Paper short abstract:

Bird ringing is a kind of embodied attentiveness that sits between the expectation of conformity and repetition and the confusion of an unmediated multisensory encounter. The paper reflects on what this practice can mean in the context of an ethnographic encounter with non-human subjects.

Paper long abstract:

Bird ringing is an intimate bodily experience for all involved. For bird ringers, it is a kind of embodied attentiveness that sits between the expectation of conformity and repetition and the confusion of an unmediated multisensory encounter. Bird ringers touch, caress, stretch, hold, breathe and blow on birds and feathers, divinate all kinds of information, and wrestle with the very existence of categories that are supposed to put order in these experiences. What is a species? How do you read age, sex, the life history, population or geographical belonging? And if that is not enough, how such an intersubjective human-non human experience can be learned, communicated, calibrated so that it becomes more than a punctual encounter and is turned into what we call science? What to make of the traces—material but not only—left on the bodies of these captive creatures that pass through their hands? After four years of handling birds and almost two of being a bird ringer in training in several different contexts, and using interviews and discussions with bird ringers in Romania, I reflect on what these experiences can mean in the context of an ethnographic encounter with non-human subjects.