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Unicum arbustum haud alit

Duos erithacos

(A single tree cannot shelter two robins)

Proverb by Zenodotus of Ephesus

(Greek philosopher, third century BC)

Scientists have found themselves genuinely intrigued by this process of metamorphosis. And not just intrigued, but moved at the same time. How can these birds, some of whom have been observed quietly living together through the winter, flying in unison, seeking food together, sometimes squabbling over apparently trivial matters, somehow, at a given moment, adopt a completely different attitude? From that point on, they isolate themselves from other birds, select a particular place and confine themselves to it, singing ceaselessly from one of their chosen promontories. Seemingly no longer able to tolerate the presence of their fellow creatures, they furiously devote all their energy to a frenzy of threats and attacks if any of these dares to cross a line, invisible to our eyes, but which appears to represent a remarkably well-defined border. The strangeness of their behaviour is astonishing enough, but even more striking is the aggressivity, the utter determination and pugnacity of their reactions towards others and, above all, what will later be referred to as the incredible ‘profusion’ of songs and poses – colours, dances, flights, movements of the most extravagant nature, all of them spectacular, all of them elements of a veritable spectacle. And the equally astonishing repetition of the routines involved in the process of setting up a territory. In 1920, Henry Eliot Howard described how a male reed bunting, observed from his home in the English countryside of Worcestershire, set about establishing his territory. The bird chose a marshy area planted with small alders and willows. Any of these trees would have provided a suitable perch from which to survey the surrounding area, but the bunting chose one in particular, which would in a sense become the most important spot in the chosen area, the bird’s ‘headquarters’, as Howard would call them. This would be the base from which he would signal his presence by his singing, monitor the movements of his neighbours and go off in search of food. Howard observed a specific routine taking shape around what would become the centre of the bird’s territory: the bird would leave the tree, go and perch in a nearby shrub, then on a bulrush a little further away, before returning once more to the tree. These journeys would be repeated in all directions with remarkable regularity. Their endless repetition mapped out the territory and gradually established its limits.

Other descriptions are possible. These would quickly follow, since Howard had clearly opened the floodgates to a whole stream of research in this area and was widely acknowledged by all the scientists working in this field as its genuine founder. His book Territory in Bird Life, published in 1920, not only provides meticulously detailed descriptions but also sets out a coherent theory which provides the explanation for these observations. According to Howard, the birds are engaged in securing a territory which will enable them to mate, build a nest, protect their young and find enough food to provide for their brood.

I should point out, first of all, that Howard was not a professional scientist but, rather, a naturalist who was passionate about observing birds, an activity to which he devoted the first hours of each day, before going to work. But scientists would quickly follow in his footsteps, acknowledging him as the true pioneer of this new field of research. Territory, as Howard understood it, could now be regarded as a valid scientific subject and could be explained in terms of the ‘functions’ it sustained in relation to the survival of the species. Moreover, in order to signal the arrival of this subject in the scientific domain, ornithologists would refer to a ‘pre-territorial’ period, indicating any theoretical speculations which preceded Howard. Secondly, it should also be pointed out that Howard was not in fact the first person to have associated territorial behaviour with the functions it could sustain and with the demands of reproduction. Two other writers had done so before him, notably Bernard Altum, the German zoologist who, in 1868, in a book which would not however be translated until considerably later, had developed a detailed theory of territory, and another amateur, Charles Moffat, a journalist with a passion for natural history, whose writings, published in 1903 in the relatively obscure Irish Naturalist’s Journal, would escape the notice of scientists. If Howard is acknowledged as the true pioneer of research in this area, it is first of all because he was the first writer, among those read by English and American ornithologists, to propose a detailed and coherent theory in a domain hitherto dominated by a great many speculative hypotheses.¹ In addition, Howard was responsible for the growing popularity of a new method focusing on the life stories of individual birds. This is significant in that it was a matter not just of telling the story of birds but of becoming familiar with their ‘lives’. We should not forget that, until then, many ornithologists and amateurs studied birds largely by killing them or by taking their eggs to form collections or to draw up categories.

