“A Super Wild Story”: Shared Human–Pigeon Lives and the Questions They Beg

Origins: #pigeons

My family runs a small wildlife rehabilitation shelter at our home. Our patients are mostly birds. I once ended up sharing my home with a pigeon I had hand-reared as an orphaned nestling and who—through accidental events—became too habituated to leave us. As a consequence, I came to know people around the world in person and through social media who share their lives with pigeons and other wild birds for various serendipitous reasons. I am fascinated by these multispecies lives and have a particular interest in their unique productivity as indicated in Instagram images’ rhythmic hashtags as well as processes of surrogate pregnancy and motherhood. I have unexpectedly lost my #unlikelyfriend, and the personal motivation of this article is to explore what happened during our shared lives such that I came to mourn a pigeon so intensely.

This fascination for human–pigeon lives arises from the observation that the currently available conceptualization of shared human–nonhuman lives in wildlife rehabilitation and ethological fieldwork—habituation—does not address productivity. On the contrary, habituation refers to an individual’s largely automated process of adjusting to a new situation or environment to the point that the individuals—even if from different species—become almost invisible, no longer different. The end result of habituation is thus erasure of difference and resuming business-as-usual: indifference. The three human–pigeon lives I have studied for this article, one of them my own, are, however, productive, complex, and affectionate because of differences. And they keep being so. Thus, habituation cannot be an adequate answer to these shared human–nonhuman lives. Something else is going on.

First, I describe what I consider concepts to be and how I use them as methods in this study. Next, I briefly return to habituation before embarking on a mission to find what else is going on in the human–pigeon relation using a similar yet crucially different concept that guides this project, the refrain.

In this work, I am indebted to discussions and ongoing work with Margaret Somerville (e.g., Somerville, Rautio, & Taylor, 2013) who suggests that concepts can be thought of as answers to questions posed by the world. Concepts are answers insomuch as they are certain ways of thinking about and acting within the world—always excluding other ways. In living and working with answers, as we do, it is easy to forget the original questions: What did the world ask of us, and could there be other possible answers?

In some cases, we have grown accustomed to the answers, the conceptualizations, to the extent that the original questions are no longer easily available. For example, having grown up and been educated generation after generation in a Nordic welfare context of postenlightenment era anthropocentrism and natural scientific rationality (Snaza et al., 2014), I tend to fall back on the concepts of human and animal even if I am now convinced that these are not the only possible answers to the questions that distinguish animate life on Earth. ¹ To envisage new answers to the question of animate life on Earth is to overcome decades of sedimented ontologies—settled ideas, lived constructs, and understandings of what it is to be human.

Getting back to the questions the world is posing to us is an act of deconstructive responsibility. The more sedimented the answers have become, the more effort we need to put into deconstruction. Methodologically, this requires conceptual work, for we have nothing to begin with except the answers—the existing concepts, the existing orientations for thinking. It might be helpful to think that we could follow the practice of the television game show, “Jeopardy,” and work from the answers to the questions.

In this article, there are two main concepts or answers at work in their respective ways. As I explained earlier, habituation is an established and widely used concept or answer that explains what goes on when species meet. ² Through exploring human–pigeon lives, however, it has become clear to me that habituation is not the only possible answer, that something else is also going on that it cannot explain. Enter the second concept, refrain, which is essentially different and will therefore function as the main method for getting to the questions the world asks from us.

At the risk of providing the dreaded step-by-step linear and mechanical directions of how to use a concept as a method, I will, for the sake of clarity, outline my use of concepts as methods in three broad steps. The first step is to determine toward what the answer habituation orients our thinking and being. The second step is to find a similar answer (or many)—in this case, the refrain—to the same situation which orients our thinking in a different way. The third and final step is to use the different answer to get to a different question that might change the nature of the phenomenon studied, to find other answers that relate to it, and to ask how those answers change how we can perceive, think, and feel about the phenomena we study in ways we could not have, prior to using this answer, and finally, because we don’t know the question at the beginning because conventional answers have overshadowed it, our objective is to find/formulate questions—even if tiny or fragmentary—to which no existing answers (concepts) fit, which then compels us to keep producing new (ever failing) answers.

