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 analysis of the writings of two of the leading ornithologists of the period: Alfred and Edward Newton. 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 article 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. Second, connections with the more-than-human provided support to oppressed people in ways not fully captured by colonial scientific research. Studying ecologies in flight provides new insight for how humans and birds survived the plantation regime that continued from the era of slavery to that of emancipation.