What scientists refer to as the ‘pre-territorial period’ in relation to the theory of territory therefore indicates the fact that any observations tended to be relatively fragmentary in nature and lacked any real theoretical structure. The proverb from Zenodotus cited as an epigraph to this chapter, for example, would be revived at a later stage in connection with the theory that robins like solitude. Before Zenodotus, Aristotle had observed, in his Historia animalium, that animals, and, more specifically, eagles, defend the area which constitutes their feeding ground. He also observed the fact that, in certain areas, where food was in short supply, only one pair of ravens would be found.

For others, territory would first of all be associated with rivalry between males over females. The defended area would either enable the male to ensure exclusive access to any female who settled there, and would therefore amount to a problem of jealousy, or it would provide him with a ‘stage’ on which to sing and perform displays in order to attract a potential partner. This would be one of Moffat’s theories. In such a case, territory counts not as a space but as a behavioural whole.

Not surprisingly, the hypothesis of the robin’s love of solitude failed to gain a place in any scientific writings. The theory arguing that a territory enables a bird to guarantee exclusive access to the resources necessary to its survival would, by contrast, long be considered a pertinent one and would gain favour with a great many ornithologists. The argument that territory is associated with a problem of competition around females would, however, dominate the pre-territorial scene for a considerable time (and was notably favoured by Darwin). Controversial as it was, it would not be completely abandoned and would recur frequently, in one form or another, in scientific writings – no doubt encouraged by the attraction certain scientists have for the high drama often involved in competition and in others (sometimes involving the same people) because of a reluctance to abandon the notion that females are simply resources for males. Howard, however, vigorously challenged this theory of competition around females because it failed to fit certain of his observations. He wrote moreover that it held only for as long as it was believed that such confrontations exclusively involved males. In fact, as he pointed out, in certain species females fought with other females, couples with couples, or even sometimes a couple of birds might attack a solitary male or female. And what explanation might be given for the fact that, in species which travel to breeding sites, the males sometimes arrive considerably in advance of the females and immediately engage in conflict? Territorial behaviour nevertheless remains a predominantly male affair. As Howard points out, if the females behaved in the same way and isolated themselves, birds would never succeed in getting together!

The notion that birds could establish living spaces and would then protect their exclusive right to such zones is not a new one and had already been observed by Aristotle, Zenodotus and some later writers. However, the term ‘territory’ was not mentioned and would appear for the first time with reference to birds only in the course of the seventeenth century. In her book on this subject, published in 1941, Margaret Morse Nice, an American ornithologist, indicates that the first reference to territory occurs in a book by John Ray (1627–1705) entitled The Ornithology of Francis Willughby and published in 1678. As the title suggests, Ray’s book focuses on the work carried out by his friend Francis Willughby (1635–1672). With reference to the common nightingale, Ray cites another writer, Giovanni Pietro Olina, who published a treatise on ornithology entitled Uccelliera, ovvero, Discorso della natura, e proprietà di diversi uccelli in Rome in 1622. This treatise turns out to be a book on the various ways of catching and looking after birds in order to set up aviaries: ‘It is proper to this Bird at his first coming (saith Olina) to occupy or seize upon one place as its Freehold, into which it will not admit any other Nightingale but its mate.’ Ray also mentions the fact, again according to Olina, that the nightingale ‘has a peculiarity that it cannot abide a companion in the place where it lives and will attack with all its strength any who dispute this claim.’² But according to ornithologists Tim Birkhead and Sophie Van Balen,³ another writer, Antonio Valli da Todi, in fact preceded Olina in 1601 with a book on birdsong, and it is highly likely, given how similar the observations are in both books, that the latter may have copied his predecessor. He describes, for example, how the nightingale ‘chooses a freehold, in which it will admit no other nightingale but its female, and if other nightingales try to enter that place, it starts singing in the centre of this site.’ Valli da Todi would estimate the size of this territory by observing that its extent corresponded to a long stone’s throw. It should be noted incidentally that Valli da Todi himself derived much of his information from a work by Manzini, published in 1575. This latter does not, however, discuss the issue of territory.