Andrew Pickering (2005) offers a helpful example of this kind of work by contrasting the painting processes of Mondrian and De Kooning. In the case of Mondrian, the desired result is known beforehand and so dictates the methods to be used in the composition of the painting. In De Kooning’s work, however, the result is not known at the beginning, and the method is invented and evolves throughout the process. It is only when the piece is finished that De Kooning can say “This is what I was after.”

De Kooning’s method was to smear thick patches of paint onto the canvas and move them around, into and over one another, with brushes, knives, probably fingers. Then he would look at the result, trying to find beautiful and complex configurations. Then he would add some more paint and smear it around again, trying to improve on what he first saw. And so on. And often he arrived eventually at wonderful paintings, the contents of which, I want to emphasize, would have been totally unimaginable in advance. (p. 41)

Cora Diamond (2000) offers another example of the relation of questions and answers, asking us to think about riddles. There’s an absurd question such as “What time is it on the sun?” in which the identities of the pieces (words) in the question do not tell us what to do with the question. Even so, we might try to answer the riddle. What Diamond suggests is that it is possible for us to identify an answer without understanding the question.

One of the examples I used in that riddle paper was from the upbringing of my niece, when she was eighteen months or so, when my sister told her, “kiss your elbow.” She struggled to do it—but it was clear what she was meant to do. And there the identity of the words kiss and elbow, which you’re already familiar with, tell you what you’re meant to do, only you can’t do it. And then my sister said, “kiss your ear.” Now what my niece did was kiss her hand and put it to her ear. There the identity of the piece does not tell her at all how to interpret the command. And so she invents a solution to the riddle. (p. 70)

Working with concepts as methods in the way De Kooning does is using concepts in an exploratory, evolving, intuitive, and associative way—not knowing where they’ll take us. Working with concepts as methods in the way Diamond does is realizing that the identities of words (concepts) refer to particular language games—to other answers—and if we are to go beyond existing answers, we perhaps need to treat the task at hand as a riddle and the answers/concepts we have as invitations to play and experiment. The world is throwing riddles at us. We do not know beforehand whether the riddle is an accidental reference, a pigeon, or years worth of philosophy scholarship that will enable us able to play—to experiment and use concepts playfully.

The Square One: # …

The concept habituation originates from Aristotle’s (1985) moral education but is widely used today as a neuropsychological term in studies of humans and other animals referring to an individual’s largely automated process of adjusting to a new situation or an environment (e.g., Cohen, 2004). In both of its uses—as a philosophical concept and as a neuropsychological concept—it describes similar processes. As a form of moral education, habituation refers to internalizing virtues through repeated opportunities to exercise those virtues, and the desired outcome is almost automatic virtuous behavior (Kerr, 2011; cf. Steutel & Spiecker, 2004). As a neuropsychological and ethological concept, habituation refers to a mechanistic normalization process which results in virtual blindness or disregard of the other (a situation or an individual; Candea, 2010; Martin & Bateson, 2007). Habituation seems to function as a concept that describes and directs attention to processes of normalization, accustomation, and the resulting smoothing over of differences. In existing conceptualizations of shared human–animal lives (excluding conventional pets or companion animals), habituation is used to explain a process through which one species becomes accustomed to another’s presence, usually a nonhuman animal to a human animal (Candea, 2010; Clay, Bloomsmith, Marr, & Maple, 2009), but it also extends to explaining general processes of accustomation of species such as hamsters (Johnston, 1993) or even flatworms (Owren & Scheuneman, 1993).

I have studied three human–pigeon lives through personal correspondence and related posts on three Instagram accounts that include hundreds of images with captions, hashtags, and commentaries. Most of the material used in this article is accessible publicly online; however, I have nonetheless obtained permission from the people in question to portray their lives through their Instagram feeds in this article.

The human–animal relations described here don’t fit into existing categories. The pigeons living with the humans are not conventional companion animals (i.e., pets), livestock, zoo animals, wild animals, or laboratory animals. The humans living with the pigeons are not animal trainers, zoo keepers, veterinarians, laboratory personnel, or farmers. Trying to explain the accidental or sudden encounters and shared lives between unusual couplings of species using preexisting knowledge, habits, or directions just doesn’t work. These lives are made up as they are lived. And rather than smoothing over differences using habituation, the shared lives begin to produce something new, difference, and to give different life in unexpected, serendipitous ways. In this way, we learn that habituation is an insufficient answer and makes us wonder what it was that the world asked us in the first place.

