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.