We could of course allow ourselves to reflect on a coincidence here in that the term ‘territory’, with its very strong connotation of ‘the taking over of an exclusive area or property’, first appears in ornithological literature in the seventeenth century – in other words, at the very moment when, according to Philippe Descola and a great many legal historians, the Moderns reduced the use of land to a single concept, that of appropriation.⁴ Descola emphasizes that this conception is now so widely accepted that it would be very difficult to abandon it. In short, this notion first took shape under the influence of Grotius and the concept of natural law,⁵ although it is in fact rooted in sixteenth-century theology. It redefines the right of ownership as an individual right and is based in part on the idea of a contract which redefines humans as individuals and not as social beings (the ‘ownership’ of Roman law came about as the result of a process of sharing and not of an individual act, a sharing sanctioned by the law, the customs and the courts). In addition, it drew both on new techniques for evaluating land, which meant that any land would be delineated and its possession assured, and on a philosophical theory of the subject, that of possessive individualism, which reconfigures political society as a mechanism for the protection of individual property. We are all too aware of the dramatic consequences of this new conception of ownership, of those it favoured and of those whose lives were destroyed as a result. We are familiar with the history of enclosure, the expulsion of peasant communities from land over which they had previously exercised commoners’ rights and the ban which prevented them from taking from the forests the resources essential to their survival. With this new conception of ownership came the eradication of what is generally referred to today as the ‘commons’ and which represented land given over to the collective, coordinated and self-organized use of shared resources, such as irrigation ditches, common grazing grounds and forests⁶ … In England, writes Karl Polanyi, ‘in 1600, half of the kingdom’s arable land was still in communal use. By 1750, that figure had fallen to only a quarter and amounted to almost none at all in 1840.’⁷ Of the many different ways of inhabiting and sharing the land which had been invented and cultivated over the course of centuries, all that would remain would be the right of ownership, admittedly sometimes limited, but always defined as an exclusive right to use, and indeed abuse.

Returning to birds, to nightingales and to robins, I am not however entirely convinced that very much can be learned from this historical coincidence. That would be going rather too fast. It would mean, for example, neglecting the fact that the term ‘territory’ was not used in a random way with reference to animals but only in the description of the methods used to confine birds within aviaries, methods involving appropriation admittedly, and which involved the uses of cages and confinement but also methods intended to deterritorialize birds in order to have them live ‘with us’, in what constitutes ‘our’ territories. If I am to use this coincidence as a starting point from which to explore the story of territory, should I not also point out that the aviary originates from the desire to protect harvests from birds? And, at the same time, should I not emphasize that, as a result, it was linked to the art of hunting and falconry, an art that required cunning and an intimate knowledge of the habits of the various birds? Thus, for example, in the fourteenth century, pheasants were hunted with a mirror as a consequence of the observation that ‘a male cannot abide the presence of another’ and would immediately provoke a confrontation. A mirror would be hung from a string and the pheasant, convinced that what it was seeing in its reflection was one of its own kind, would attack the mirror, crashing into it and triggering the release of a cage which would then fall down and act as a trap. But if I am indeed to tell this story, I should also point out that it was precisely in the seventeenth century that aviaries ceased to be associated with falconry and that, instead, birds would be captured on a large scale no longer purely with the intention of killing them but for the pleasure of living alongside them and hearing their songs.⁸ This unprecedented enthusiasm for aviaries tended to focus on songbirds in particular – that is to say, in the vast majority of cases, territorial birds. This led to a spate of treatises describing their habits, their uses, the different ways of catching them and of keeping them alive. And I would no doubt need a great many more stories in order to consolidate this coincidence, to come up with other ways of linking these two events, to breathe life into a world I know little about but which – particularly in the context of this investigation – I have inherited. But if I am unable to do this, and if I must leave this coincidence as an open question, I can still be grateful for the fact that this process encourages me to be vigilant: ‘territory’ is by no means an innocent term, and I must not allow myself to lose sight of the violent forms of appropriation and of the destruction which has been associated with some of its current manifestations. It is a term which could bring in its wake certain habits of thinking as impoverished as the multiple uses which had characterized the reality of inhabiting and sharing the earth from the seventeenth century onwards.

