‘territory’, with its very strong connotation of ‘the taking over of an exclusive area or property’, first appears in ornithological literature in the seventeenth century – in other words, at the very moment when, according to Philippe Descola and a great many legal historians, the Moderns reduced the use of land to a single concept, that of appropriation.4 Descola emphasizes that this conception is now so widely accepted that it would be very difficult to abandon it. In short, this notion first took shape under the influence of Grotius and the concept of natural law,5 although it is in fact rooted in sixteenth-century theology. It redefines the right of ownership as an individual right and is based in part on the idea of a contract which redefines humans as individuals and not as social beings (the ‘ownership’ of Roman law came about as the result of a process of sharing and not of an individual act, a sharing sanctioned by the law, the customs and the courts). In addition, it drew both on new techniques for evaluating land, which meant that any land would be delineated and its possession assured, and on a philosophical theory of the subject, that of possessive individualism, which reconfigures political society as a mechanism for the protection of individual property. We are all too aware of the dramatic consequences of this new conception of ownership, of those it favoured and of those whose lives were destroyed as a result. We are familiar with the history of enclosure, the expulsion of peasant communities from land over which they had previously exercised commoners’ rights and the ban which prevented them from taking from the forests the resources essential to their survival. With this new conception of ownership came the eradication of what is generally referred to today as the ‘commons’ and which represented land given over to the collective, coordinated and self-organized use of shared resources, such as irrigation ditches, common grazing grounds and forests6 … In England, writes Karl Polanyi, ‘in 1600, half of the kingdom’s arable land was still in communal use. By 1750, that figure had fallen to only a quarter and amounted to almost none at all in 1840.’7 Of the many different ways of inhabiting and sharing the land which had been invented and cultivated over the course of centuries, all that would remain would be the right of ownership, admittedly sometimes limited, but always defined as an exclusive right to use, and indeed abuse.
Returning to birds, to nightingales and to robins, I am not however entirely convinced that very much can be learned from this historical coincidence. That would be going rather too fast. It would mean, for example, neglecting the fact that the term ‘territory’ was not used in a random way with reference to animals but only in the description of the methods used to confine birds within aviaries, methods involving appropriation admittedly, and which involved the uses of cages and confinement but also methods intended to deterritorialize birds in order to have them live ‘with us’, in what constitutes ‘our’ territories. If I am to use this coincidence as a starting point from which to explore the story of territory, should I not also point out that the aviary originates from the desire to protect harvests from birds? And, at the same time, should I not emphasize that, as a result, it was linked to the art of hunting and falconry, an art that required cunning and an intimate knowledge of the habits of the various birds? Thus, for example, in the fourteenth century, pheasants were hunted with a mirror as a consequence of the observation that ‘a male cannot abide the presence of another’ and would immediately provoke a confrontation. A mirror would be hung from a string and the pheasant, convinced that what it was seeing in its reflection was one of its own kind, would attack the mirror, crashing into it and triggering the release of a cage which would then fall down and act as a trap. But if I am indeed to tell this story, I should also point out that it was precisely in the seventeenth century that aviaries ceased to be associated with falconry and that, instead, birds would be captured on a large scale no longer purely with the intention of killing them but for the pleasure of living alongside them and hearing their songs.8 This unprecedented enthusiasm for aviaries tended to focus on songbirds in particular – that is to say, in the vast majority of cases, territorial birds. This led to a spate of treatises describing their habits, their uses, the different ways of catching them and of keeping them alive. And I would no doubt need a great many more stories in order to consolidate this coincidence, to come up with other ways of linking these two events, to breathe life into a world I know little about but which – particularly in the context of this investigation – I have inherited. But if I am unable to do this, and if I must leave this coincidence as an open question, I can still be grateful for the fact that this process encourages me to be vigilant: ‘territory’ is by no means an innocent term, and I must not allow myself to lose sight of the violent forms of appropriation and of the destruction which has been associated with some of its current manifestations. It is a term which could bring in its wake certain habits of thinking as impoverished as the multiple uses which had characterized the reality of inhabiting and sharing the earth from the seventeenth century onwards.
Caution is therefore required. And curiosity. I have of course come across some examples of terms which are at the very least ambiguous, such as the fact that a male ‘claims’ a space, that he establishes ‘possession’ or that hummingbirds defend a ‘private hunting ground’. The fact that, in the context of territorial behaviour, aggressivity should be so prevalent and apparently so specific has also attracted a certain type of attention, particularly since observers, associating it with the usual patterns of competition, have tended to interpret it quite literally, emphasizing its aversive effect. The words used by some ornithologists to describe specific behaviours speak volumes: conflicts, combats, challenges, disputes, attacks, chases, patrols, territorial defence, headquarters (frequently used in reference to the central point of the territory from which the bird sings), war paint (to describe the colours of territorial birds) … But, at a very early stage, certain ornithologists challenged these terminological practices, not because they anthropomorphize birds but because they tend to focus attention on competitive and aggressive behaviour associated with territorialization, to the detriment of other dimensions which seemed to them of crucial importance.
That apart, as I was to discover in the course of my investigation, few ornithologists favour an approach based on ‘ownership’. The majority would prefer the definition proposed in 1939 by the American zoologist Gladwyn Kingsley Noble, ‘Territory is any defended area.’ This at least had the merit of being a relatively simple one, capable of describing almost all territorial situations. Depending on the various theories, a variety of functions would also be identified: a site can be defended in order to ensure subsistence, to protect birds from interference during the reproductive period, to provide a ‘stage’ for ‘promotion’ (a term encompassing all forms of exhibition, displays and songs), to ensure exclusive rights over a female or guarantee the stability of the same meeting place from one year to another, along with various other functions which will be examined in chapter 2. Very quickly, ornithologists realized that there was no one single way of establishing a territory but instead multiple forms of territorialization. This definition of an ‘actively defended area’ would be subject to a great many nuances as more discoveries on the subject came to light and as the multiplicity of different ways of becoming territorial were revealed. The boundaries would turn out to be far more flexible, negotiable and porous than early observations might have indicated, and, surprisingly perhaps, certain researchers would reach the conclusion that, for many birds, territories had other functions beyond simply that of protection against intrusion and ensuring exclusive use of a site. All of that will be examined in what follows.
Territory will therefore take on other meanings which extend well beyond the notion that it is simply a matter of property. Certain ornithologists were moreover at pains to point out that, when it comes to territory, what is said with reference to birds does not necessarily have the same meaning as humans would give to the term. Howard, for example, would emphasize that territory is above all a process, or rather, as he explains, part of a process involved in the reproduction cycle: ‘Regarded thus, we avoid the risk of conceiving of the act of securing a territory as a detached event in the life of a bird, and avoid, I hope, the risk of a conception based upon the meaning of the word when used to describe human as opposed to animal procedures.’9 A few pages further on, he would add that what he calls a disposition to secure a territory amounts to a disposition to remain in a particular place at a particular moment. And even the father of ethology, Konrad
