Thinking With Thrushes Exploring Knowledge Making Practices In Migratory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The wood thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) is a songbird that has come to symbolize the fate of Neotropical migratory birds, many species of which are reported to be rapidly declining. This paper draws from work at the intersection of political ecology and science and technology studies to explore knowledge making practices in the conservation of wood thrushes. Thinking with thrushes, its aim is to bring the theoretical concepts and accompanying vocabulary from social theory into the discourse on conservation. Drawing upon participant observation and interview material, it follows the efforts of field ecologists and conservation practitioners in southern Canada and central Costa Rica—two end points of the migratory journey of these birds. It begins by tracing the affective and embodied practices in ecological fieldwork, and goes on to examine how individual birds as objects of scientific knowledge come to be framed as, and speak for, the species as an object of conservation. By exploring these aspects, this paper shows how ecological science that informs the conservation of wood thrushes is constructed from a mix of scientific observations, technological capabilities, embodied work, material agencies, and normative values. It then locates these birds in new conservation networks in their non-breeding grounds, where narratives around biodiversity and conservation become linked to location-specific activities, such as ecotourism. The paper concludes with outlining some implications for considering these themes more carefully for knowledge making in, and the practice of, conservation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".