Caution is therefore required. And curiosity. I have of course come across some examples of terms which are at the very least ambiguous, such as the fact that a male ‘claims’ a space, that he establishes ‘possession’ or that hummingbirds defend a ‘private hunting ground’. The fact that, in the context of territorial behaviour, aggressivity should be so prevalent and apparently so specific has also attracted a certain type of attention, particularly since observers, associating it with the usual patterns of competition, have tended to interpret it quite literally, emphasizing its aversive effect. The words used by some ornithologists to describe specific behaviours speak volumes: conflicts, combats, challenges, disputes, attacks, chases, patrols, territorial defence, headquarters (frequently used in reference to the central point of the territory from which the bird sings), war paint (to describe the colours of territorial birds) … But, at a very early stage, certain ornithologists challenged these terminological practices, not because they anthropomorphize birds but because they tend to focus attention on competitive and aggressive behaviour associated with territorialization, to the detriment of other dimensions which seemed to them of crucial importance.

That apart, as I was to discover in the course of my investigation, few ornithologists favour an approach based on ‘ownership’. The majority would prefer the definition proposed in 1939 by the American zoologist Gladwyn Kingsley Noble, ‘Territory is any defended area.’ This at least had the merit of being a relatively simple one, capable of describing almost all territorial situations. Depending on the various theories, a variety of functions would also be identified: a site can be defended in order to ensure subsistence, to protect birds from interference during the reproductive period, to provide a ‘stage’ for ‘promotion’ (a term encompassing all forms of exhibition, displays and songs), to ensure exclusive rights over a female or guarantee the stability of the same meeting place from one year to another, along with various other functions which will be examined in chapter 2. Very quickly, ornithologists realized that there was no one single way of establishing a territory but instead multiple forms of territorialization. This definition of an ‘actively defended area’ would be subject to a great many nuances as more discoveries on the subject came to light and as the multiplicity of different ways of becoming territorial were revealed. The boundaries would turn out to be far more flexible, negotiable and porous than early observations might have indicated, and, surprisingly perhaps, certain researchers would reach the conclusion that, for many birds, territories had other functions beyond simply that of protection against intrusion and ensuring exclusive use of a site. All of that will be examined in what follows.

Territory will therefore take on other meanings which extend well beyond the notion that it is simply a matter of property. Certain ornithologists were moreover at pains to point out that, when it comes to territory, what is said with reference to birds does not necessarily have the same meaning as humans would give to the term. Howard, for example, would emphasize that territory is above all a process, or rather, as he explains, part of a process involved in the reproduction cycle: ‘Regarded thus, we avoid the risk of conceiving of the act of securing a territory as a detached event in the life of a bird, and avoid, I hope, the risk of a conception based upon the meaning of the word when used to describe human as opposed to animal procedures.’⁹ A few pages further on, he would add that what he calls a disposition to secure a territory amounts to a disposition to remain in a particular place at a particular moment. And even the father of ethology, Konrad Lorenz, whose book On Aggression is certainly by no means exempt from questionable and insufficiently problematized analogies, was keen to distinguish between territory and property, pointing out that territory ‘must not be imagined as a property determined by geographical confines.’¹⁰ Territory, he adds, can also, in certain circumstances and for certain animals, be linked as much to time as it is to space. Thus, for example, cats establish what he calls ‘a definite timetable’: a given space is not divided but instead shared at different times. The cats leave scent marks at regular intervals. If a cat encounters one of these marks, it can assess whether it is fresh or a few hours old. In the first case the cat chooses a different route and in the second it continues calmly on its way. These marks, according to Lorenz, ‘act like railway signals whose aim is to prevent collision between two trains’.

