86POETRY AS FIELD GUIDEand amateurs who wanted to discover, describe, classify, and name (or
learn the names of) new species. This drive was not slowed down by
Charles Darwin, whose revolutionary idea was to call into question the
fixity of species by revealing the complex and dynamic process of their
creation. If species are always in the process of becoming and disappear-
ing, then they are not Platonic or stable. Biologists have not been able to
agree on a definition of species or on the degree to which they are even
the site of evolutionary pressure. Biologists now understand species
as statistical or probabilistic entities, or more intriguingly, as scholars
of biosemiotics suggest, communities produced not so much by repro-
ductive isolation as by sharing systems of communication. Species are
perhaps best thought of as interpretive communities.^6
While coming to know sentient creatures primarily through type is
both cultural and instinctive, it is morally problematic, since animals
are individuals as well as collectives. Defining animal worth in terms of
species rather than individuals is a fundamental schism between envi-
ronmentalist and animal rights ideologies. For the former, what mat-
ters most is generally the survival of groups (species), ecosystems, and
habitats, while for the latter what matters are the lives of individual ani-
mals. As I noted in my introduction, J. M. Coetzee in The Lives of Ani-
mals argues against species essentialism, which he sees as at the center
of those forms of environmentalism that measure ecological health and
value in terms of the survival of species rather than individuals. What-
ever science and philosophy have to tell us about the speciousness of
species, however, seeing animals through the lens of a species concept
is clearly ubiquitous. Remembering Muldoon’s quote, we might wonder
if there is an art form beyond the field guide that works to capture spe-
cies essence. Why should this seem to poets like an ambition particu-
larly suited to poetry? Put another way, what does poetry have to offer
the cultural work of defining species? By looking at several examples of
such poems, I want to reveal some of the ways in which poetry reflects
and refracts notions of species. Perhaps most of all, these poems depict
the process of observation, of detailing several characteristics seemingly
unique to or definitive of the type. Identifying species, as bird-watchers
well know, is above all a matter of giving a name to a cluster of such