Next, I introduce three human–nonhuman lives as I have come to access and know through the social media application Instagram, ³ personal correspondence, and my own experience. All three lives came into being accidentally.

The Concept: #ourhome #mylife #pigeonlife #aintnobodyfuckingwithmyclick

As I explained earlier, because habituation cannot account for the dynamic, affectionate, productive, and mutual nature of shared human–pigeon lives, I use the concept, refrain, to find my way to different questions. Rather than being mechanistic and anthropocentric, the refrain is an answer that directs attention to all that is dynamic, unpredictable, productive, and nonanthropocentric or nonindividualistic. I do not believe, however, that the concept, refrain, has been used in connection with research of human–animal relations. In what follows, the kind of answer that refrain is, is mapped through three cases of human–pigeon lives.

The ritournelle (refrain) is a concept created by Gilles Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in their book, A Thousand Plateaus. Translated in English as refrain, it has been used most often in connection with music, particularly popular music (Bogue, 2007; Genosko, 2001), or art in general (Grosz, 2008). The refrain is a rhythmic operation creating order out of chaos. It territorializes, creates temporary configurations of diverse elements in sync, and then deterritorializes again, reconfiguring those elements (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Deterritorialization disrupts a given relational context, setting the stage for possible other configurations—new existential arrangements with new refrains (Schroeder, 2012). This is where #pigeonlife flies in—a serendipitous encounter that creates instant arythmia, a chaos, and demands a reterritorialization—a new existential arrangement, a new way of considering #mylife.

The refrain is not something that can be captured but something that links us, our bodies, to things that surround us (Murphy, 2001). As a rhythmic operation, the refrain and the territory it denotes not only exceed individual bodies but precede them as primordial (Schroeder, 2012). Refrains can be thought to emerge when enough bodies are in the same rhythm and begin to produce familiar repetitions.

The rhythms of the body and the rhythms of the world are the conditions of the refrain, and their force is best felt by bodies of the same species, argues Elizabeth Grosz (2008). Carrie Rohman (2011) turns to rhythms shared by humans and their more-than-human environments by looking at the oscillating refrains that connect the living and the cosmic in Virginia Woolf’s (1931) The Waves. I have, however, yet to find accounts that originate in real-life territorial processes and refrains giving rise to shared lives between species.

Rhythms are conditions of the refrain, but this does not mean that refrains emerge out of sameness: Rhythms being the repetition of one and the same thing is, in fact, an illusion (Williams, 2003). Rhythmic repetitions, or refrains, can originate from the discursive. They can be identified as “waves” or as “waves and a swimmer.” But as a repeating series, they break up the logic of discursive frameworks because they manage to capture the intuited and sensed flow of forces that create worlds beyond existing categories (Bertelsen & Murphie, 2010; Stewart, 2010). A dissymmetry in rhythmic repetitions—like in the case of a swimmer and waves trying to come to terms with each others’ bodies (Williams, 2003)—is what creates shared, engulfing worlds. Differences even as notable as between a human body and a body of water can become a shared life, a new kind of life because of difference.

In the case of cohabiting with a pigeon, there are certain rhythms that the bodies of two species share almost effortlessly—cycles of sleep, wake, or eating being the most obvious. Other rhythms are familiar territorially but are not in sync temporally, such as laying eggs. Pigeons lay eggs approximately every other month, whereas human females ovulate approximately once a month. There are also rhythms in space-time that offer a greater degree of difference between the species. For example, the pigeon mainly moves by flying while the human walks.

I once walked along a path in the woods with my pigeon on my shoulder. She would take off and fly ahead for about 50 meters, land on a branch to wait for me, and when I got closer, she’d land back on my shoulder, only to take off, fly ahead, and wait for me again. This was our multispecies spatial-temporal way of moving. It was an entirely new rhythm for me and for her, but it soon made our very different ways of moving proceed in sync, as if we were one blended, hybrid species.

Rhythmic patterns of space-time constitute the refrain, such as the one we created on our walks, which in turn, characterize a milieu. A milieu can be thought of simply as surroundings—but not literally things in themselves rather the completely relational and functional idea of a “surrounding”—elements that overlap and interlock to form a functioning whole. For example, a milieu sustaining life that includes a white-backed woodpecker would entail proximity of water, deciduous forest with preferrably decaying trees, and ample light.

