Bird

Erik Anderson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501353352
• eBook ISBN: 9781501353369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Hope, as Emily Dickinson famously wrote, is the thing with feathers. Erik Anderson, on the other hand, regards our obsession with birds as too sentimental, too precious. Birds don't express hope. They express themselves. But this tension between the versions of nature that lodge in our minds and the realities that surround us is the central theme of Bird. This is no field guide. It's something far more unusual and idiosyncratic, balancing science with story, anatomy with metaphor, habitat with history. Anderson illuminates the dark underbelly of our bird fetish and offers a fresh, alternative vision of one of nature's most beloved objects. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

1 Put a Bird on It

The black-tailed trainbearer (Lesbia victoriae) is a tiny bird, about the size of my thumb, yet its skinny tail, reminiscent of the trailing fabric suggested by its name, is dramatically out of proportion—I’d say several times as long. Like its green-tailed cousin, Lesbia victoriae is a hummingbird with a needle-like bill and a flat crown, indiscernible from its crest, and although the front of its body is clearly adaptive—how else to suck the nectar from flowers?—the purpose of its train, which does not fan out like a peacock’s, is less immediately apparent.

I first saw it in the basement of our local museum—the North Museum of Nature and Science in Lancaster, Pennsylvania—perched in one of the many glass cases in the public specimen collection, which consists mostly of taxidermied birds. From one perspective, the situation was unreal: the trainbearer’s carcass was preserved well beyond the time when its matter should have cycled through the stomach of some other animal, or else been reabsorbed by the earth. I found the idea of a room of such carcasses, and the peculiar impulse that led to gathering them there, baffling: Why attempt to preserve something as fleeting as a bird’s life? Is this curiosity, or are we holding on too tight?

A few days later, I wrote to the museum’s education director to ask how the bird got there, but after consulting the collections people, she could tell me only that the species is native to South America and that the specimen dates from the turn of the nineteenth century. The museum has no record of where, or when, or by whom the bird was collected, or how it came to the museum, which wasn’t even built until 1953. Because the nineteenth century was the heyday of the amateur naturalist, I had no trouble imagining some local gentleman, a true Victorian enthusiast, marching off through the high meadows, gun slung over his shoulder—but in South America? That was tougher to picture.

Before I go any further, I have a confession to make. I’m not all that interested in birds. It’s not that I don’t like them. I simply lack the enthusiasm others possess. I’ve heard friends declare their love of cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis) or goldfinches (Spinus tristis), watching these birds alight on the dogwood outside our dining room window, but whatever connection they feel is lost on me. I admire the birds, find them lovely, but am no more attached to a splash of yellow or red plumage than to the summer chorus of crickets and cicadas. If anything, I’m more attached to the noise, given its soothing constancy.

So why all the fuss about a tiny bird that has been dead for more than a century, a member of a species in no immediate threat of extinction? For one thing, the brilliant patch of iridescent green extending upward through its throat from its breast (the gorget, it’s called), shining even from a dark basement corner, caught my eye. It was somehow unlike anything I had ever known. Seeing the bird stationed next to a greater bird-of-paradise (Paradisaea apoda), with its puffy white plumes, I realized that the scintillating green patch—like the tail, maybe—must have evolved to attract a mate, might be, in fact, evidence of its power of attraction.

But I also suspected that our so-called connection to nature means little, and that the species we single out for devotion signal only our longing for that connection—either that or our unspeakable grief, the unspoken admission that we cause more sorrow in the animal world than celebration. Our supposed love of nature so often seems to mask or compensate for an underlying disdain. On the shelf above the trainbearer, for instance, a couple of sharp-shinned hawks (Accipiter striatus) sat displayed in various stages of taxidermy, a process that, in all of its stretching and pinning, appeared to be alternately a form of torture and a kind of disregard. And though the birds were of course dead by the time they were prepared and stuffed, I still rue, for their sake, the indignity of their demise.

The natural world may be endlessly fascinating, but never more so, for me, than in its intersections with the human one, which is—in all of its creative and destructive power—an extension of the former. If individual birds intrigue me, I’m even more beguiled by the figure just out of sight, binoculars in hand. It’s incredible to me—as in, I cannot give it credence—that one would fly to Papua New Guinea just to see birds. I marvel at the dedication, or obsession. And I long to understand it.

The North Museum, just a five-minute walk from my house, is an incarnation of the now defunct Linnaean Society of Lancaster County, active from the 1860s to the 1920s. Sometime around the year 1900, the college where I teach, Franklin & Marshall, acquired the society’s collection, and its papers are stored in our library. In late May of 2014, not long after meeting my trainbearer, I spent an afternoon scouring them for evidence in reports and lists dating back to the Civil War, many of them written on the backs of receipts and stationery, some bound together in twine or purple ribbon.