Yet the cautious approach taken by Lorenz vis-à-vis possible misunderstandings (a caution which is very much relative since, on the same page, we will nonetheless be confronted with the notion of territory as a ‘headquarters’) is not quite as widely shared as might be suggested by what has so far been described. I have been referring to ornithologists, but they are not alone in taking an interest in animal territories. And that, as we say in colloquial terms, is where things take a turn for the worse.¹¹

So, for example, in the historical inventory drawn up by the ornithologist Margaret Nice, I find a quotation from Walter Heape, who writes, in a book on emigration, immigration and nomadism published at the end of the 1920s, that

territorial rights are established rights among the majority of species of animals. There can be no doubt that the desire for acquisition of a definite territorial area, the determination to hold it by fighting if necessary, and the recognition of individual as well as of tribal territorial rights by others are dominant in all animals. In fact, it may be held that the recognition of territorial rights, one of the most significant attributes of civilisation, was not evolved by man, but has been an inherent factor in the life history of all animals.¹²

Need I point out that Heape is an embryologist and not an ornithologist? Should I also take into consideration information I discovered in probing a little deeper, notably the fact that he became famous for having successfully carried out, in 1890, the first transfer of embryos from an angora rabbit into the uterus of a female domestic rabbit (the Belgian hare), inseminated three hours earlier by a male of its own species? Does that have any bearing here? Could it be that the success of this transfer between two different types of creature (the two angora rabbits and the four little Belgian hares born as a result of the experiment are testimony to the success of the operation) might perhaps have encouraged Heape, like a form of authorization awarded to himself, to indulge in other types of transfer, without considering that these might involve risks of an entirely different nature, requiring very different precautions? In advancing such a hypothesis, I am, of course, guilty of exaggeration and, in a sense, am deliberately crossing boundaries myself, without due precaution, and in ways which may not always be in the best of taste. For it is not only a matter of style which is at stake in such analogies and comparisons, a matter of political or epistemological style, it is also a matter of taste. Isabelle Stengers proposes restoring Kant’s ‘sapere aude’, ‘dare to know’, to its original meaning, attributed to it by the Roman poet Horace: ‘Dare to taste.’ Learning to know something, she says, means learning to discriminate, learning to recognize what matters, learning how differences count, and learning all of that in the context of the encounter with all its attendant risks and consequences. In other words, it means connecting with the inherent plurality of what matters for these particular beings, the ones we are trying to get to know, and of what matters because of them. It is an art of consequences.¹³

It is precisely for this reason that I was filled with dismay on reading Michel Serres’ book Malfeasance.¹⁴ A sensation all the more acute because, until then, his efforts to ‘deterritorialize’ issues and concepts, to take them out of their fields of study and remove them from the temporalities in which they had been associated, represented a creative task which was at once daring and imaginative, teeming with connections, with translations, and with potentially rich and inventive relationships. Thus, in The Natural Contract,¹⁵ when he asks the question ‘What language do the things of the world speak, that we might come to an understanding with them, contractually?’, we are aware of the presence of an authentic network of analogies, which I would describe as generative, of analogies which enrich the terms of comparison, analogies which, through a series of interconnections, make us aware of qualities hitherto unperceived, and which are capable of reactivating an exchange of the forces of action, or agencies, between objects and living creatures. So is it with the earth, which, Serres tells us, speaks in terms of forces, of bonds and of interactions. In a later book, Darwin, Bonaparte et le Samaritain: une philosophie de l’histoire, Serres returns to this idea again, this time focusing more precisely on writing. Reading, he says, is not limited only to the codes of writing such as we normally understand it, and this is exemplified by good hunters, accustomed to reading, in the tracks left by wild boars, their age, gender, weight, size and a thousand other details: ‘The good hunter reads, having learned how to read. What does he decipher? A coded footprint. Yet this definition could equally well be applied to historic human writing itself.’¹⁶ Because, Serres goes on to say, writing is the line traced by all beings, living or non-living, all of whom write ‘on things and between them, the things of the world one on top of the other’. The ocean writes on the rocky cliff, bacteria write on our bodies, everything – fossils, erosions, strata, the glow of galaxies, the crystallization of volcanic rocks – is there to be read. We could read before we could write, and this possibility opens writing to a great many other registers, like ‘an ensemble of traces which encode a meaning’. ‘If history begins with writing, then all the sciences enter, along with the world, a new history, one which does not forget.’ Of course, these are daring juxtapositions on the part of Serres, interpretations which link what seemed destined to remain unlinked – if only because human exceptionalism keeps a careful watch over these separations of register. And this is precisely what Serres is interested in, this task of abandoning the sordid habit of placing the human at the centre of the world and of its stories, and instead opening history to myriads of beings which matter and without which we would not be here.

