Bird in hand: How experience makes nature Hillary Angelo Published online: 1 June 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract It is almost a truism that nature is social, but by what means is nature made social at the level of the interactional encounter? While the transformation of society/nature relationships is often approached through the problematic of distance, and at the scale of macro-historical transformation, this article uses a conflict between American birdwatchers and ornithologists over scientific “collecting” (literally, the killing of birds) to examine the processes through which individuals come to know nature, and come to know it so differently. With John Dewey’ s(1958 [1925]) “experience” as the unit of analysis, I trace changes in each group’ s experience with birds over the past century; the phenomenology of the resulting encounters; and the understanding that emerges from each in order to understand (1) how, empirically, these two very different loves of birds are formed, and (2) knowledge of nature as an affective sensibility shaped by experiences of closeness. Keywords Experience . Society-nature relationships . Natureknowledge . John Dewey . Birdwatching . Ornithology . Collecting How do we come to know nature, and how do we come to know it so differently? This article explores this question through two groups of bird lovers: birdwatchers, who love birds through binoculars, and ornithologists, whose research needs dictate that they love their object of analysis through the barrel of a shotgun. The activities aid and reinforce each other, and the groups have often been and still are allied against common enemies. Yet over the past century scientific “collecting”—the killing of birds for research—has become a source of tension in the bird community. Beginning with the moments of mutual unintelligibility that collecting creates, I trace the origins of each knowledge so as to understand the current differences between these two loves of birds. The short answer is simple. Like the taxidermist’ s, the collector ’ s intimate knowl- edge has become strange because this relationship to animals is the minority one in the contemporary western world. Killing animals you love is harder to comprehend Theor Soc (2013) 42:351–368 DOI 10.1007/s11186-013-9196-x H. Angelo (*) Department of Sociology, New York University, 295 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012, USA e-mail: hillary.angelo@nyu.edu