A territory emerges when a part of a milieu ceases to be merely functional and becomes expressive. For example, certain birds use leaves picked from trees to signal their territories. Thus, the leaf, a functional part of the milieu, becomes expressive of the bird’s territory (Bogue, 2007). In all the human–pigeon lives I refer to in this article, parts of shared milieus become expressive; they were co-made into territories through material and social actions that signaled shared lives. For instance, Mariah’s pigeon, Camp, is keen on building nests to attract his partner, Mariah, with things such as her iPhone earplugs chord, dollar bills, decorations from the house, and the odd straw from outside. Mariah, in turn, collects all of the pigeon’s wing and tail feathers when he molts and makes them into earrings she wears, hashtagging her selfies with feather earrings in Instagram often with #crazybirdlady, #mommymate, or #pigeonlady. Mariah’s iPhone chord becomes expressive of Camp’s territorial attachment and choice of mate, as do Camp’s feathers dangling in Mariah’s earrings, posted online: #aintnobodyfuckingwithmyclick.

In further exploring the kind of answer refrain is—toward what does it orient our thinking—we can simply ask how does it orient our reading? Which other answers do I turn to? What does it make me think about, want to read about? The first two directions are William James’s blindness and James’s and Henri Bergson’s intuitive knowing. Both have to do with the pleasure in the ability to affect and be affected, to transcend ourselves and become more or other than human through realizing that our existence is a matter of degrees of connectedness. Both ideas make us recognize pain and sorrow resulting from the loss of such connection and affect (e.g., Bogue, 2007; Mullarkey, 2007; Murphy, 2001).

William James (1899/2009) cautions us against a certain blindness embedded in our being practical creatures—our deadness toward the joy of life of beings and species other than our own. He takes us through a multitude of references from Stevenson and Wordsworth to William Henry Hudson’s Idle Days in Patagonia, highlighting these as illustrations of what he calls “magically irresponsible” or “irrational” spells (James, 1899/2009, pp. 10-26). In moments when we realize another being’s joy of life, our own is heightened as well. We get to borrow other beings’ senses, thoughts, practices, and viewpoints—albeit always only partially—and thus access joys of being alive quite different from our own. That James views this as irresponsible or irrational is perhaps best understood through his view of humans as first and foremost practical beings. In the following, however, I explain that the irrationality of human–pigeon life organizes itself through very practical refrains, yet never in its totality does it lose the feel of #strangelife (https://www.instagram.com/p/9twC5mHsEX/?taken-by=campthepigeon).

Regardless of countless refrains and new inclusive, multispecies territories, #ourlife or #pigeonlife is still #strangelife or #neighbourhoodspectacle in comparison. William James (1899/2009) in The Tigers in India distinguishes between knowing something intuitively and knowing something representatively. Intuitive knowing is when Mariah, Laurie, and I have our pigeons on our shoulders, when they fly across our kitchens and bathe in our sinks. We know them immediately, their bodies and our knowing of them are one and the same thing, both present. Representative knowing is when the object of knowing is absent but can be referred to as something (and not something else); for example, knowing there are tigers in India, or there are pigeons in cities, or even in people’s homes. Using Henri Bergson’s (1903/2007) notions of thinking and knowing, we could argue that intuitive knowing of Maia, Arcas, Camp, and Pietari is a never-ending process—thinking in duration (Bergson, 1946)—whereas representative or analytic knowing in the absence of the known is, has to be, the more fixed and less singular “knowing-as.” The former requires and/or produces refrains, hybrid shared territories, but the latter may not.

Proximity and direct experience—shared human–pigeon everyday lives—would seem to lead to what Bergson calls intuition, a nonsymbolic knowledge of an object (of knowledge) from within. An interior knowledge, which is variable, indivisible, and in the making means that the object is not seen from the outside, but its singularity is grasped as if from within. When we know something or someone intuitively, we have integrated our movement into its own, participated in its becoming (Mullarkey, 2007). This is where refrains are needed and/or emerge. Intuition, for Bergson, is not a supernatural effort but the effort of experiencing ourselves becoming more or other than just human. Participating in lives that seem alien to us is about finding and synchronizing one’s movement (i.e., life) with that of the other. This effort, for Bergson, is generative. To metaphysically investigate that which is unique in an alien life form is to engage in a productive cycle of differentiations and integrations with the other. Deleuze and Guattari have since conceptualized this as refrains in the processes of territorialization/deterritorialization.