Malfeasance takes a very different subject, as is clear from the book’s subtitle: Appropriation through Pollution? From the very first pages, Serres turns his attention to territories: ‘Tigers piss on the edge of their lair. And so do lions and dogs. Like those carnivorous mammals, many animals, our cousins, mark their territory with their harsh, stinking urine or with their howling, while others such as finches and nightingales use sweet songs.’¹⁷ Such practices, according to Serres, are the ways in which the living inhabit a specific space, establish it and recognize it. These places are defined and protected by male excrement. All of them constitute different ways of appropriating, whether by men or by animals: ‘Whoever spits in the soup keeps it; no one will touch the salad or the cheese polluted in this way. To make something its own, the body knows how to leave some personal stain: sweat on a garment, saliva or feet put into a dish, waste in space, aroma, perfume, or excrement, all of them rather hard things …’¹⁸ Serres then observes that the verb ‘to have’, expressing possession, has the same origin in Latin as ‘to inhabit’. ‘From the mists of time’, he writes, ‘our languages echo the profound relationship between the nest and appropriation, between the living space and possession: I inhabit, therefore I have.’¹⁹ For Serres, the act of appropriating stems from ‘an animal origin that is ethological, bodily, psychological, organic, vital ….’ not from a convention or from some positive right: ‘I sense there’, he writes, ‘a collection of urine, blood, excretions, rotting corpses.’²⁰ I have indicated already that, in this context, Serres is no longer concerned with a fight against anthropocentrism and against this strange historical amnesia to anything which is not human. His mission in this case is to mount an attack on all forms of appropriation through pollution, whether air pollution, the invasion of visual or sound space to which we are submitted in the form of advertising, cars, machines … all of them just as filthy and polluting as the excrements used to signal appropriation. ‘You obtain and keep what is properly yours through dirt,’ he writes, or, even more explicitly, ‘The spit spoils the soup, the logo the object, the signature the page: property, propriety, or cleanliness. The same word tells of the same struggle; in French, it has the same origin and the same meaning. Property is marked, just as the footstep leaves its imprint.’²¹

But this is not the reason for my severity towards him – quite the contrary in fact. That Serres should want to make us aware of, and outraged by, all the various market-driven operations of expropriation and appropriation is not the issue here, and I very much share his opinion on that subject. However, the fact that, for him, garbage and marks, as soiling gestures, are of animal origin seems to me all the more seriously problematic in that the gesture of appropriation is, in his view, synonymous with that of disappropriation and exclusion.²² The equation is too hasty. For this connection can be made only at the cost of a double simplification, a double negligence. Firstly, because it means forgetting that, for a tiger, a dog or a nightingale, territory does not equate to this or, indeed, to any one ‘single’ thing which could claim to unify a certain combination of types of behaviour. And, secondly, because this definition of ownership as a process of monopolizing and taking over seems to me to define living in a territory in too facile and simplistic a manner. By advocating a form of naturality in terms of territorial behaviour as an argument to denounce the right assumed by some people to pollute the air, the acoustic environment, shared things and space, Serres, without pause for question, associates the territorial behaviour of animals with a regime of possession and ownership and, as a result, assimilates it to a form of natural rights. In short, he attributes a modern and unchallenged conception of ownership to animals, turning the latter into petty little bourgeois property owners preoccupied with claiming exclusive ownership.

For me, it is not about wanting to defend the violated dignity of these animals caught up in a project which sets out to defend a damaged earth or polluted existences. But if we are indeed to reflect on the reappropriation of the earth, I believe that it is important to pay attention to the different ways of inhabiting it and to those who inhabit it alongside us. With this oversimplified ethology we are off to a very bad start.

It should be pointed out first of all that it is highly questionable to associate animal markings with dirtiness and to regard the latter as somehow the opposite of cleanliness. It is us, or most of us, who see excrement as dirty, but for many animals things are much more complicated. Anyone who has watched their dog wallowing enthusiastically in a decaying carcase or rolling in animal droppings will immediately understand that, as far as smells are concerned, we inhabit completely different universes. Secondly, putting mammals and birds in the same category is not really a good idea. True, marking and singing appear to share a common function in that both are done in order to signal presence. But mammals and birds have very different problems to resolve when it comes to announcing their presence and any similarities should be approached with considerable caution. It makes little sense to refer simply to ‘animals’. If certain birds – though this is more unusual – can indeed mark their presence by their droppings, they generally tend to favour the use of song and of what might be called intense demonstrations of their physical presence. Mammals, for the most part, have opted simply to suggest their presence. For most birds, territory is a site for display and spectacle. It is the place which enables the bird to be both seen and heard. Indeed, it would be perfectly reasonable to wonder if in certain cases (in the case of leks, or mating grounds, this is indisputably how things stand) it is not so much in order to defend their territory that birds sing and perform their various displays as that the territory provides them with a stage for those songs and displays. Some ornithologists have indeed suggested this to be the case.

Clearly many mammals have a very different ambition and therefore correspond closely to Jean-Christophe Bailly’s proposed definition of territory as a place where it is possible to hide, or, more precisely, a place where animals know where to hide.²³ Songs and tracks or traces therefore already have only superficial similarities. It could be said that mammals are experts in the use of the metaphor in absentia – the tracks and traces suggest presence so that animals make their presence felt in their absence. For birds, on the other hand, having chosen the more literal choice of ‘Here I am’, everything is pretext for being seen and heard. One writer uses the term ‘broadcasting’ in reference to this process, a term which suggests dissemination, and this is clearly the case here, but one which also refers to advertising or promotion via the media (radio or television).²⁴ If the term ‘broadcasting’ can be applied to both birds and mammals, it would nevertheless be used somewhat differently in each case. In the case of birds, the focus would be very much on the notion of ‘promotion’, of advertising, whereas for mammals who mark their territory, it would refer to the fact that not only are the transmitter and the message in different locations, but that the transmitter is able to leave multiple indications of presence by making sure every trace or mark left behind continues to broadcast its presence. The deferred power of ubiquity through messages.

