a
similar light to those of jungle crows. Species and individual organisms
always become with others including human others within diverse
elds of freedom and constraint (indeed, what counts as freedom for
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whom is part of what is produced in these entangled co-becomings).20 In

this context, co-becoming with people doesnt make current alala (or
their Japanese counterparts for that matter) not real crows in fact, the
behavioural plasticity, the capacity to adapt to and make use of humans
and the changed environments we produce, is itself a key part of what it
is to be an intelligent generalist like a crow.21
Alan Lieberman may have been heading in this general direction in
our discussion. Reecting on Cynnie Salleys views on real alala (the two
of them are old friends), he noted that:
she feels that once theyve lost the wisdom of their elders the alala
will never be an alala again. I agree. It will never be what it was,
because that culture has been lost. We havent been able to transfer
the alala culture from one generation to the next. But well do the
best that we can and well create a new culture.
Loss is only part of the story that Lieberman wants to tell. Adaptation
and change facilitate the creation of something new. While this situation
is far from desirable from Liebermans perspective, ongoing crow-ness is
still possible. But what kind of crow-ness, what kind of identity, would
this be?

Performative Species Identities

The understanding of identity that I have in mind here is a performative
one, an understanding that might get us outside of the discourses of
authenticity that can function in some conservation contexts to position
particular identities as false or derivative, and others [as] true and original (Butler, 1999: viii). Species identity understood as performative is
not an essence but a doing, as Karen Barad (2003: 822) has succinctly
put it.22 Like Barad, the notion of performativity that interests me is a
thoroughly material one what she terms posthumanist performativity
in which the constitution of material bodies and their identities occurs
through reiterative processes of materialized reguration (Haraway,
1994). Bodies and identities are remade, but they are not made purely
out of social and discursive practices that are too often imagined to be
solely human aairs.
In short, biology avian and otherwise and other forms of materiality, matter. The cognitive and emotional competences that alala inherit
from their parents and others open them into some possible worlds and
not others, some ways of being and not others.23 Only some big black
birds can be alala. American crow eggs brought from the mainland and
reared by alala will not become alala in some signicant senses while
they certainly may in others. The point here is not that biology and
materiality place limitations on how we become, but rather that they
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too are part of the eld of agencies that are at play in the particular
(entangled) processes of materialization (Barad, 2003) that produce
bodies and worlds.24
A similarly performative notion of species is embraced by Sarah
Whatmore and Lorraine Thorne (2000) in their discussion of elephants,
and by Kersty Hobson (2007) in her discussion of moon bears rescued
from a bile farm in China. In both cases, what is at stake is an understanding of what it means to be a particular kind of animal that moves
beyond static and xed identities to embrace an attentiveness to the way
in which these animals themselves exert their own agency in remaking
what counts as natural behaviour for a being of their kind (?). Here, we
see that natural behaviour is like most things with the designation
natural always up for grabs, always being remade and newly pieced
together, and not just by people. The task here is not to look deeper and
deeper for the real natural behaviour and so essential identity but to
recognize that these identities are always being performatively reiterated
in ways that dip into and out of our knowledge.
Vinciane Despret (2008) oers a complementary account of animal life
in her discussion of Irene Pepperbergs work with Alex, a grey parrot of
Gabon. Despret insists that Alex, who learned to talk working with
Pepperberg, does not authorize some sort of new understanding of
what, or who, parrots fundamentally are.
I cannot . . . arm that all parrots talk, nor that all the grey parrots
of Gabon talk. Alex is not representative of parrots; no parrot could
be. The givens appear to us instead as a means of sketching out the
competences that can, with the appropriate environmental support,
gure in the list of capacities of the species. Here then is not what
parrots are but what they might be rendered capable of. (Despret,
2008: 127)
For Despret, as for Pepperberg, what a parrot is, what Alex is, is not
xed once and for all, but the emergent achievement of interwoven histories of interaction over evolutionary and personal timeframes, histories
that are by denition ongoing. Here, an assemblage constructed by a
particular human, a particular parrot and a range of other experimental
devices creates a specic environment (an apparatus in Desprets terms).
In this context, Alexs speech is no longer expressed in terms of what
parrots are, but in terms of the possibilities that the apparatus could
actualize (Despret, 2008: 128).
One important consequence of this understanding of identity is that it
thrusts us into the realms of politics and ethics. As Arun Agrawal (2005:
171) notes: It is this recognition of contingency that introduces the register of the political in the creation of the subject. In this context, the
questions that emerge are not about authenticity or even how much
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change is acceptable, but are rather centred on the practical labour of

