William Brewster and the Poetics of the Avifauna

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.

The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting CSWR scholars and their research.

Few figures in ornithology loom as large as John James Audubon (1785-1851). His grand opus, Birds of America, encapsulated a moment of intense ambition and contradiction. His endeavor was as expansive as the American landscapes he traversed, and yet paradoxically, he killed hundreds of thousands of birds to capture their vivacity for posterity—a dominion that both celebrated and consumed. The National Audubon Society is now synonymous with nature conservation, but this reputation belies the invisible violence embedded in his famed drawings and scientific practices. 

Yet, woven into the history of North American ornithology is another story—a story of attunement and kinship with the more-than-human worlds. William Brewster (1851-1919), born the year of Audubon’s death, was a pivotal yet understated self-taught ornithologist who reimagined the scientific practices of his time. His meticulous observations of bird behavior, songs, habitats, population changes, and migration anticipate a future where knowledge-making becomes an act of caring for and listening to the world, resonating with today’s reemerging sensibilities of environmental kinship. 

Co-founder of the Nuttall Ornithological Club and the American Ornithologists’ Union, first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), Brewster started his ornithological journey as a careful collector, amassing a private collection of over 40,000 bird specimens, including nests and eggs. Brewster treated the specimens he collected with care, regarding them as objects of scientific study and aesthetic admiration.

Brewster eventually rejected killing birds, finding it a “most painful task.” Instead, he documented birds in natural settings through photography and field glasses (binoculars). Likewise, responding to urbanization and the plume trade that claimed millions of birds to supply women’s apparel, he advocated for nature conservation. Before birdwatching was a popular pastime, he established some of the first bird sanctuaries in his garden in Cambridge and his “open-air laboratory” in Concord.

Brewster’s sensory-rich descriptions of bird vocalizations challenged predominant visual biases in nineteenth-century science. While Audubon pictorially captured avifauna, Brewster filled his journals with notes on the soundscapes of the American wilderness, radically realigning his scientific practices toward ethical field observation and multispecies becoming the emergence of new relations from intertwined agencies and symbiotic attachment. By inscribing in his journals the ambient textures and rhythms experienced by his sensorium, Brewster’s records engender what Salomé Voegelin terms “geographies of sound”that resist conventional mapping, highlighting the dynamic and undulating nature of environments. Brewster’s embodied and situated attunement anticipates contemporary ontological shifts that displace anthropocentric narratives to accommodate more-than-human perspectives.

The modern notion of scientific objectivity arose simultaneously with the advent of photography—the photograph was the quintessential symbol of noninterventionist objectivity. Brewster utilized photography to provide visual evidence that complemented his written accounts of birds and their habitats. Brewster and his assistants spent hours, even days, preparing to photograph avian subjects in the field. 

In the framework of evolving paradigms of scientific objectivity, Audubon adhered to what Daston and Galison term the “truth-to-nature” approach: a vision of objectivity seeking to extract a universal truth (the type) by selecting ideal specimens for his drawings. Brewster’s photographic practice probed and challenged “mechanical objectivity”—a detached, self-effacing form of scientific observation. His methods for setting scenes in the field, including tying birds to prevent escape, projecting light, and camouflaging equipment, reveal a complex interaction with his avian subjects. Brewster’s pioneering techniques demonstrate an inherent tension between the desire to leave wildlife intact and the primal enactment of the hunt, an epistemological drive to apprehend, understand, possess, and control. 

Brewster’s photographs transcend mere documentation to become active dialogues with the environment. Each photograph is a testament not only to the photographer’s objectivity but also to the dynamic and embodied interaction of Brewster’s perceptual world. Through the reciprocal technologies of writing and photography, dynamic narratives inscribing biographies of birds and landscapes and mapping shared experiences and intertwined temporalities come to life.

Brewster’s work anticipates and resonates with contemporary sensibilities responding to the Anthropocene, a contested yet irresistible term to describe our species’ footprints on the earth. We are positioned at existential, ontological, and environmental crossroads and faced with alarming biodiversity crises, and we must acknowledge our mutual entanglement and interdependence with the biotic world.

Audubon’s efforts to “accurately” document species visually and scientifically may have established ornithology as a legitimate scientific discipline, but Brewster shifted ornithology from solely collecting specimens toward ethical practices of field observation and documentation. Many species Brewster documented are now endangered or extinct. His work challenges us to recognize that extinction is a multispecies event, to foreground listening, and to honor the vibrations that weave through the interspecies worlds. Alongside acknowledging the role of human actors in geological transformations and environmental apocalypse, his legacy urges us to explore the importance of multispecies cohabitation and how we might think beyond the limits of the human and develop politics that include the nonhuman too.