Much of the society’s work was shouldered by one Simon Snyder Rathvon, an unhappily married and impecunious tailor, also an amateur naturalist. Although he dedicated his days to work as a matter of course, he pursued his second life often until two or three in the morning. “Occupation! That is the grand redeeming secret,” Rathvon declares in his essay on the origin, objects, and progress of the Linnaean Society, delivered on its fourth anniversary, February 24, 1866. While he envisions an institution to rival the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (ANSP), he also frames the pursuit of natural history as a refuge from “the fascinating haunts of vice”: “the gaming table,” “the death infecting brothel,” and “the street-corner carnivals.” The “riches enjoyed by the truly scientific mind,” he continues, are “not purchasable with the mere ‘coin and currency’ of a mercenary world.” Science, in his view, is one of “those investments that, although not always manifest in a pecuniary light . . . may ultimately ‘pay.’”

For all of Rathvon’s optimism about its mission, the society appears to have been chronically short of funds and other resources, dependent on specimens gathered or donated by its members and friends, and Rathvon’s writing for the group is often saturated with his melancholic suspicion that their work is going nowhere. In a curator’s report from 1869, Rathvon doubts that the period in his lifetime will arrive “when the various natural objects that are being brought together in this society, will be properly classified labeled and arranged, according to the most approved modern systems.” But if the present members of the Linnaean Society cannot carry out that work, they may at least construct “a material chaos . . . out of which something more orderly and symmetrical may be developed by future explorers and collectors.” In the meantime, he concludes, “it more the less [sic] beh ooves me to continue on collecting material.”

It was a pleasant afternoon in the reading room, light streaming through the windows, but I found no reference to the black-tailed trainbearer in the society’s records, or any sign that they had access to, or means to procure, specimens from beyond their immediate surroundings. Given the attention he lavished on the local birds that passed through his hands, the trainbearer would not have escaped Rathvon’s enthusiasm. I found only one reference in his prose to hummingbirds, an entry from June of 1884, in which he notes keeping “a specimen in a small glass case at home, that remains intact, although it was put there more than fifty years ago and without any preserving preparations whatever—being literally an unembalmed mummy.” It’s as fine a metaphor as any for the past, the persistence of which, in the present, is often no less of a marvel or a fluke. We gather around it, as though around a stuffed carcass. Is it bizarre, or are we?

Bryce Shivers and Lisa Eversman, on the other hand, put birds on things. Dressed in coordinated outfits (polka-dot bow tie for him, polka-dot blouse for her), the two stencil images of birds on a teapot, a tote bag, and a greeting card as a shop owner happily watches from behind the counter. They sew a bird into a pillow, carve one into a piece of toast, even paint a tiny bird on a carved wooden bird. But when the shop owner opens the door and a pigeon flies in, Bryce and Lisa are disgusted. They try to shoo it out, trashing the place in the process, breaking nearly everything in sight. The obvious irony of the skit, from the show Portlandia, is that the characters cherish nature’s “prettiness” even as they keep it at arm’s length, both physically and metaphorically. But if “putting a bird on it” is one of the guiding clichés of hipster culture, it nonetheless belongs to a timeworn tradition of fetishizing birds.

Say the year is 1521 and the emperor’s aviaries, ornate palaces with latticework ceilings, are burning. The birds are screaming in the flames, or else flying for the hills. It’s psychological warfare on Cortes’ part, intended to distress Tenochtitlan’s inhabitants, who raise the birds for their feathers, incorporating them in headdresses, robes, tapestries, and more. The barbarism is appalling, but then—never mind how well they were treated, how carefully they were plucked—what were the birds doing in the cages to begin with?

Or say instead it is early 1779, some 3,500 miles to the west, in the middle of the Pacific, and the Hawaiian king Kalaniʻōpuʻu presents his returning guest, James Cook, with an elaborate cloak and ceremonial helmet, symbols of enormous power fashioned from the feathers of native birds for the island’s elites, the ali‘i. It is a fleeting friendship, and Cook will be murdered on the island within a few short weeks. The king will live for several more years. In the wake of his death in 1782, his son’s brief rule will give way to the rise of his nephew, Kamehameha the Great, famous for uniting the islands and for his splendid yellow cloak, made up of feathers from tens of thousands of now extinct birds.

In the nineteenth century, throughout Europe and the United States, people of means often built aviaries on their estates, large cages where captured birds, some of them exotic, might fly freely and where, in some cases, their owners might sit and observe them. For those less wealthy, or with other appetites, like Simon Snyder Rathvon, it was fashionable to keep a cabinet of mounted birds, a tradition indebted to the Renaissance Wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities, early collections of miscellaneous and esoteric objects that can be seen as the forerunners of the modern museum. Whereas the objects contained in the Wunderkammern often defied categorization, and indeed were included for precisely that reason, the nineteenth-century viewer’s sense of wonder at a bird whose tail was much longer than its body was tempered by the era’s classifying spirit, as filtered through the binomial system devised by Carl von Linné, or Carolus Linnaeus.

