the times | Tuesday April 5 2022 31Comment
Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826Show us nature’s story, red in tooth and claw
Natural history museums increasingly hide away the stuffed polar bears and shot birds but they can’t rewrite the past
plaques must go, shrunken heads
must be whisked out of view. You
mark my words: next are the
crucified beetles in cases, the stuffed
stoats, the taxidermied dioramas and
all those sharks and stingrays
suspended from ceilings in 19th-
century museums. Dolly the sheep,
the first cloned mammal, is mounted
on a turntable at the National
Museum of Scotland. Not suitable
for vegetarians, but such exhibits do
tell us about human curiosity and
the spirit of scientific inquiry.
In the accompanying text to Birds
of America, Audubon wrote this of
the raven, killed in huge numbers by
American farmers: “His usefulness is
forgotten, his faults are remembered
and multiplied by imagination; and
whenever he presents himself he is
shot at, because from time
immemorial ignorance, prejudice,
and destructiveness have operated
on the mind of man to his detriment... For my part, I admire the Raven,
because I see much in him calculated
to excite our wonder.”
We are in danger of remembering
all the faults of the past and none of
the wonders. Facts cannot be culled,
individuals cannot be wiped out,
unpleasantness cannot be cancelled
to suit a modern story. Let us have
history as it really was — red in
tooth and claw.
Hugo Rifkind is awayMassachusetts Audubon Society was
founded in 1896 by Harriet
Hemenway and Minna Hall to
campaign against the mass slaughter
of birds for their fashionable feathers.
There’s a cloche hat in the exhibition
made from a peacock bust, complete
with head, beak and artificial eye.
Eek. Today, the National Audubon
Society campaigns to protect birds
across America.
So, Audubon: hero or villain? Raise
him up or tear him down? And whatabout that peacock hat? Those
stuffed ibises? Those “study skins” —
birds steamrollered, but not stuffed,
to maximise storage? Should we still
be gawping at their stitched and
feathered corpses?
A friend who works at a small
regional natural history museum
tells me of the agonies they’ve been
through about whether to keep a
stuffed polar bear — a hit with the
kids — on display. The conclusion:
no. Offensive to modern
sensibilities. A nasty legacy of the
shoot ’n’ stuff past.
Once you start on natural history
collections, where do you stop?
Statues must fall, Cambridge chapelwore his wolf-skin coat and cradled
his gun. He used bear grease to slick
back his hair. In 1833, he bought a
live golden eagle, watched it for
three days, killed it and painted his
“proud prisoner”. Seven of the bird
species painted by Audubon have
since become extinct, including
the Carolina parakeet and the
passenger pigeon.
It’s quite a charge sheet. But just
because you have done wrong
doesn’t mean you can do no right.
Audubon was a founding father of
American naturalism. He wrote of
the immense numbers of buffalo
“murdered” on the plains of North
Dakota, their tongues and tails
carried off as trophies.
After a visit to Canada, he drew
attention to the commercial egg
harvesters stealing about 400,000
eggs in less than two months. He
regretted the “noble forests” felled to
feed “greedy mills” and the nesting
snowy herons shot for their spotless
white plumes. He was among the
first to write of the destruction of the
environment by industry, agriculture
and urbanisation.
On the passenger pigeon, he
miscalculated. He wrote of the
pigeons being shot in their tens of
thousands but thought their
numbers so vast that the species
would survive. By the early 1900s
they were extinct in the wild.
He stirred others into action. The‘I
t moves through the air with
such ease and grace, that it is
impossible for any individual
who takes the least pleasure in
observing the manner of birds,
not to be delighted by the sight of it
whilst on the wing.” Not so delighted
as to put down one’s gun. The artist
and ornithologist John James
Audubon, who wrote in raptures of
the swallow-tailed hawk, sketched
and shot his way across America.
He killed more birds than were
ever necessary for his watercolours.
A bad day was a day when he
bagged fewer than a hundred
specimens. On one outing, he
stopped the son of a friend from
shooting a nesting lapwing: “I hate
to see birds shot when breeding.” To
which the son replied: “By any
person but yourself.”
On Sunday, I saw the (excellent)
Audubon exhibition at the National
Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Birds of America, published between
1827 and 1838, was Audubon’s
attempt to paint every bird species in
North America. Only 120 copies
were printed, each one with 435 life-
size, hand-coloured prints. In 2010, acomplete edition was sold at
Sotheby’s for £7,321,250, setting a
record for the highest price ever paid
at auction for a printed book.
The curators warn us to expect
“beauty and brutality”,
“contradiction and controversy.” He
often shows his birds mid-strike,
making off with snakes, squirrels
and butterflies, their quarry lifeless
and limp.
Audubon was born in Haiti, the
illegitimate son of a chambermaid
and a French plantation owner. As
an adult, he himself owned slaves.
After first observing a specimen in
the wild, he would shoot the bird, pin
its body to a wooden board and draw
it on the spot. No time to lose. The
colour of legs, bills, eyes andplumage all faded soon after death.
(Feeling squeamish yet?)
He derided those who drew from
stuffed specimens and claimed never
to do it himself. Not true — he did.
Audubon was a great one for
exaggeration, embellishment and
never letting the truth get in the way
of a good story.
When he posed for a portrait by
the Scottish artist John Syme, heBecause you’ve done
wrong doesn’t mean
you can do no right
Unpleasantness can’t
be cancelled just to
suit a modern story
Laura
Fre eman