As an answer then, refrain directs our attention to specific kinds of multispecies encounters, to those characterized by intellectual, emotional, and embodied experiences of taking part in the joy of life of another being. They direct our attention to those which are an “awkward” combination with no preexisting scripts to fall back on, when the combination of lives is truly #unlikely. They point to shared lives whose milieus become expressive of territories and thus continually productive, when habituation does not resolve difference.

A single hatching egg found on your kitchen counter is a riddle. It dissolves the question of “sensible” and asks for response rather than reaction. In the next section, I discuss the three studied human–pigeon lives already introduced as examples of the kinds of shared lives the concept refrain directs our attention toward.

New Existential Arrangements: #brothers #teamfauna #myfamily

Pigeons, like any other living beings, eat and pass whatever is left of their digested food as feces. They come in the two sexes by which we are used to distinguishing humans and at least other mammals and most other animals: males and females. They mate and reproduce, bathe, and express themselves through making sounds and gestures. There is much our two species share, but when thrown together all of a sudden, each has to make a conscious effort to accommodate the other. These efforts lead not only to practical inventions but new existential arrangements—literally new life.

OMG! little Maia LAID AN EGG !!! does this mean i’m a grandma?

—Laurie (https://www.instagram.com/p/jsAbjMtW-o/?taken-by=oncefoundnotlost)

Reproduction in shared human–pigeon lives is no simple matter, yet it seems to give birth to the most enduring and productive of human–pigeon life refrains. Laurie’s Maia-pigeon made her first nest in a big decorative shell on top of a chest of drawers. She laid about two infertile eggs about every other month and sat on them for an average of 21 days, as pigeons do, until Laurie decided to intervene:

if all goes well, little Maia is going to have a baby!!! i just switched her infertile egg with a “real” one . . . you see, last november i rescued a wayward racing pigeon who we had rehabbed at WildCare, from the Marin Humane Society. her owner no longer wanted her because she strayed off course during a race (which is all too common). eventually, i gave her to my songbird room supervisor who had a rescued King pigeon in need of a mate. as hoped, Courtney & Jon fell madly in love and now have a little family of their own! SO, earlier this year we “hatched” a plan that if/when Maia and Courtney laid eggs at the same time, we would swap one for the other . . .

The first attempt failed—Laurie broke the fertilized egg she received from Courtney. The second time they let Courtney and Jon sit on the egg for most of the 21 days and then moved the egg just when it was ready to hatch. This time Maia made Laurie a grandmother by hatching a nestling from another pigeon couple: https://www.instagram.com/p/qXNBfaNW9B/?taken-by=oncefoundnotlost. The resulting family was a genuine co-creation of Laurie and Maia—a strange, yet perfectly natural course of events and outcome.

Camp, on the contrary, has always been convinced that Mariah is his mate. He coos and displays for her, mounting her feet and hands and jealously guarding her as his own. When Camp made his #iNest for Mariah—with odd bits and pieces, a few straws, and Mariah’s iPhone earplug chord (https://www.instagram.com/p/tV4cO_nsMx/?taken-by=campthepigeon), Mariah and George got a small wooden egg the size of a pigeon egg for him to sit on. This occurred during the time they tried to get pregnant with a human baby of their own. When they found out that Mariah could not carry a baby, they arranged for a gestational carrier. Because that was expensive, they created a fundraiser in which Camp played a key role, starring in mugs, T-shirts, coasters, and refrigerator magnets. They also used his molted feathers for earrings (https://www.instagram.com/p/rkF_NVnsLJ/?taken-by=campthepigeon). By the time Camp was two years old, he had helped Mariah and George produce baby Ace, becoming a #bigbrother himself (https://www.instagram.com/p/31_QefHsNF/?taken-by=campthepigeon)

Pietari, who we first thought was male because she seemed to display to me, begun to lay eggs and so I turned from a female mate to a male mate—queerly assuming and assembling a multispecies heteronormative, yet transgendered bond. Pietari cooed and squatted for me—and only me—waiting for me to mount her by pressing my fingers on her back. She rewarded me with two perfect white eggs, always laid in a basket where we keep woolen mittens and hats (https://www.instagram.com/p/oGLkhGse5g/?taken-by=ipauliina). Every morning I sent my two children off to school with their hats and mittens, listening to Pietari make cooing sounds in the background as she watched over her two eggs. While our children were fascinated and amused by what we called a family-within-a-family, not everyone appreciated the bond, as I explain next.

