The digital peregrine: A technonatural history of a cosmopolitan raptor

Abstract

Humans, non-human animals, and technologies are increasingly entangled.Using the peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) as an illustrative example, we propose 'technonatural history' as a theoretical and methodological approach for observing, describing, and examining the role technologies play in shaping human relations with other species. After nearing extinction in the 20th century, peregrines have become woven into the fabric of everyday urban life and are a frequently sighted urban raptor in the UK, nesting on high-rise buildings and church spires since the late 1990s. Their unexpected presence in cities symbolises hope for multispecies conviviality amid the contemporary ecological crisis.As their populations resurged, crucially, webcam and livestreaming technologies developed rapidly. Peregrines were one of the first animals to be broadcast over the internet via 'nestcams', granting broad publics access to their intimate lives.We examine the related technological histories of livestreaming technologies and natural histories of peregrine falcons in the UK, tracing the emergence of 'the digital peregrine' and its manifold implications for more-than-human and digital geographies. To do so, we build on oral history interviews with people associated with digital peregrines throughout the UK: nestcam technicians, peregrine conservationists, professional ecologists, activists, and citizen scientists. While digitisation brings broad publics closer to these cosmopolitan raptors, they can only ever grasp at the wildness of peregrine falcons and their wider milieus as the digital peregrine is a distinct entity, encountered via its own set of affects and affordances. In the peregrine's case, digital technologies create unexpected and radical opportunities for urban conviviality, signalling the positive potentials technologies host for forging meaningful more-than-human connections.

Digital ecologies: Materialities, encounters, governance

“…Emerging digital technologies have the capacity to produce on-screen encounters with otherwise un-encounterable aspects of nonhuman life. Through a case study of peregrine falcon 'nestcams', Searle et al (2022) detail how digital encounters allowed for previously unachievable observations that generated insights fundamentally reshaping understandings of peregrine ethology (see also Kettel et al 2016). Similarly, Crickette Sanz and colleagues have used digital camera traps to observe wild chimpanzees without relying on human habituation to study their behaviour 'in the wild' (Musgrave et al 2016).…”

“…The zoo believed the eels' health and sociability would be improved through these digital encounters. Contrary to the risks of poaching just identified, civilians have also become watchdogs of the security and well-being of wild animals on livestreams, alerting authorities to risks of poaching or urging intervention in the case of harm (Pschera 2016;Searle et al 2022). Digital encounters thus take a range of both care-full and harmful forms.…”

Anthropause environmentalisms: Noticing natures with the Self‐Isolating Bird Club

“…This work suggests that such accounts might be tempered and nuanced by an attention to the actual application of such technologies and how they are experienced by their users (see also Fletcher, 2017aFletcher, , 2017b. In spite of confident assertions, such work is thin on the ground (e.g., Chambers, 2007;Searle et al, 2022;Silk et al, 2021) and empirical research is required to understand how digitisation transforms subjective experiences of nature (e.g., Arts et al, 2021;Gabrys, 2019). This paper offers one such empirical account, flagging how digital technologies are fundamentally constitutive of anthropause environmentalisms in ways that confound simple narratives of digital pathology and Cartesian maps of movement.…”

Care for Transactions

“…A third area for further engagement relates to digital geographies. These include concern for how the digital is remapping human and non‐human relations as well as digital maps themselves, with a growing interest in digital natures, digital ecologies, digital cities, digital geopolitics and even digital territory (Datta, 2018; Morris, 2022; Prebble et al, 2021; Searle et al, 2023; Smith et al, 2020; Woods, 2021; Zook & Graham, 2018). While smart urbanism and associated forms of platform capitalism continue to highlight the interdependencies of code/space, scholarship on digital geographies is also documenting spatial inequities within these interdependencies at multiple scales and in particular places, ranging from the platforms of online education and debt relations to the embodied experience of tech‐enabled home care (House‐Peters et al, 2019; Reid, 2022; Roos‐Breines et al, 2019: Sparke, 2017; Tan, 2022).…”