Newsworthy Nature: Capturing Exotic Birds in Buffon’s France

Abstract

Abstract: Today, with the effects of climate change and the information revolution, nature is viewed as especially newsworthy. However, news about nature has a deeper history. An important precedent was Buffon’s popular ornithological project (1770s–80s). In its wake, the kingdom of France experienced an avalanche of newspaper reports on birds and public displays of reportedly exotic and rare birds found by amateurs. Though initially a top-down endeavor of knowledge production, Buffon’s project incited a burgeoning reading public to transform themselves from passive recipients of data about the natural world into active amateur scientists producing, perhaps for the first time, a network of actors who crowd-sourced knowledge about a natural species that was at once ubiquitous and in continuous motion. Compassing the global universe of birds was both an effect of, and a captivating metaphor for, the acceleration of social mobility and transnational networking in late eighteenth-century France.