Sticks, Stones, and Nested Agency in Wildlife Photography

Traducción al Español.

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The wildlife photographer is often figured as intrepid, non-interventionist, slow, skillful, and, perhaps most importantly, solitary. Yet understanding wildlife photography as a solitary human venture fundamentally neglects the liveliness and agency of more-than-human nature. In the realm of wildlife photography, non-humans are often viewed as passive muses for human creativity rather than as active participants. However, the two case studies I consider here—the nests of Amamihoshi pufferfish and satin bowerbirds—show how certain wildlife photographs exist as collaborative artworks between multiple actors that serve both human and more-than-human agendas.

Rethinking wildlife photography in this way fits within a broader shift in interspecies inquiry. Environmental geographer Jamie Lorimer observes that scholarly “attention has turned from cognition and representation to issues of embodiment, performance, skill and affect, understood as relational and distributed forces and competencies that cut across any lay-scientist and human-nonhuman divides. In simpler terms, rather than focusing on the ways in which non-human species think in the world, we are beginning to think about the ways in which they experience it—and the spaces and scenarios in which that embodiment overlaps and intersects with the human world in the creation of mutual meaning and belonging.

One key site at which these ideas of entanglement and embodiment come to the fore is in art and craft. As Daniel Palmer, scholar of contemporary art and cultural theory, argues, “Thinking about photography in collaborative terms invites us to reconfigure assumptions about the photographic act … [d]espite the normalized status of the single-authored photograph.” While Palmer is not explicitly referring to wildlife photography, the sentiment resonates in a wider, ongoing discussion in the environmental humanities about multispecies belongings and more-than-human agency.

Conceptualizing photographs of nests as more than a single, human-authored pursuit does not require one to understand animals as “artists.” Rather, one must simply acknowledge the multispecies subjectivities that encompass craft, expertise, and agency, as each of these exceed the scope of the human.

Collaborative Crafts  

What do the bowerbird and the Amamihoshi pufferfish have in common? To a casual observer, maybe very little. The former is a kleptomaniac bird, the latter a toxic marine species. And yet, the two animals share one notable commonality: their respective crafts, or their strategies of attracting a mate through visual assemblages. While reproductive behaviors might not usually fall into the category of “craft,” I follow Camilla Groth and Biljana Fredriksen in their multispecies definition of the term: 

 “[W]e do not mean that non-humans craft in the same way and with the same conscious intentionality as humans. Rather, by acknowledging more-than-human ‘crafting’, and by learning to appreciate the transformative processes carried out by other-than-humans, we are supporting the restoration of a more balanced worldview and more levelled power distribution.”

This worldview does not rely on an understanding of more-than-human crafting as the intentional creation of beauty, or even as a process in which the non-human agent is innately aware of the visual value of what they are creating. This positioning, as opposed to relying on contentious definitions of “art,” allows us to acknowledge value in the expansive concept of both human and non-human “craft” and begin to discern a collaborative process of creation and reception.

By focusing specifically on photographs of the nest, I build on an existing body of work that addresses the complexities of human and more-than-human collaboration. These works, which have emerged in the Western academy primarily in the last two decades, have started to explore the ways in which non-human animals create meaning through making sculptures, painting and participating in multimedia artworks.

A common criticism of more-than-human artworks, such as paintings by chimps and dogs, holds that, although humans might imbue these artworks with meaning, the pieces hold none for their animal authors. As Jessica Ullrich, scholar of multispecies aesthetics, highlights, “In many interspecies artworks animals are always at the risk of becoming mere extensions of human agency.”

Nests as artifacts have the potential to bridge a gap in meaning: They are both visually attractive to the human viewer and innately meaningful to their animal creators. The value of nests does not simply derive from fragile definitions of interspecies aesthetic value but, rather, from a wider understanding of being-centered subjectivity.

Bowerbirds and Nested Agency

The bowerbird nest is a site of interest for scholars of visual culture. This intrigue is not surprising; bowerbird nests are often very striking in their distinctive composition and materiality.

The male bowerbird sets about making his nest by collecting and arranging colorful objects around a built structure, known as a bower. These objects might include berries, stones, and sticks, or they might be manmade objects, such as small plastic toys and rubbish.

The female bowerbird often visits multiple nests before deciding on the most suitable, using her judgement to choose her mate. Nests that are more symmetrical, vertical, and decorated are most successful in attracting a female. This process of creation and judgement on the part of the male and female bird, respectively, lends itself inordinately well to the eye of a camera.