learning to be part of the constitution of ourishing forms of crow-ness;
learning to ask what matters to and for others (Despret, 2013), what
forms of life are possible for (once) captive animals within the breeding
facility and beyond its walls.
The rst thing to note in this context is that notions of the wild will be
of no help to us. Although the wild is deployed in a wide range of
dierent ways, it pretty much always stands in contrast to the (civilized)
human (Palmer, 2010). While the wild is in some ways preferable to the
wilderness (Cronon, 1995), both share a core dualistic orientation in
which the human is the (anti-) measure of all things: when it comes to
animals or landscapes, to be wild is to be (relatively) uninuenced by
people. A simplistic preference for wild birds (in this sense of the term)
positions humans as intruders, outside of the best/preferred/natural set
of interactions that produce birds how they ought to be their most
authentic selves. But control and inuence are everywhere in entangled
relations of co-becoming. In some cases a great deal of human involvement will be required to form and maintain ourishing communities and
ways of life; in other cases some or all of our particular forms of presence
may undermine these possibilities for other animals. In short, the devil is
always in the detail. A blanket preference for the wild in the form of
minimal human involvement wont always yield the best of possible
worlds.
In addition, the wild only asks us to pay attention to one kind of
inuence or power: human power over others. At the same time, a focus
on the wild covers over the incredible diversity within human forms of
inuence and involvement in others lives. Instead, what is needed is an
attentiveness to diverse forms of power and inuence, human and nonhuman, in the shaping of bodies, lives, worlds and their possibilities for
ourishing. Having said that, however, this article focuses primarily on
the specic roles that humans do or might play in interactions with
endangered crows in part because people are just so central to
animal life in captive environments, but also because I am interested
specically in how those people involved might learn to be part of ourishing forms of crow-ness.
With the wild behind us, perhaps the best entry point into this topic is
an attentiveness to the delicate interplay of distance and proximity in our
relations with non-human others. In recent work Matei Candea (2010)
has explored the balance between engagement and detachment in
humanmeerkat relations. For him, these two terms are not opposites
(or at least dont have to be), rather, ethical humananimal relations
might often require the cultivation of inter-patience, of relationships
grounded in careful and deliberate forms of detachment. Hugo Reinert
(2014) has taken up a similar theme in his discussion of Sami reindeer
pastoralism, focusing on the dynamics between proximity and
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distance, intimacy and detachment. In recent work on the captive

breeding of whooping cranes, I have explored the use of costumes by
human keepers in an eort to be intimately present in the day-to-day
lives of young birds while also remaining visually and ontologically
absent so as to end up with cranes more capable of ourishing lives
after release (van Dooren, 2014a).
In dierent ways, each of these approaches presents a non-dualistic
understanding of human/animal entanglements where all being is cobecoming and human presence is not necessarily a polluting force that
undermines how animals ought to be. And yet, in each case there is also
a commitment to some eort to hold back (in some ways in some
places), some eort to provide respectful distance that will enable
others to become on their own terms (even though absolute autonomy
is both impossible and undesirable). As Val Plumwood (1993) taught us,
this is one of the fundamental and ongoing challenges of multispecies
relations: recognizing and respecting both sameness and dierence,
continuity and separation, within the context of a largely relational
world view.
In recent work Reinert has provided another helpful glimpse into this
space of what we might call autonomy-within-relationship. In his discussion of the diverse technologies and practices of surveillance that
underlie the conservation of the lesser white-fronted goose (Anser erythropus), he is concerned by intensive forms of conservation in which a
species might be conserved, while its way of life in a fuller sense may still
be lost. Here we are:
held in the pressured space between extinction (as a limit on numbers and time) and the fragile wild (as a limit on intervention). Fail
to intervene, and the object is lost; intervene, and the object may
also be lost, although in other ways. (Reinert, 2013: 22)
In this space, successful perhaps ethical conservation must be
achieved through what Reinert terms a constitutive withdrawal. Put
simply, this is a relationship grounded not in abandonment but rather
the opposite, a powerful and highly productive investment which,
through its paradoxical absent-presence, oer[s] a solution (of sorts) to
the double bind. Engage with the birds, but in a manner that approximates absence (Reinert, 2013: 22).
In captive breeding and ex situ conservation programmes more generally we are drawn into precisely this double bind. In cases like that of
the alala, where most or even all of the remaining individuals of a species
are in captivity, this is particularly so. Here we are reminded that in a
time of extinctions, a constitutive withdrawal often needs to take place in
our relations not just with individual animals but with entire species.
In these contexts the captive breeding facility is a site of condensed
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43

