Mist net photographs as art?

Image Source: Scientific American

Scientific American Symbiartic “The Complex Net of Human Interference”

Mist netting is a common tool of the ornithologist: you set up thin, nearly-invisible nets in areas where birds travel and wait to see who gets caught. These images capture the diverse beauty of these birds at the moment of their capture.

But are these images anything more than beautiful? Personally, I cannot mine these images for much of an ecological nature. They do not tell us much about the state of these different species, just that they are vulnerable to being caught in our nets. I am not suggesting that it is a simple task to capture in photographs the ecological threats that birds are faced with, but to me these photographs are more nature as art than art telling us anything about nature.