Ecologies in flight: black environmental knowledge and human-bird interactions between the Caribbean and Britain

People interacted with birds and created ecological knowledge about them while enslaved and during the transition to emancipation from 1848 onward in the Danish colony of St Croix. These Black ecologies can be reconstructed through a close reading of the archives of two of the leading ornithologists of the period: Alfred and Edward Newton. Their notebooks, correspondence, and publications are contextualized alongside plantation records and missionary accounts. These sources provide the basis for a new analytic frame: “ecologies in flight” in which flight refers to bird migration, escape from enslavement, circum-Caribbean passages, and ephemeral sources. Through ecologies in flight, this paper makes two connected claims. First, freed Black people developed ecological knowledge, which by its very existence transcended the plantation, and enabled freed people to spend time doing things outside the plantation economy. Kalinago and maritime maroon people provided precedents for ecologies in flight. Second, connections with the more-than-human provided support to oppressed people in ways not fully captured by colonial scientific research. Ecologies in flight became a method for humans and birds to survive the plantation regime that continued from the era of slavery to that of emancipation.