co-becoming, of enhanced and intensied inheritance which is always a

process of simultaneous carrying forward and leaving behind (Derrida
and Roudinesco, 2004; van Dooren, 2014b). In such a space the future
trajectory of a whole species is shaped and formed, for better or worse.
The approach that I am suggesting here grounded in an attentiveness
to autonomy-within-relationship doesnt t neatly into either of Bruno
Latours principal camps: that of the (traditional) environmentalists
xated on pure wilderness, or that of the post-environmentalists imagining a complete breakdown of borders between humans and a wider
more-than-human world.
Environmentalists say: From now on we should limit ourselves.
Postenvironmentalists exclaim: From now on, we should stop agellating ourselves and take up explicitly and seriously what we have
been doing all along at an ever-increasing scale, namely, intervening, acting, wanting, caring. (Latour, 2011: 26)
While I am certainly in agreement that ecology does not need, and would
in fact be better o without, nature, there is an equal danger in the
celebration of human presence and involvement. We dont need to buy
into a simplistic nature/culture dualism to believe that some creatures,
some places, would be better o in a range of dierent ways if we carefully and deliberately limited our involvement with them. What is relevant here is not wilderness or the wild, but the particular dynamics of
diverse forms of human relationship with specic non-human others, and
the consequences for the development and ourishing of individuals and
species.
It is far from clear what form this kind of relationship might take in
dierent contexts.25 Outside of essentialism, however, what emerges is
the possibility that conservation might become a practice grounded in an
eort to cultivate and support diverse forms of becoming for a changing
world. In this context, perhaps the most important and challenging question that we need to learn how to ask is: what kinds of relationships and
forms of life are crows themselves interested in taking up? How would they
like to perform their own crow-ness now and into the future? And, how
might we support and make room for them to explore these possibilities
in captivity and beyond?26
For (soon to be) free-living members of highly social species, like
alala, these are questions that cannot really be asked of individual
birds in isolation. Despret is helpful here. Her work moves our attention
away from the question of whether an animal in her discussion a lion
that has been changed through its interactions with humans would no
longer be lion enough to teach us anything on the subject of lioness
(Despret, 2008: 126). Instead, Despret (2008: 126) proposes that a more
interesting question than whether people would recognize this lion as a
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lion, is whether other lions would: What matters, from the point of view
of a lion, to make it say to another lion you are still one of us.27
Posing the question in this way reminds us that a performative understanding of identity is one in which the agency of not only individual
animals, but that of their broader social circles, comes to matter profoundly. As humans involved in these processes of becoming, making
room for others to explore and perform their own identities in company
with others of their kind (as determined by them) is an important part
of a polite conservation (Despret, 2006). Despret espouses the virtue of
a particular form of politeness in our experimental interactions with nonhuman animals. This politeness is grounded in a practice of asking what
counts for others? (Despret, 2006, 2013). Desprets focus is on experimental interactions aimed at producing knowledge about/with animals
(and their scientists), but this virtue of politeness might also be employed
in the kind of experiments for life being undertaken in captive breeding
and release programmes around the world.
To some extent current release plans for alala enable precisely these
possibilities. In interviews both Switzer and Lieberman emphatically
noted that released groups of alala would need to be given space and
support to adapt to and learn about their new environment. In the case
of past releases this kind of support hasnt always been provided and sta
are now planning a soft release for the future. In Liebermans words:
Instead of just closing the aviary and saying Now youre an alala,
be free, if they get sick they [will] know that they can come back
and get food. The rst generation is going to be a real interesting
generation. Like school kids going to school for a long time. Its not
a three-month release but a three-year release.
This process requires signicant preparation and investment. According
to Switzer, as part of the soft release we have them in aviaries for a few
weeks. They get xed on that spot and they know that its a food source.
After release the aviary is left in place and supplementary food is made
available to birds. In addition, it is likely that the alala programme will
also oer veterinary care to released birds, requiring sta to live out in
the forest for a time at the release site. This more intensive form of soft
release is not yet mainstream, as Switzer put it: It is amazing how little
post-release veterinary care has been considered in a lot of species recovery programmes. But Switzer would like to go further still:
A few years down the track, if youve got an alala nest with three
chicks in it, why not move a food pan to the bottom of the tree so
that the parent can come down and feed their chicks the perfect
alala diet? Giving them the best chance of survival. Or, if one of
those chicks is struggling, how about bringing it into a quarantine
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45

