Buffon, on the other hand, imaged nature as a “grand tableau filled with interesting and complex relationships”⁴⁸ and commissioned elaborate and artful color plates from Martinet; images now known as Planches eluminées or illuminated plates. Depicting a total of 1,239 birds, some have lauded this set of illustrations as the onset of a new era of ornithological iconography, considering them to mark a transition from ornithological draughtsmanship presenting species for identification and classification’s sake to ornithological affect, where the birds’ liveliness and variation is conveyed through a painterly artfulness. Indeed, Martinet’s engravings for Buffon appear luminous, colorful, and animated. They inspired other natural history illustrators to also emphasize artistic composition and aesthetic consideration. In Buffon’s L’Histoire naturelle des oiseaux, most birds are situated within complex landscapes including water, plants, and dramatic skies while striking a variety of poses: some swim in ponds, some sit in front of high steeples, and others look straight at the beholder—even though this happens to not be the case in the two bird-of-paradise pictures reproduced here. [Figs. 09, 10]

But what if this blankness served to emphasize their enigmatic status? Rick De Vos has a grave point: “Representations of birds of paradise as rare and exotic, shrouded in mystery, allowed a lack of knowledge about their distribution and behavior to be normalized and their slaughter and transformation […] to continue […].”⁴⁹ With decolonial scholar Walter D. Mignolo’s concept of “epistemic destitution” we can scale this up to a globalized “colonial politics of knowledge” that relies on asymmetrical hierarchies of suppression, exclusion, and disavowal “demonizing co-existing ways of knowing, sensing, believing and living/being in the world” in order to extract andconsume.⁵⁰ By the end of the nineteenth century, birds of paradise were pushed towards extinction as the plumage of the males had become a high-priced fashion accessory among city folk in imperial centers such as Paris, Vienna, London, Amsterdam, Berlin.

In a broader trajectory of museological display culture, Buffon’s more vivacious and—as philosopher Etienne Turpin likes to say—viviscopic depiction of species can be seen as a precursor to the “habitat dioramas” that would be created in the soon emerging public natural history museums. Among these were the Leverian Museum in London (opened in 1775) and Charles Willson Peale’s museum in Philadelphia (opened in 1786), which both included large bird collections. [See image on page 314] Peale happened to be both a painter and a naturalist; a combination of these skills led to the design of a bird exhibition worth mentioning here. First, Peale mounted the birds in a more realistic, necroaesthetic manner by carefully carving wooden bodies and exhibiting them with rocks and dried plants in front of painted landscapes.⁵¹The 140 bird cases were arranged according to the Linnean taxonomy published in Systema Naturae; a “framed Linnean catalog […] keyed by number to the cases” was available to visitors.⁵² Birds classed lower were nearer to the bottom and birds classed higher, such as raptors, were up at the top. On the walls above were portraits of famous social and political figures. With time, such displays concerned with the limits and classification of species may have become more concerned with dynamic relations and transformation. But, contemporary panopticon’s such as the floor-to-ceiling “Biodiversity Wall(s)” at the natural history museums in Berlin, Frankfurt, or Hamburg to some extent still call forth these earlier experiments in cross-mapping specimens and taxonomic charts as means for their beholders to gasp at nature’s abundance.


Of Birds, Books, and Decolonial Practice

The question that remains is how to learn from these insights about the inner logics of bird books and natural history specimens so they can support us with regards to taking agency towards the challenges of our current situation. First of all, I believe that there is yet something else at play in the lineage of these display techniques—something beyond the exercise of experiencing beauty, wonder, and reverence in the face of these empirical (and dead) specimens as well as pictures. For, despite of all possible good intentions and fascinating outcomes, the history of natural history also still carries the legacies of wanting to grasp the whole of nature, to exercise dominion over it—both mentally and physically—and in that way, take license to use and treat other life forms both as a natural resource and a backdrop for differentiation and hubris. Grappling with the meaning of museum specimens in the context of their actual species’ more recent extinction, environmental studies professor James Hatley writes with regards to the emergence of the scientific enterprise of biology:

That we humans had verified a species to have existed was deemed more important than the fact that it might continue to exist without our having known it as doing so. As a result, the face of the Earth became in principle the planetary backroom for a great and celebrated complex of museums, botanical gardens, and zoos. This is, it strikes me, not a very polite manner in which to conduct oneself in the presence of all the other living kinds.⁵³

In this essay, I have shown that scientific bird images, ranging from the illustrated page to the avian habitat diorama, are the result of heterogeneous exchanges and processes of abstraction—usually also incorporating avifaunal specimens. As we are now faced with the rapid demise of many bird species (due to the metabolic accumulation of insecticides and the destitution of habitats around the world), it is crucial to re-evaluate which stance and conduct one takes in this more-and other-than-human world—both individually and collectively. I believe that a helpful, recursive step is remembering that representations such as those I’ve discussed are not natural—meaning, that the image of a certain bird species and the birds themselves are not the same—and that for this reason they also do very different things.

By exploring the curatorial-editorial dynamics that undergirded the production of the early bird book as a premuseological artifact in the context of objectifying methods such as the index, the taxonomic list, the nomenclature, and the collection catalog, I have tried to emphasize their role in the production of a coloniality that privileges certain standards, views, and visions while suppressing many others. To some degree, historical bird books functioned as tools of capture, or second-nature aviaries. They are early exemplars of a habitus towards the living world that has been effective in western thinking for centuries: a false familiarity born from the reduction of its “perplexity and complexity […] to an amorphous set of words and a collection of fleeting images,”⁵⁴ a reduction that in the context of ornithology—as I would add—often presupposed the killing and subsequent recompositioning of the birds as the very objects of desire. … and all of that while we are so accustomed to associating the beautiful image of the bird with poetry, with thought, with the imagination!”⁵⁵

As a writer, curator, and the co-editor of this book, I am not only invested in better understanding the visual economies of scientific knowledge cultures; in this climate crisis and mass extinction event called the Anthropocene, I also want to actively contribute to an urgent biocultural, socioecological, and multispecies recalibration by finding, gathering, and supporting practices of living, being, and thinking that not “only” de-naturalize, but which also reassemble and reanimate as well. So, how then does all of that inflect the meaning and process of making a book filled with birds today?

*

A scene from Frères des arbres [Siblings of the Trees], an award-winning film about the vastly disruptive effects of deforestation in Papua New Guinea co-directed by French filmmakers and photographers Marc Dozier and Luc Marescot, left its mark on me.⁵⁶ Near the very end of the story, the film’s narrator and main protagonist, Mundiya Kepanga—a charismatic Huli chief and “man of the forest” from the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea campaigning for the preservation of his ancestral lands at the UN—is led by scientists into the Zootèque, a vast subterranean storage facility of the Musée d’histoire naturelle in Paris. [Fig. 11] Reaching six floors down, this repository houses more than eight million zoological taxidermy objects and other specimens. Kepanga, upon entering a row of shelves in the bird collection, is evidently overwhelmed by the appearance not of one, but of eight Cassowary birds—his revered and feared ancestors, as he describes them. He is also astonished by facing a sheer multitude of mounted birds of paradise packed tightly into shelves. Beside wondering out loud how all these birds “from my forest” have ended up down here, Kepanga is struck by being both in a sort of “library of birds” and among a “gathering with family.” For his community, the forest belongs to all inhabitants and the people are mere stewards, like all the other beings, including seed-dispersing paradise birds. Kepanga respectfully praises the great care and maintenance with which the birds have been kept in Paris for more than a century. But, when he wistfully remarks that it is impossible to hear any of their songs, it is a somber reminder that a (dead) bird object that has been dis-membered from its nested ecologies isn’t a real bird any longer.