December 24 & 31, 2018 Issue

Dylan Kerr’s absorbing Talk story, “Birds of a Feather,” in this week’s issue, tells about an exhibition of avian art at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Kerr reports that the show includes “some two dozen taxidermied birds from the National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C.” He describes what the Cooper Hewitt curators saw when they visited the Museum of Natural History:

When the curators were granted access, the experience was shocking. “It’s just row after row of drawers,” De León said, as the crystalline song of a resplendent quetzal rang out from a speaker. Méndez, who speaks with a soft Mexican accent, nodded gravely. “You cannot help but, first of all, smell the formaldehyde,” she said. “And then you open, and you open to death.”

Reading that passage, I recalled another New Yorker piece on taxidermied birds – John Seabrook’s brilliant “Ruffled Feathers” (May 29, 2006), in which he describes, among other things, the bird collection of Britain’s Natural History Museum:

The collection is housed in a new building that abuts the museum, which is now open to the public. The bird skins, the feathers still as soft as the day they were shot, in some cases a hundred and fifty years ago, lie on their sides in acid-free cardboard boxes, in large white cabinets that form long spooky corridors stretching the width of the building. 

Illustrating Seabrook’s piece is a beautiful, sorrowful Martin Schoeller photo of ten tagged bird skins. Here’s a detail from it:

Martin Schoeller, "Bird Skins" (Detail)

Morten Strøksnes’s Wonderful "Shark Drunk"

I want to thank The New Yorker’s Dylan Kerr for recommending Morten Strøksnes’s Shark Drunk
(2015). What a great book! Part memoir, part natural history, part adventure story, it’s an account of Strøksnes’s and his friend Hugo Aasjord’s quest for the Greenland shark in a tumultuous Norwegian fjord called Vestfjorden. I’m about half way through it, and I’m savoring every line. Here, for example, is Strøksnes’s description of a sperm whale:

In front of us is one of the largest of all toothed whales. As we approach, it starts to arch its back. When we’re a hundred feet away, it blows one last time and then lowers its head into the water. The flukes and hind part of the body stick vertically up from the surface, iconic as a rock carving, before the sea closes around them. The whale is gone, as if someone had pulled a string, drawing it down into the abyss.

Here’s his depiction of water: 

All is quiet around me and Hugo, except for a soft, musical sound from invisible currents lapping against the boat. Elsewhere around us the water licks at the underside of its own surface, which gleams above the hollows and high shoals.

That “licks at the underside of its own surface” is inspired! Shark Drunk brims with such descriptions. I’m enjoying it immensely.