facility here, give it some antibiotics, then start it on a hand rearing

regime, and release it later on.
This is a kind of involvement, or intervention, that may go a step too far
for some. But at the heart of this proposed approach is a recognition that
alala is a uid identity the goal is not to rush towards some vision of
the authentically wild bird. Switzer doesnt want birds behaviour or diets
to be changed to suit human whims and convenience, but he is also
practical about the need to make allowances in a changing world to
nd ways to support alala while they make new lives in a new landscape.
Switzer, Lieberman and others are particularly mindful that alala are
not returning to a pristine wilderness (whatever this might mean). Nor
are they returning to the forests that the species occupied 100 or even
30 years ago. Instead, these are landscapes in which food will be scarce
in particular due to introduced ungulates like pigs who have grazed down
the understory in most of the islands forests (van Dooren, 2014b). At the
same time a range of new predators like cats and mongoose have arrived
in the islands, along with new diseases like avian malaria and toxoplasmosis (to which alala have little resistance). Despite ongoing eorts to
recover habitat in some key sites, things will be tough for released birds.
And so, while the ultimate hope is still to have a viable population out
there long term with minimal human involvement (Switzer), it is readily
acknowledged that this may require support for years to come.
In part, sta see such eorts as an attempt to buy time for the forest
ecosystem to recover and hopefully become better suited to alala needs.
But this is not a vision of a forest changing around a static bird. At the
same time this support is seen as enabling birds to adapt and develop new
ways of life. Part of this adaptation will be physiological (e.g. developing
disease resistance [Lieberman]), but much of it will also be behavioural
learning to forage for both old and new foods (including, perhaps, a
range of introduced fruits), to rear young, to enliven the forests with a
new vocabulary of raucous sounds.
How far this kind of thinking will be taken in the release of alala
remains to be seen. There is, however, great promise in the work that this
programme is doing to explore what it might mean to provide the support necessary for alala to take up new possibilities, to craft new ways of
life. In this context, soft release might be about creating an environment
and a set of relationships that enable alala to be interesting in the sense
that Despret (2006), following Barbara Smuts, deploys the term.
Thinking in this way requires us to pay close attention to the fact that
dierent spaces and relationships hold open or foreclose, encourage or
dissuade, dierent possibilities for becoming especially when we are
talking about highly adaptive beings like alala who are keen social
and environmental learners. With this in mind, perhaps what polite conservation in this era of incredible biodiversity loss requires is a wider set
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of practices that seek to create the conditions for other species to explore
and develop their own emergent forms of life. This is work that will
always be situated in a dicult space of constitutive withdrawal that
negotiates diverse forms of involvement and absence, of holding on and
letting go, with all of their many consequences (Reinert, 2013).
Importantly, it is also work that only becomes conceivable once we
learn to value and understand species like alala as adaptive, emergent,
ongoing achievements more than their genes or any given behavioural
repertoire. It is only in this way that we can begin to seriously take up the
challenge of thinking with alala about how we might help them to stick
around in the world a little longer.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the people in Hawaii who agreed to share their ideas and
insights, in particular Alan Lieberman, Paul Banko, Cynnie Salley, Rick Switzer and the
many other sta at the Keauhou Bird Conservation Center. This article also beneted
from input from a number of colleagues including Deborah Bird Rose, Eben Kirksey and
Matthew Chrulew. An earlier draft of this article was presented at a workshop on cryopolitics at the University of Melbourne, organized by Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal
(Defrost: New Perspectives on Time, Temperature, and Survival). This research was
funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP110102886).