The assumed hygiene of monospecies homes—even with established pet species such as dogs or cats—becomes interrupted when a nonpet settles in. The refrains orchestrated around keeping both of the cohabiting species #sofreshandsopreened are plentiful. Even before being interviewed for surrogate parenthood by social workers, Mariah decided she had to find a way to stop Camp from soiling the house when friends were over—or friends’ houses when they went to visit with Camp. She devised a diaper from a parrot diaper made for African Grey Parrots that are about the size of a pigeon, filling the rear pocket with female sanitary pads that she cut to the right shape. And so, Camp’s #superfly #flightsuit was invented (https://www.instagram.com/p/pZ0uBKnsLE/?taken-by=campthepigeon).

Steam from a shower or bath attracted the pigeon who also wanted to bathe or just tag along (https://www.instagram.com/p/su-u3UtWwT/?taken-by=oncefoundnotlost). A pigeon is also attracted to any bowl with fresh water (https://www.instagram.com/p/jCkKmBtWwl/?taken-by=oncefoundnotlost). Times for preening became shared moments of rest. When the house was quiet and the humans were still, the birds preened on our laps, our heads, our shoulders, or on a couch or the back of a chair close by, silently going over all their feathers one by one with their beaks. And then ruffling. Whenever Pietari began to preen herself, I relaxed and waited, either watching her or continuing to read and write. Sometimes I was the target of her intensive preening as she meticulously inspected and nibbled the backs of my ears, the fine hairs on my neck, and the jewelry dangling from my ears. In this way, we shared mutual peaceful moments.

Refrains that amalgamate basic everyday life from mono- and multispecies routines enclose all of the beings within the forming territories. In studies of human–animal relations, the feeling of being in sync through embodied, rhythmic, daily practices is often discussed as taking both parties beyond their individual selves (e.g., Evans & Franklin, 2010). Human–pigeon refrains co-habituate the individuals into an almost inseparable #teamfauna. Pigeons are taken along family trips (https://www.instagram.com/p/mHmwmbseyM/?taken-by=ipauliina), and their bowls and food are packed along with those of the humans (https://www.instagram.com/p/m668sNse4b/?taken-by=ipauliina). What could be obnoxious behavior is tolerated, from excessive interest in the book you’re reading (https://www.instagram.com/p/m7MkvkMe1p/?taken-by=ipauliina) to stealing cheese off your toast (https://www.instagram.com/p/lui00SsewI/?taken-by=ipauliina). In the awkward coupling of pigeons and humans, the multispecies affinitive relations of #brothers, #mates, #friends, or #family have to be constantly enforced, and the refrains sung over and over again to maintain a visible, audible, tangible territory, an #ournormal.

This is where I have come to understand Instagram to function as an amplifier. The daily refrains that synchronize human–pigeon movement—eating, bathing, and preening—can be thought of as first-level refrains originating in daily life but amplified and further territorialized by sharing, by hashtagging-as-you-go. Originally meant as navigational thematic veins in expansive social media, hashtags are both definitive and open. They highlight what Bergson (1946) called “thinking in duration” (p. 36), the affective re-creation of movement that proliferates life (Mullarkey, 2007). Hashtagged photographs of Cécile, Maya, Arcas, Camp, Pietari, Laurie, Mariah, and I are about the “creation of concepts that simultaneously discover their unique object” (Bergson, 1949, p. 49; Mullarkey, 2007, p. xxv), about becoming a “thing,” a more/other than human, a #teamfauna, through unbecoming oneself.

Refrains, as discussed and illustrated in this article, work with Bergson’s (1903/2007) basic argument that there are two profoundly different ways of knowing: “The first implies that we move round the object; the second that we enter it” (p. 1). Entering the object does not describe first-level refrains of co-habituation or “anthropozoogenesis” (Despret, 2004), of knowing an individual of another species intimately. Intuitive and affective entering of the object is knowing a way or a joy of life other than one’s own as to how it feels—not to the other, but to oneself. It is thus about simultaneously entering and creating a way of life, a new joy of life that is inherently productive. Refrains have to be worked affectively.

