The milliner and the mourning dove
Seven wild women / Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey
We carry birds in our hearts, they have been around 150 million years longer than us modern earthbounders, our culture is impossibly entangled with theirs. Birds have shaped us, we have immortalised them in art and literature, our first attempts at mimicking their song was a note released from the bone of a vulture, we endow them with super powers in folklore and legend, we wave flags of hope, freedom and peace that bear their image, inking our bodies with swallows and eagles, their grace and song celebrated in ballet and opera.
All this considered, birds are still not shown the admiration and respect they truly deserve, we still shoot them from the skies for fun and wear their plumage in a vain attempt at emulating their sophistication and beauty. A dead bird is always a dispiriting sight, silent, earthed and heavy like a marionette with snipped strings, a broken bell. No amount of rationalising can loosen the stomach knot experienced when pulling open a large shallow draw of birds lying on their backs, wings closed, toes pointed, eyes closed, each still corpse neatly presented as if in some invisible gothic coffin. It's not just the sight of a dead bird that jars the spirit so much as the fact that it is draw after draw of the same species, a draw of Ring-necked parakeets, a draw of nightingales, like being witness to a macabre mass extinction event, welcome to the world of skin collections.
Image from LSU Museum of Natural Science
In the early days of the natural sciences, collecting was an obsessive pastime that took the term hunter gatherer to a different level, collecting expeditions were despatched far and wide, scouring all corners of the earth for anything and everything from, eggs and butterflies to orchids and shells, whether you could name it or it needed a name, it was collected and collected on mass, case after case of the same egg, along with the bird that laid it, even the nest it was laid in. Any notion of completely wiping out a species or forcing a local extinction was simply trampled in the stampede for financial gain, specimens were auctioned off to the highest paying collector, the rarest and most unusual reaping the greatest reward.
In 1886 journalist and bird enthusiast Frank Chapman took a stroll through the streets of Manhattan, on two walks he spotted 40 different species, birds such as Bohemian Waxwing, California quail, Red-headed woodpecker and Snow bunting, even a Green-backed heron, this at the time made Manhattan one of the most twitch-able spots in the world, the only problem was, that all these birds were dead, all found decorating the hats of fashionable women.
Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey very much disapproved of the collection of birds for the purpose of fashion and worked tirelessly towards educating people on the value of living birds and how we should be putting our energies into their protection. Born in 1863 in Lewis county, New York, Florence was at an early age encouraged to study natural history, by the time she was attending college she was already very knowledgeable and being appalled by the quantities of birds being killed for specimen study. Florence, shunned the use of bird skins in her studies, did something unusual, she started championing the study of living bird behaviour and is credited with being the first person to use binoculars (opera glasses back then) for this purpose. A fierce advocate for the protection of birds, she condemned the mass extermination of birds for their fashionable feathers in a series of highly charged newspaper articles, her efforts eventually led to the Lacey act of 1900 which illegalised the interstate trade in wildlife and was the first step in halting the killing of wild birds for the fashion industry. Florence continued to pursue her passion for writing and nature, publishing over 100 journal articles and 10 books, contributing many articles to the Audubon magazine. It was these articles that in 1889 were eventually compiled and published, Birds through an opera glass is now regarded as the first field guide to birds and Florence the first lady of ornithology.
“Ask him for his compass. He needs no trail. Follow him and he will teach you the secrets of the forest”