Mammals need to resolve a problem which is much less difficult for birds, notably that of being present everywhere. Birds have the advantage of a much greater mobility and are capable of flying over their territory rapidly from one point to another, which is not the case for mammals, particularly since the latter seek to remain hidden. The problem of movement in space – the ability, or inability, to be everywhere at once – and that of needing to be seen or to remain hidden have been resolved in each case through a different relationship between presence and time. Birds, with their songs and displays, are in a regime of physical presence, whereas mammals, with their marking activities, have adopted a regime of historical presence. The tracks left behind by a mammal continue to be effective over a relatively long time (in relation to its actual presence at the site), with the animal seemingly present everywhere at the same time even though in fact any actual presence occurred some while previously. Droppings might in this context be seen as a kind of decoy, in that they create the effect of a presence in absence. But it is a decoy that fails to deceive anybody (though that does not affect its efficacy), since each message conveys an element of ‘watch out!’, or ‘be careful!’ And the message finds its mark. The traces or tracks left by the animal are therefore part of this process referred to as ‘stigmergy’, or ‘non-local rules of interaction’ through which the behaviour of certain animals can – whether in space or in time – affect the behaviours of others at a distance – just as ants leave behind them the pheromones which will alter the route of those following on behind. It is a form of presence which creates certain modes of attention. Moreover, it is rather sad that Serres, who so appositely succeeded in using the argument of writing in its broadest sense to portray the traces and tracks left by animals as the astonishingly sophisticated mechanisms of writing, capable of conveying a wide range of qualities and messages, should fail to consider, or rather deliberately choose to forget, that the hunter is not the only one to read tracks, that animals do so constantly and undoubtedly read them much more often and more accurately than humans. Equally sad that he should also have reduced them to a single function: that of dirtying something in order to appropriate it.

There remains one further matter, to which I shall be returning later (since singing could be interpreted in a similar way): if the act of marking does indeed create the effects of presence in absentia, certain writers have suggested, notably with reference to the mountain goat or to certain animals in captivity, that marking also represents an extension of the animal’s body in space.²⁵ In this context, the term ‘appropriation’ takes on another meaning, since here it is a matter of transforming the chosen space not so much into something the animal ‘owns’, something which belongs to it, as into the animal ‘itself’. The distinction between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’ is even less clearly defined, in that many mammals not only mark locations and objects, but they also mark their own bodies with their own secretions, transferring these onto different parts of the body. More astonishing still, many of them also steep themselves in the smell of objects found within the area of the territory – soil, grass, rotting carcasses, tree bark. The animal then becomes appropriated both by and into the space which it appropriates as its own by marking it, thus creating a physical bond with that place which renders the ‘self’ and the ‘non-self’ indistinguishable.

It is clear that what we are looking at here is something much more complicated than the simple regime of appropriation described by Serres, and if I were to continue the list of such differences, interspersed with a few partial resemblances, it would be almost endless. But what I am trying to emphasize here is the fact that, when it comes to territories and what we can learn from them, there is no such thing as an ‘all-purpose’ approach that can be applied to every situation. Moving from one territory to another – whether it be that of a particular animal which is the focus of researchers’ interest or that of scientific methods – cannot be undertaken just like that, without due precautions, without paying attention to the incredible diversity of modes of being which territories have helped to create. And this is also why I am keen to stress that certain ornithologists – not all of them, certainly, and we shall be returning to this later – very quickly understood that territories could not easily be encompassed by one general theory. In 1956, moreover, in his introduction to a special edition of the journal Ibis which was dedicated to territories, the British zoologist Robert Hinde wrote that ‘the diversity of nature can never fit into a system of compartments and categories.’²⁶ Categories, he added, are only there to help us in our discussions. They are all the more questionable given that, within the same species, in the course of the same period of time, we can find very different practices, simultaneously or in sequence, and, in other species, we might observe practices which vary according to age, sex, habitat or population density.

All this is no coincidence. From the very beginning, ornithologists were brought face to face with the diversity of species and very quickly developed a comparative approach which rendered them attentive to the plurality of different organizational structures.²⁷ Comparative approaches require, and encourage, a genuine culture of tact, a heightened attention to differences and to specificities, and a concern for what matters. It is a culture that many of them – not all, but those who turn out to be the most interesting – have learned to respect.

But it is, moreover, equally possible that something is happening in relation to territorial behaviour, a behaviour which, as I pointed out, left researchers astonished and moved. Very often birds demonstrate such vitality, such power of determination, such an outpouring of energy, in fact seem so utterly ‘possessed’ by what they are in the process of defending, that it would not be unreasonable to assert that researchers have themselves been touched by the sense of something which was truly important! And that this importance mattered.