Kirsten A. Greer. Red Coats and Wild Birds: How Military Ornithologists and Migrant Birds Shaped Empire

Abstract

In Red Coats and Wild Birds, Kirsten Greer examines the motivations, practices, and consequences—for science, for empire, for masculinity—of nineteenth-century officer-ornithologists in the British army. Tracing the migratory paths of bird-watching lieutenants, ordnance officers, and military surgeons from their training grounds in the United Kingdom, to imperial way-stations in the Mediterranean (Malta and Gibraltar), to further-flung corners of the Empire (Crimea, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Tunisia, India), and back, Greer elucidates how the study of ornithology centered both the self-fashioning of British military masculinity and the production of geographical knowledge of the British Empire. The connection between the study of birds and military training, combat, and careering may not be immediately apparent to a modern reader, but ornithology constitutes a long and venerable tradition in the British military. By the nineteenth century—Greer’s period of study—participants had amassed an impressive “avian imperial archive” (12, 21) composed of diaries, journals, notes,...