Laurie does not, cannot, know what flying feels like to Maia or Arcas. But in sharing her daily life with them, she is party to the joy of flying as a mode of movement and being alive. How she works her way into it, how she knows “flying” or “Maya flying” is not through meticulous or habitual observing or “moving round the object” but “entering the object” affectively. Perhaps this knowing has enabled Laurie to create the lightest, most delicate jewelry, casting the tiniest of found bird bones into silver. Mariah’s partner, George, paints; I write.

The outlets for affective knowing through creating are plentiful. Things created are shared, in this case, as hashtagged images in Instagram, which in turn create further layers of affective, generative responding—layers upon layers of refrains. Camp’s Instagram account has sparked people to woodwork, to make performances with felt pigeons in downtown New York City (https://www.instagram.com/p/1VqYQ-nsOh/?taken-by=campthepigeon), to inkdraw (https://www.instagram.com/p/8TDWQznsAl/?taken-by=campthepigeon), and to produce fine art by painting #largerthanlife pieces and exhibiting these in a gallery (https://www.instagram.com/p/9h8i0XnsEH/?taken-by=campthepigeon;https://www.instagram.com/p/9wpPaansLm/?taken-by=campthepigeon). The Instagram-hashtagged images of human–pigeon life have been accelerated and amplified in the drives of electronic devices and begun to live lives of their own. Human–pigeon lives have spawned literal human and nonhuman life but also virtual, cultural, social, abstract, artefactual, and affectual life because they took place in the first place, because of serendipity.

Steve Hinchliffe (2010) offers a tribute to Donna Haraway’s (2008) book, When Species Meet, explaining that where species meet, the spatial arrangements for multispecies encounters, are equally as important. Each individual, regardless of species, is already “enacted within and through many ‘knots’ of becoming, and place is enacted as part of this process” (Hinchliffe, 2010, p. 34). The “where” is crucial to coincidental encounters between humans and other species. Planning, infrastructures, pest-control, urbanization, sewage designs, and ultimately changes in climate all affect which species we can meet, if any at all, and how. Coincidental animal contacts require both the where and the when: making oneself available concretely and figuratively (Despret, 2004).

Learning to Be Affected: #dontjudgeme, #okjudgeme

while individually soldering on each tiny shell to make my little bird’s nest/saddle, i inadvertently unsoldered birdie three times!!! now that they’re all safe and secure, i’m not quite sure where we’ll go next . . . time to fidget with those misty bits of sky & water blue labradorite back there, or maybe even a diamond or two! i love the surprises that accompany my making, because the journey is always a mapless adventure that leads me to a special, magical place i’ve never ever been before. (Laurie)

Laurie collects bits and pieces she finds from her long walks—just like the corvids she follows along the way. She picks up colorful pieces of plastic, seashells, feathers, bones, and abandoned birds’ nests and works them into necklaces, rings, bracelets, and earrings—some cast in silver and others incorporated as such. Adding the odd gem, all the while watched by Maia from her nest that she built from bits and pieces picked up around the house and meticulously arranged, Laurie creates assemblages that reflect the fragility and preciousness of life, calling the things she finds along the beach “love letters from the sea” and her engagement with them “stitching it [the beautiful] to my life” (https://www.instagram.com/p/-KhIyNtWxR/?taken-by=oncefoundnotlost). Whether she was always attuned to the details and drawn by serendipitous adventures, or whether her shared life has made this possible is not really the question. That it is possible to share a territory with an individual of another species not only in practice but also in a more existential sense—being able to co-create refrains out of the joy of being alive—is what matters.

What Laurie, Mariah, and I have been engaging in has not been an intentional attempt to understand the world like a pigeon, or to behave like a pigeon, or to know like a pigeon. Rather, we have had to respond to another being’s needs and desires but also to another being’s way and joy of life—to learn what might matter to another kind of being. Vinciane Despret (2013b) distinguishes responding from reacting and from imitating. What she describes as learning to be affected or “reciprocal induction” (Despret, 2013a) has to do with getting involved in the lives of other beings as they get involved in the lives of others. This requires empathy, a notion that Despret uses with caution as it is too often understood simply as experiencing what the other experiences. For Despret, empathy is a creative mode of attunement; it is about creating the possibilities of embodied communication, or even more simply, making one’s body available for the responses of another being (Despret, 2013b). Here, we make available a shoulder to land on, earlobes to nibble, a voice to respond to, a lap to sleep in, and hands and feet to be affectionate with. From the mutual responses and the intuitive knowing of each other emerge the refrains that envelop us.