Keith Horton’s photograph, “The Blue Bower,” clearly illustrates this affinity. Capturing critical attention, it was a highly commended entry in the 2024 Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition. The photograph displays a female satin bowerbird judiciously assessing the work of a male who has adorned his bower with bright blue plastic objects, including bottle tops, clothing pegs, and straws.

The image portrays the enmeshment of human and more-than-human life in more ways than one. The material traces of the human—the seemingly banal discarded objects that the satin bowerbird has collected—most obviously signal such entanglement. The image itself is another site of entanglement. Though hidden behind the camera, the presence of the human photographer helped to create the photo we see.

And then there’s us: the (presumably) human viewers of the picture. We behold the photograph. The photographer beholds the birds in their habitat. The female bowerbird beholds the work of the male. And finally, the male beholds the photographer, breaking the fourth wall with his piercing blue eyes. Thus, the resulting photo is a product of humanness and more-than-humanness in equal measures. It encompasses multiple, embedded subjectivities.

The final photograph is a joint effort between bird and human. Aesthetic processes were unfolding prior to Horton’s arrival. He did not arrive at a clean canvas, nor at the habitat of a passive muse. Instead, this image is an active site of craft and creation in which Horton’s photographic witnessing constitutes part of a wider dialogue between co-authors.

Horton’s caption speaks to the layers of authorship at play: “This (bowerbird) made good use of waste plastic carton tops, drinking straws and clothes pegs.” The bird’s intentionality in the collection of nest-building materials is clear, and the phrase “made good use of” further acknowledges the bird’s agency. Just as Horton’s photograph was the result of patience, careful framing and intentionality, so the same qualities shape the bowerbird’s nest.

Mandalas Under the Sea: The Amamihoshi Pufferfish Nest

Unlike its ornithological counterpart, critics and scholars have not given much attention to the Amamihoshi pufferfish. Their aquatic nests are a relatively recent discovery, and adequate image-capturing for underwater craft is still inaccessible to many. However, the Amamihoshi pufferfish nest is a compelling subject in the art of multispecies collaboration.

Unlike the bowerbird and other aquatic species such as the Giant Shell Dweller (cllipterus cichlid), the Amamihoshi pufferfish’s nest-building ritual does not rely solely upon gathering. It is instead a highly physical process. The male pufferfish uses his fins and body to leave thousands of marks on the seabed, working inward in a circular pattern to create an intricate mandala in the sand. He finishes by leaving small shells to adorn the ridges of his creation.

Diver Yoji Ookata recorded the unusual nest of the Amamihoshi pufferfish off the coast of Japan in 2012 and later returned to the site with the crew of the Japanese nature documentary NHK. In 2014, an episode of the BBC’s Life Story documented the ritual of the pufferfish’s nest creation. Notably, in the voiceover for the episode, David Attenborough dubbed the fish’s work a “masterpiece,” subtly crediting the pufferfish with a degree of creative agency.

From the perspective of visual culture, the footage-photographs of Amamihoshi pufferfish nests are interesting in both their outcomes and their implications. The position of the nest on the sea floor means that it quickly degrades, and this impermanence imbues its human witness with a certain urgency and timeliness, like a piece of performance art or an installation that must be captured by the camera before it ends.

To behold the Amamihoshi pufferfish nest as an aesthetic art object prompts many of the same questions as looking at bowerbird nests, even though the nests are both geographically and materially distant from one another.

Submerged in a watery gallery, the photographer of the Amamihoshi pufferfish nest is party to a work of expertly crafted sculpture. Their transient witnessing is key to documenting the disintegrating artwork. Photographs like Ookata’s and films such as the BBC documentary thus represent a collaboration between performer and audience, rather than artist and muse.

Co-Authored Meanings

Photography of pufferfish and bowerbird nests speaks to the complexities of interspecies encounters, especially in the creation of visual media. I have sought to understand the process of photographic documentation as not only a snapshot of an object, animal or landscape, but rather an artifact of a shared, embodied experience of space and aesthetics. The resulting image may be static, but when framed in this light, it relates a broader narrative of dynamic creation and reception.

Photographs of both pufferfish and bowerbird nests reflect what we want to see of nature – eclectic, intricate, and crafted with skill. However, as an audience, we have the capacity to look further, to understand the photograph as an artifact of entanglement between human and non-human crafters and not simply as static representations of non-human worlds completely separate from our own.

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Featured Image: A photographer capturing a turtle underwater. Photo by Leonardo Lamas, 2019.

Rae Ferner-Rose is a postgraduate student and writer based in Bristol, UK. Her work interrogates the visual culture of the Anthropocene with an emphasis on endangered species and landscapes of conservation. Instagram. Substack. Contact.