Although our rage for order, and for the names that would seem to provide it, has not abated in the two-and-a-half centuries since his death, our rage for taxidermied animals has, at least in most circles. This change is due in part to regulations such as The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which made illegal without a permit the capture, trade, and even possession of almost all migratory birds, their parts, nests, and eggs. If I were to inherit a mounted specimen of a black-tailed trainbearer today, I would probably have to surrender it to the authorities. If I were to find and pick up a feather from even the most common bird—say, the American crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos—and take it home with me, I’d be breaking the law. (Invasive species, like the English sparrow, Passer domesticus, may be collected freely.) Rather than run afoul of the law, many early twentieth-century collectors donated the contents of their cabinets to local natural history museums, among other places.

Prior to examining the Linnaean Society’s archives, I had been operating under the assumption that the trainbearer at the North Museum had been purchased or donated in the early days, during Rathvon’s lifetime. I imagined tracing the provenance of the bird back to a local traveler, or a well-traveled friend of a local, who had killed it somewhere in South America. But then I began to wonder whether the absence of any catalog information stemmed from another source: maybe the person who donated the bird didn’t want to be found.

“A good wildlife photograph or film,” writes Jon Mooallem, “or at least a marketable one, does just this: shows us an image of nature that’s already lodged in our heads.” But I might substitute story for image here, since what I initially imagined about Lesbia victoriae was both the story of an individual collector and that of the scientists and institutions complicit in his activities. “We exert our power,” Mooallem continues, “but are then unsettled by how powerful we are,” and I suppose I’ve turned this whole thing into a parable about that contradiction.

For this reason, and maybe a few others, I want to reverse perspective. What does any of this look like to a bird? Beyond concern for its immediate safety, a living bird must view me with some indifference. Even if it’s eating from my feeder, the bird likely thinks nothing of me, though by feeding it I may become entangled in its ongoing evolution—and it in mine. For as rapacious as humans can be, we are also in thrall to nature. Even a tiny South American hummingbird, dead for more than a century, can exert a tremendous influence. It may appear to revolve around our needs, but ours equally revolve around its.

Consider the factory farm, where conditions have more in common with a concentration camp than with the barnyards of children’s books. To call these animals livestock (a cow is never or rarely Bos taurus) is the beginning of the abstraction that allows us to slaughter them en masse. It may appear that we care nothing about these animals, yet the opposite is also the case: we care so much about them, and about what they offer us, that we construct massive edifices, whole economies even, dedicated to their power.

Make no mistake: in a slaughterhouse, an individual cow has no power. Its sacrifice is absolute. But taken as a whole, cattle—and their accompanying euphemism, beef—have tremendous power. We offer our bodies up to them, as at an altar, much as in the ritual of the natural history museum, in the ritual that is “nature,” we turn animals into idols. We prize them for what we need, including their indifference. Because at the same time that we want a world in which we are the undisputed masters, one that glorifies our mercenary egos, we want another world that is autonomous and wild, one that doesn’t care about us, one that confirms our insignificance.

And so, on a balmy June day in 2014, I followed the trainbearer’s trail (or at least my version of it) into a small back room at ANSP. There I watched the collection manager, Nate Rice, skin a crow as two assistants assailed their own. Lying on the bloody table was a pair of crow’s eyes, looking disconcertingly like blueberries. A starling in a plastic bag on the table was clearly next. This task would fall, after I’d gone, to the illustration student interning for the summer. Also on the table were scalpels, pens, thermometers, tiny scissors, rulers, viscera, wire cutters (for breaking bones), and a toothbrush (for smoothing out feathers).

As there are shoe stores and bookstores and jewelry stores, Rice told me, there were once bird stores. You could pick up a pair of oxfords, go next door for Moby-Dick, then, on a whim, buy your wife a mounted Lesbia victoriae. Rice’s hypothesis was that at some point a well-to-do Lancastrian put together a cabinet or what he called a collage: a group of mounted birds assembled, maybe, on a side table. Eventually the specimen tag was lost or removed, either when the bird was purchased or when the collection it was part of was broken up. There was a year in the 1800s, he said, when more than 100,000 hummingbirds were shipped to England (there were many such years, I later learned, and Rice’s estimate was conservative). What he didn’t say—what his good manners may have prevented him from saying—was that, like most needles in haystacks, the futility of my search was part of its meaning.

Mounted on a branch in the basement of a provincial museum, separated from others of its kind, my trainbearer radiated significance. But when Rice pulled open first one drawer of tagged and stuffed trainbearers, then a second, I could only ask why the academy needed so many. We are d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title
• Epigraph
• Contents
• 1 Put a Bird on It
• 2 The Hater’s Guide to Birds
• 3 The Buoy Bird
• 4 The Hater’s Guide to Birds
• 5 What a Name Can Do
• 6 The Hater’s Guide to Birds
• 7 There Never Was a Bird
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright