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Paper short abstract

The Eastern flyway moves migratory birds along a route from Eastern Europe to Eastern Africa. This paper explores struggles around the meaning and nature of expertise as shaped by continuities and fractures between human borders, uncertain and precarious data, and the wayfaring of migrant birds.

Paper long abstract

The Eastern Flyway--stretching from Northern and Eastern Europe through the Balkans, East Mediteranean to East Africa--is a landscape of intense multispecies mobility affected by borders, climate change, agricultural expansion, energy infrastructure projects, and the aftermath of war. While the Western Flyway is mapped through a robust, well funded, and integrated knowledge infrastructure, the Eastern route remains an epistemic blind spot, where human understanding is as fragmented and precarious as the habitats it crosses.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with biologists along the flyway (with a focus on Romania), this paper explores how environmental expertise is negotiated under conditions of data precarity. I organize my argument around several sets of contrasts. First, the scalar clash between the vastness of avian migration and the puncturing methology of scientific knowledge, relying on small scientific projects (bird ringing and tracking), hunter-collected rings, citizen science, and industry-mandated monitoring. Second, between the localized, partial knowledge of biologists and, drawing on Tim Ingold’s concept of wayfaring, the lived and diffused intelligence of the migrant birds. And third, between the uneven distribution of research resources and attention between the West and the East (both European and African).

I show how these contrasts and fractures shape what natures are deemed worthy of protection. I argue for an ethics of conservation that makes room for both human data precarity and uncertainty and the continuous, lived expertise of the migrant birds.