Notes
1. KBCC is run by the San Diego Zoo and funded by the zoo, the State
Government of Hawaii and the US Federal Government.
2. Of the 113 endemic bird species present just prior to human arrival in the
islands, almost two-thirds are now extinct. Of the 42 species that remain, 31
are federally listed under the Endangered Species Act (Leonard, 2008). With
these statistics in mind it isnt hard to see why Hawaii is considered to be one
of the extinction capitals of the world.
3. I have written in detail elsewhere about some of the many other political and
ethical aspects of Hawaiian conservation (with a particular focus on the
alala). See, for example, van Dooren (2014a, 2014b).
4. For example, Snyder et al. (1996) report that in the early 1990s captive
breeding was recommended by the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for half of the worlds parrot species, as
well as in 64 percent of all approved recovery plans for threatened and endangered species in the USA. Also see the current work of the Conservation
Breeding Specialist Group of the IUCN (http://www.cbsg.org/).
5. Although this article seeks to contribute to a broader conversation about the
work of captive breeding, its focus is this particular project. Each captive
breeding programme has its own complexities. The chances of successfully reestablishing free-living populations differ markedly, depending on the developmental nature of the species in question and the possibility of managing
wider threats to the species in the release environment, including possible
threats from human communities, as in this case (van Dooren, 2014b).
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6. For obvious reasons, this potential for loss is even clearer in the case of
extinct species for which banked DNA is all that remains. In this context,
viable storage of DNA is one thing; reanimation in the basic sense is another
(perhaps achievable through SCNT [somatic cell nuclear transfer] or a
related technology); getting from a single individual to a viable genetically
diverse population is then another obstacle. But even if all of these challenges can be met, will the resulting animals act and live as their forebears
did, will they possess the necessary behaviours to survive? Depending on the
species in question, a great deal of this diversity simply is not coded in the
DNA. In this context, the simplistic but popular notion that cells provide
complete instructions for an organism of that species as recently stated by
Oliver Ryder, the Director of Genetics at the San Diego Zoo is a key part
of the problem (see: http://longnow.org/revive/tedxdeextinction/geneticrescue-and-biodiversity-banking).
7. The term retain is very problematic in this context, implying that there is
an authentic blueprint of each species (morphological and behavioural)
that is in each case either realized or not in the next generation.
Nonetheless, this is the way that behaviour is normally spoken about in
this context. I will revisit this framing in a more critical mode below.
8. All references to Lieberman refer to an interview conducted by the author
with Alan Lieberman, then Director of Regional Conservation Programs at
the Institute for Conservation Research, San Diego Zoo, on 1 December
2010.
9. Interview with Rich Switzer. All references to Switzer refer to interviews
conducted by the author with Rich Switzer on 18 December 2011 and
22 January 2013. Switzer is an aviculturist who was at the time
heading the alala captive breeding programme as part of his more general coordination of the San Diego Zoos Hawaii Endangered Bird
Conservation Program.
10. In reality, however, things are more complex than this. In many cases, species have ended up in these dire situations precisely because their previous
behaviours were not working for them. In some of these cases, conservationists have introduced training regimes that aim to teach captive animals
better roosting strategies or anti-predator behaviour (especially important
when a new predator has been introduced to an environment and the endangered species has no effective way of living with it). Here survival requires
change, not stasis, but these kinds of approaches are usually minimal and
often controversial (largely because survival is not the only imperative guiding this desire for stasis).
11. This statement draws on interviews with several biologists/conservationists
conducted by the author in January and February 2013, including Rich
Switzer, Paul Banko and staff at KBCC.
12. Unless otherwise specified, all references to Marzluff refer to an interview
conducted by the author with John Marzluff on 13 November 2010.
Marzluff is a professor in the School of Environmental and Forest
Sciences at Washington University.
13. There are some important similarities between the ways that authentic
notions of species identity and authentic notions of human cultural identity
are often understood and managed. In both cases there is a tendency to
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14.
15.
16.

17.

18.

19.
20.

21.
22.

