Anthropology Colloquium: Emily Hayflick

Eagle Agencies: Bureaucracies of Federal Bird Conservation in the United States

US federal wildlife laws enacted to limit the harming or killing of birds restrict the interactions people can have with animal bodies, even when those bodies or bodily parts, such as feathers, are already separated from a living animal. Looking specifically to the protections for bald eagles—a bird deemed to be “no longer a mere bird of biological interest but a symbol of the American ideals of freedom”—and golden eagles—a bird whose federal protection introduced a permitting system for Native American religious and cultural use – Emily Hayflick’s research examines how the federal government conceives of its responsibilities to these species, to members of federally recognized tribes, and to other permitted utilizers of salvaged birds. Drawing on ethnographic research with federal, state, and tribal employees, researchers, Indigenous utilizers, and eagle caretakers, this research asks who gets to imagine and produce avian afterlives.

To address bald and golden eagles’ legal protections while providing pathways for Indigenous access to feathers, the federal government has implemented procedures that direct eagle bodies and feathers to a centralized repository for processing and distribution to members of federally recognized tribes. As a government agency, the repository aims to create standardized and replicable bureaucratic objects out of eagles, an impossible goal when dealing with the accumulated effects of lived experiences on bird bodies. Eagle bodies also exert their own agency on these bureaucratic procedures through their capacities to be messengers, kin, symbols, sinks, and reservoirs. At the repository, this is most visible in the biosecurity measures introduced in response to the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) outbreak which began circulating in the United States in 2022. Using the HPAI outbreak and resulting concerns of the potential for eagle bodies to store and transmit the virus to humans, this talk explores how governmental bureaucracy aims to handle the liveliness of these eagle bodies when it cannot be ignored.

Emily Hayflick is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Cornell whose research explores the production of wildlife conservation bureaucracy in the United States. Her dissertation research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies.