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Paper short abstract

This paper presents an ethnography of a northern lapwing conservation project in Austrian farmland to suggest that it holds lessons for multispecies analysis in STS. How diverse actors attempt to think like a lapwing may provide insight into the complexity of analytically accounting for nonhumans.

Paper long abstract

The northern lapwing (Vanellus Vanellus) is one among many inhabitants of European farmland that have experienced considerable population decline over the past decades. To help this bird and other species recover, conservationists have attempted to establish ways of preserving lapwings and (especially) their nests within agricultural practice. These include interventions such as marking nests or leaving breeding patches on fields uncultivated. Many of these measures are supported by subsidies to compensate farmers for any income lost to conservation work.

On the basis of an ethnography of one such conservation effort, a project for farmers to support lapwings in designated regions in Austria, I will suggest that conservation practices in farmland may hold lessons for multispecies analysis in STS. Moving beyond the idea, often implicitly held in STS, that biological scientists can serve as primary spokespersons for non-humans, my ethnography suggests that the diverse range of actors involved in conservation practice – including not only scientists, but also e.g. farmers and subsidy schemes for biodiversity in agriculture, contain particular, sometimes divergent, interpretations of how lapwings think and why thy act as they do. Thus, subsidy schemes may materialize the value of certain amendments to common agricultural practice by offering specific amounts of money to compensate for, say, late mowing, while farmers may wonder about the birds’ preference to breed on fields with certain crops. By combining different human interpretations of lapwing thinking, I suggests, these various interventions can jointly suggest a way forward for thinking like non-humans in STS work.