Theory, Culture & Society 33(2)

valorize perceived stasis and purity at the expense of more complex and
dynamic forms of identity. Assumptions that in order to be legitimate and
authentic, indigenous culture and traditional and customary practices need to
be identical to those of the past, disavow the possibility of ongoing change
that is at the heart of all forms of inheritance. As James Clifford (1986: 10)
famously put it: Cultures do not hold still for their portraits. Similarly, legal
definitions of indigeneity are often bound up with assumptions about particular kinds and quantities of biological relatedness. In Hawaii, for example, a strong emphasis has been placed on the need for authentic, truly
native individuals, to have a specific percentage of native Hawaiian blood
(Kauanui, 2008). This approach similarly fails to come to terms with the
dynamic nature of identity which cannot be located and measured in a
single ingredient and its unchanging transition between generations.
I will return to the value of the wild as a conceptual category below.
For an insightful ethnographic take on some of the many ways that species
emerge through complex scientific practices in different biological domains,
see Kirksey (forthcoming).
These questions take on new dimensions in de-extinction projects. Recent
proposals to effectively piece together a passenger pigeon genome by splicing relevant genes into the genome of its nearest extant relative the bandtailed pigeon offer an interesting example (the allele replacement technique). At each stage of the process, hybrid pigeons would be produced to
test the successful expression of any given trait (i.e. longer tail feathers).
Even once all of these traits are assembled in a single bird, to what extent
is it an actual passenger pigeon? Jamie Shreeve has suggested the term
proxy passenger pigeon for the reconstructed birds that are not genomically identical to the original but will hopefully embody its most significant
characteristics
(see:
http://longnow.org/revive/passenger-pigeonworkshop).
In many avian captive breeding programmes puppets and costumes are used to
avoid birds imprinting on, or becoming habituated to, their human keepers.
For a fuller discussion of the practicalities and ethics of this situation in the
context of the captive breeding of whooping cranes see van Dooren (2014a).
All references to Salley refer to an interview conducted by the author with
Cynnie Salley on 29 January 2013. As noted above, Salley is a passionate
advocate for alala and has been actively involved in their conservation on
her property and beyond for several decades.
For a related discussion of wild experiments see Lorimer and Driessen
(2014).
For example, canine freedom is not everywhere the same. Freedom for a
wild wolf is very different to the kinds of freedoms that make life good for
a domesticated dog although, perhaps, not as different as we might at
first assume (Tnnessen, 2010).
Although alala are certainly more specialized in many ways than many
other corvids, they are no less intelligent and, given time, presumably
no less adaptable.
Rollin also refers to what an animal does, but clearly means what an
animal should do, or would do if it were free of human (and perhaps
other?) interference.
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49

23. Inheritance is always also about all of our multispecies ancestors

(van Dooren, 2014b).
24. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it: the biological induces the cultural rather than
inhibits it . . . biological complexity impels the complications and variability
of culture itself (Grosz, 2004: 4). (So much so that the distinction between
biology and culture itself loses any real solidity.)
25. In particular, it is worth remembering that the forms of life and so the
humananimal relations that might foster them that work well for some
contexts will not necessarily work well for others, even within the same
species. For example, the birds best adapted to a flourishing life in captivity
(which is where many of them will remain) are likely to be very different
from those birds that are best adapted for release. I have explored some of
these important differences in my recent work on the conservation and
captive breeding of whooping cranes (van Dooren, 2014a). Teasing apart
what works well where is a practical labour of care (unavoidably mixed with
violence); it is about taking the time to practice the kind of epistemic care
that comes with genuine curiosity about and for others (Haraway, 2008).
26. The environmental philosopher Freya Mathews recently presented a similar
proposal when she noted that we should give wild animals the opportunity
to adapt to a human-mediated environment and let them choose for themselves. Perhaps such a choice should be seen as the ultimate exercise of wild
sovereignty (Mathews, 2013). I am not sure that sovereignty really helps us
here, but certainly Mathews is also seeking a way of valuing non-human
autonomy and agency in a world of relational becoming that has become all
too human.
27. In a related vein, Eben Kirksey reminds us that it isnt just humans who
involve themselves in (often complex) practices of paying attention to biological similarities and differences: Frogs create shared bubbles of happiness when they recognize each other as beings in common worlds. In other
words, members of the same frog species grasp each other against the backdrop of a cosmopolitical unknown (Kirksey, forthcoming).

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Theory, Culture & Society 33(2)

Thom van Dooren is an environmental philosopher and anthropologist in

the Environmental Humanities programme at the University of New
South Wales, Australia. His current research focuses primarily on the
ethics and politics of extinction and conservation. His most recent book
is Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia
University Press, 2014). He is also co-editor of the international, openaccess, journal Environmental Humanities. Further information on his
writing and research is available at www.thomvandooren.org.

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