Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (best ebook reader TXT) 📕

In 1932, Rothschild, disinherited for eschewing banking in favor of birds, became embroiled in a museum acquisition that would make a gripping soap opera. Rothschild, who was being blackmailed by an ex-mistress, was forced to sell his beloved birds to the American Museum of Natural History for a dollar a bird, or $225,000. At the time of the sale, the baron broke down and wept; parting with the birds of paradise alone proved far more painful than parting with the mistress. The museum was unrelenting, but Rothschild got the last laugh. According to one account, when the AMNH ornithologist arrived at Tring to pack up the birds, he realized that none of them had been cataloged or labeled. There wasn't any need; the baron knew the Latin name of every bird by heart. When the crated birds arrived in New York, they filled an entire storeroom.

Rothschild died in 1937. He bequeathed Tring to the British Museum, which owned it until it split with the Natural History Museum in 1963. Today Tring, the NHM's bird annex, contains the world's greatest collection of birds—nearly a million skins, including Charles Darwin's Galápagos finches (which he collected on his historic voyage on the Beagle), as well as 800,000 eggs and more than 2,000 nests. (It includes numerous stuffed dogs, too.) When the guild visits Tring, members get to go behind the scenes where all the scientific research takes place.

The guild also has gone to the Powell-Cotton Museum in Kent. Major Percy Powell-Cotton (1866–1940) was a rich hunter who survived a lion attack in Africa, then re-created other lion attacks at his home. Powell-Cotton hired the best British firms to preserve his kills, which he shipped home from Africa and Asia. He pioneered the diorama in England, eventually turning his house into a private museum where people could feast their eyes on the glorious scenes where he hunted.

However, the guild trip I thought sounded most exciting was the one to Charles Waterton's estate, Walton Hall, in West Yorkshire. Waterton is known as taxidermy's "eccentric genius." In the 1820s, Walton Hall, built on an island in a lake, was his Xanadu—the antithesis of a museum, with its storerooms of lifeless skins. Here all the animals lived harmoniously with Waterton as a landlocked Noah who communed with nature as only a Victorian British taxidermist could. He built stables so that his horses could converse, kennels so that his hounds could look out on the land, and cozy pigpens that absorbed warm sunlight—all while he, an ascetic Catholic, slept on the floor with an oak block for a pillow. At Walton Hall, birds could have sex in a starling tower that was cleverly hidden by tall yew-hedges, then raise their young on the lake where rowing was forbidden. What was so eccentric about that? But how else would you describe someone who once tried to persuade vampire bats to suck his toes as a means of bloodletting? Or who built a three-mile-long brick wall around his property to keep out poachers and their deafening guns, thereby establishing the first nature preserve in England?

Taxidermists knew Waterton as the fiery squire who pleaded with them to go outside and study animals in the wild. In this, he prefigured William Hornaday and Carl Akeley by nearly a century. Most other people knew him as the author of the Victorian bestseller Wanderings in South America, his remarkable, if discursive, account of his barefoot trek through Guiana, where he encountered the rarest, most colorful birds and beasts, which he killed and brought home. (The epilogue of the 1889 edition has a treatise on taxidermy.) Sometimes Waterton was an unreliable narrator, interchanging the names jaguar and tiger, chameleon and lizard, and puma and lion. But his vivid prose, painstaking mounts, and daring adventures—shooting deadly vipers, finding the curare used to poison arrow tips, and riding a thirty-foot caiman (perfectly safe if you avoid the teeth and tail)—provided Victorians with a glimpse of the marvelous unknown, a place they longed to see, if only from an armchair.

About taxidermy, Waterton said, "You must possess Promethean boldness, and bring down fire and animation, as it were, into your preserved specimen. Repair to the haunts of birds on plains and mountains, forests, swamps, and lakes and give up your time to examine the economy of the different orders of birds."

Waterton was antiestablishment in a way that is characteristic of all taxidermists—that is, he sided with animals over people, especially museum men, who tagged and labeled birds as if they were machine parts. Nothing depressed Waterton more than a beautiful bird badly mounted, something he called "a hideous spectacle of death in ragged plumage." His own birds blazed with vitality, as they did in the jungle. No one could get a hummingbird's gorget to sparkle quite like Waterton. Yet even he was capable of falsifying nature to make a point or stir up controversy. Take, for instance, his most famous mount—a "taxidermic frolic"—called the Nondescript.

In the early 1800s, whenever new species were brought back to England, they were given two-part Latin names that typically incorporated the name of the discoverer or the person who had funded the expedition. Waterton despised binomial naming because it made the fascinating study of wildlife arcane and elitist. To him, nothing was less truthful (or more self-serving) than naming one of God's wonders after a person, especially if that person was a rich collector or a hunter who knew virtually nothing about the species. He called binomial naming "pseudo-classical phraseology." Once, while flipping through a book of bird plates with scientific names, he said, "I find that a hawk is called the 'Black Warrier,' and that the Latin name ... given it is 'Falco Harlani.' Pray, who or what is 'Harlani'? A man, a mountain, or a mud-flat? Is 'Black Warrier' a Negro of pugnacious propensities?" His own system, called complimentary nomenclature, used local names and characteristics to describe species. This was a perfectly logical approach, except