Woodpecker Economics: Bird Adaptation, Technology, and American Economic Ornithology, c. 1880–1940

Abstract

The spread of communications infrastructure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a profound effect on birdlife. Telegraph and telephone wires killed hundreds of thousands of birds in the United States every year and disrupted migration routes, while the logging of trees to produce utility poles contributed to deforestation and habitat loss. But birds were not just passive victims of changes in the built environment; they also adapted, using wires and poles as perches and, in the case of woodpeckers, turning utility poles into surrogate trees. My paper demonstrates how woodpeckers’ adaptation to communications infrastructure undermined the predominant mode of bird science in the late nineteenth century: economic ornithology. Economic ornithology rested on a view of a balanced and static nature in which every species had an assigned role. Practitioners of the science believed they could situate birds within the economy of nature from the laboratory, by analyzing stomach contents. But this science was unable to account for the diversity of bird behavior, its unevenness across space, and birds' ingenuity in response to changes in the built environment. Furthermore, through adapting telecommunications infrastructure to their own purposes, woodpeckers disrupted the nature/technology binary upon which economic ornithology was based. Using scientific and trade journals and the papers of the Biological Survey's Chief of Food Habits Research, my paper argues that woodpeckers’ adaptive behavior revealed the inadequacy of economic ornithology and stomach content analysis as ways of knowing nature. It foregrounds animal intelligence as an important, and overlooked, historical variable.