Birds and Man

MP3 Audio CD. Birds and Man

CHAPTER I

BIRDS AT THEIR BEST


By Way of Introduction

Years ago, in a chapter concerning eyes in a book of Patagonian
memories, I spoke of the unpleasant sensations produced in me by the
sight of stuffed birds. Not bird skins in the drawers of a cabinet, it
will be understood, these being indispensable to the ornithologist, and
very useful to the larger class of persons who without being
ornithologists yet take an intelligent interest in birds. The
unpleasantness was at the sight of skins stuffed with wool and set up on
their legs in imitation of the living bird, sometimes (oh, mockery!) in
their "natural surroundings." These "surroundings" are as a rule
constructed or composed of a few handfuls of earth to form the floor of
the glass case--sand, rock, clay, chalk, or gravel; whatever the
material may be it invariably has, like all "matter out of place," a
grimy and depressing appearance. On the floor are planted grasses,
sedges, and miniature bushes, made of tin or zinc and then dipped in a
bucket of green paint. In the chapter referred to it was said, "When the
eye closes in death, the bird, except to the naturalist, becomes a mere
bundle of dead feathers; crystal globes may be put into the empty
sockets, and a bold life-imitating attitude given to the stuffed
specimen, but the vitreous orbs shoot forth no life-like glances: the
'passion and the life whose fountains are within' have vanished, and the
best work of the taxidermist, who has given a life to his bastard art,
produces in the mind only sensations of irritation and disgust."

That, in the last clause, was wrongly writ. It should have been _my_
mind, and the minds of those who, knowing living birds intimately as I
do, have the same feeling abou