Here, the European bird book stands out as a particularly multivalent publication subspecies. Field naturalists, bird collection curators, and illustrators had to join forces to create early ornithological monographs of bird species only partially known, that is, perhaps never witnessed in their natural habitat by the person describing them to a world of curious readers. Indeed, over several centuries the bird book was a space where zoological taxonomies were proposed, arranged, negotiated, and sometimes overwritten, thus constituting an intellectual device to record, construct, attribute, order, and re-display nature in a cultural format. As historian of science Emma Spary has emphasized with regards to the gradual codification of ornithology, “a species can be made manifest in three ways, as specimen or technological object in a collection, as description (text) or verbal object, and finally as illustration or visual object.”⁸ Rather than embodying “true” nature, bird books derive from an entangling of birds, things, and words; with Vinciane Despret we could say they are examples of “fabricating science.”⁹ And because in doing this, bird books purposefully activate multiple levels of perception and meaning at once, I consider them curatorialeditorial devices. They are also tools for the “production of nature”¹⁰ and, in that context, bear an inherent coloniality held in place by detailed systems of taxonomy and reductive avian display.


Flights of Fancy – Departures

For centuries, tropical birds of paradise were known in Europe merely as dead objects. Bird skins—imperfectly preserved, with bodies incomplete—were brought back as awe-inspiring discoveries by colonial explorers. The first five specimens were carried by Juan Sebastián Elcano upon returning from circumnavigating the globe on the late Magellan’s vessel Victoria in 1522. Albeit legless, these bird-of-paradise skins stirred a sensation at the Spanish court.¹¹ Lacking the field experience of observing the animals in their habitat, Europeans for a long time told themselves an exotic and ethereal mythology. These stories incorporated anecdotes from the native hunters in the endemic islands, who claimed that the birds could never be caught alive yet were easily shot when landing on the ground to drink.¹² As a result, people in Europe believed that these birds were paradisiacal creatures that lived in the heavens and only ever landed on Earth when they were about to die. While the legendary sixteenth-century skins have long withered and disappeared, the allure and curious speculation projected onto them remain reflected in some depictions of that period.¹³ These images show strange, feathered creatures that undulate among the clouds, a little more piscine perhaps than avian—for they lack spread wings and, as mentioned above, usually have no feet.

The oldest such woodcut image known was published in 1555 by the Swiss polymath Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) in the avifauna volume of his Historia Animalium, entitled De Avium Natura. Most pictures in this book show the birds in profile (usually perched on a branch or rock and appearing relatively alive and healthy). The entry on “De Paradisea” however models its bird from a severed and stuffed, and anatomically quite deformed bird-of-paradise skin. The caption below the Paradisea image states that the depiction is based on correspondence with a humanist from Nuremberg.¹⁴ Indeed, even though Gessner is considered one of the first Renaissance scholars to ever compile a specimen collection for the study of natural history it is unclear whether Gessner ever had a chance to see a bird-of-paradise skin with his own eyes. They were rarities in Europe at that time. But incorporating accounts second-hand was not uncommon. Copying from other manuscripts had been routine in the hand-scribed publishing culture of the Middle Ages; to compensate for the paucity of personal experience, this practice easily survived the introduction of the printing press. Gessner in general relayed many scholarly sources, including the writings of Pliny the Elder.¹⁵His entry on the Paradisea includes references to one of the very first written descriptions made about it—a report from 1521 by Antonio Pigafetta, the chronicler of Magellan’s voyage.¹⁶ Finding all this material must have been a great passion; the German ornithologist Erwin Stresemann (1889–1972) characterized Gessner as a voracious reader who “combed through classical and medieval literature with unparalleled thoroughness for apposite references […] and […] managed to fill 806 closely printed folio pages with the discussion of only 180 species of birds.”¹⁷ His montage of a tale about the birds of paradise imagines fantastical things such as the male and female birds brooding their eggs in a cavity between their bodies while hovering high in the air, bound together by the male’s skinny tail feathers.