The concept refrain is an answer that directs our attention to searching for what “matters” not only to one species but to both. Refrains have to mutually matter to soothe and synchronize. When we observe meanings, we can produce disaffected inventories, describe in detail, list. When thinking about what might matter to another being, we have to acknowledge that some things have more value to it than others. We then need to give those things worth, to begin to feel them as valuable ourselves (Despret, 2013b).

Despret focuses on empathy and embodied responding between different species, drawing her examples mainly from cases in which natural scientists work with animals. Much in the same vein, Jamie Lorimer (2014) identifies curiosity in human relations to nonhuman animals as an ethical sensibility. Like Donna Haraway (2010), he suggests that “staying with the trouble” or with the “conceptual discomfort” that engaging with another being demands can be an ethical virtue:

The literal and figural “area of darkness” that is the lifeworld of another being is worthy of a lifetime’s contemplation and modest activism. The conceptual discomfort of such darkness offers a shock to thought, an imperative to think life otherwise to human norms. (Lorimer, 2014, p. 203)

What Lorimer discusses specifically are “awkward creatures,” animals that are neither domesticated nor wild yet present in our daily lives, animals toward which we have ambivalent feelings and relations. Pigeons are perhaps a hallmark example. For Lorimer (2014), awkwardness entails a mutual vulnerability and a sense of disconcertion. Thinking with Judith Butler and writing about humans and bees, Kelsey Green and Franklin Ginn (2014) discuss shared but unequal vulnerabilities between species, arriving at the insight that vulnerability is a condition of receptivity toward outside forces. Learning to be affected is learning to be vulnerable—to recognize vulnerability. Returning to Henri Bergson’s idea of knowing intuitively—knowing by entering, not by going round—and the entailed premise that one must “unbecome” oneself, the idea of vulnerability gains momentum.

Becoming less uncomfortable with vulnerability and seeking to put ourselves at risk can be a productive ethical practice. We might learn to accept the risks more, to loosen the hegemonic idea of a self-certain subject to whom an outsider arrives to disrupt. Instead, encountering awkward nonhumans pushes us to recognise our corporeal vulnerability to the other, a vulnerability “that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot pre-empt.” (Green & Ginn, 2014, p. 167)

And so the concept, refrain, in research of human–pigeon shared lives, or more generally human–animal relations, is an answer that directs our attention to specific kinds of shared lives, to those that empathetically embrace the joy of life of another being that might produce an “awkward” combination characterized by mutual vulnerabilities that require creative attunement. Such lives are deeply mourned when lost, and those who’ve not shared an awkward, joyous life in this way might not understand this mourning. In this article, I’ve used the concept, refrain, as a method to grasp differently something different, something that is conventionally described as habituation, a companion animal bond, or a case of anthropomorphic projection. But viewing shared human–pigeon lives so that refrain is the answer has yielded insights to what some question(s) could be that we need new answers to.

Our attempts to find the solutions to ethical problems, is the kind of being-in-the-world, if you want a phrase, that includes responsiveness to striking and puzzling and hurtful features of our lives. Someone can go through life with a wound—the wound being the question what can it mean, the way in which we relate to animals. (Diamond, 2000, p. 72)

Epilogue

In an example by Cora Diamond (2008), a child asks, why is that man smiling if he is dead? She is then told that he was alive when the picture was taken. In this exchange, the child is taught the language game, and her problem disappears. The point of view from which she identified a problem is no longer valid. Her point of view ceases to enable new answers and new solutions to surface. To find a point of view outside conventional language games or conceptual responses is to attend, however incompletely, to what the world asks from us and to go about it like solving a riddle, trusting that no existing concept can tell us what to do. What we need to do is work backward to learn what questions the concepts are answers to.

If refrain is the answer, then questions might be how we (beyond taxonomies humans have invented) can live together, how we die together. How many times can one die, and how many lives can one live when the unit of “a life” is not measured by an individual’s life cycle but refers to something shared and multiplying? How can we learn what might matter to/in another kind of being?

Life is bizarre & beautiful, and embracing what lands on your path makes for a super wild story apparently! #coincidence #grateful #babybird #egg #gestationalcarrier #surrogacy #7monthspregnant #BNK #babynaellakeaton #teambnk

—@campthepigeon / Mariah