This thesis argues that humans and ospreys in Scotland are materially, bodily and
ethically involved with one another. It follows that a separate human or osprey
history of species conservation is inadequate. Focused primarily through the
entwined experiences of birds and people on Speyside, I examine the unfolding of
osprey-human relationships with particular attention to the agency and capacities of
nonhuman animals as animals: with geographies and lives of their own. Drawing on
the scholarship of Tim Ingold, Giles Deleuze and Donna Haraway, I consider the
dwelling, the co-becoming, and the zones of attachment between human and osprey
subjects. At the heart of this project has been an investigation of the relationship
between the historical and geographical conditions within which osprey life has
flourished on its return from extinction in Scotland, and the possibilities for osprey
nature that emerge from such conditions. I offer a ‘site ontology’ of osprey
involvements, each ‘site’ comprising a material, bodily and ethical event of agency,
subjectivity and composition. Often running in parallel to each other, such sites
emphasise differentiations of osprey life: their situation within the militarised
biopolitics of bird protection and ‘Operation Osprey’; negotiations of avian-human
proximity and distances; their nesting geographies amidst the experimental
attempts to restore a diminished community to its former range; and the nature of
avian existence emerging in the wake of a return from extinction. Drawing on an
array of archival material – occasionally supplemented with oral history, avian
science and encounters in the field – the thesis proposes a lively historical
geography of animal involvement