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Birds of a Feather
I
In Seminole culture there is a story about the screech owl. According to tradition, there are some men who appear human, but at night, under cover of darkness, gather in the woods to vomit up their entrails. Hanging their intestines in the trees, the men abandon human form, owls, and slip into the woods to pull the hearts from the mouths of the sleeping. These witches are called stikini: the same word for screech-owl.
One night, the story goes, a group of wild dogs smelled the intestines hanging in the trees and gathered to eat them from the branches. When the owls returned, their insides were gone, and without them the witch-owls could not eat. All night the monsters soared through the trees, searching for the wild dogs, until the sun rose over the forest and froze them where they rest: screech owls, sitting in the branches.
II
“We landed for the night on an island so thick with underbrush that it was no easy matter to walk through; perhaps a hundred buffalo calves were dead in it, and the smell was not pleasant as you may imagine,” John James Audubon writes in his journal in X. He is fifty-eight years old, travelling up the flooded Missouri on a “Great Western Journey.”
“We saw here no ‘carpeted prairies,’ no ‘velvety distant landscape,’” he writes: instead his steamship discovers a drowned and starving land. Like an ocean the Missouri freshets cover the plains, ripping up the trees, drowning the bison. On the banks the Omaha watch the Omega in silence, “as destitute and as hungry as if they had not eaten for a week.” Some drag putrid bison from the river, shooting the ship as it passes; others endure the “pelting rain and keen wind” to beg scraps outside Fort Union, where the Omega arrives on June 12th.
“To fill the time on this dreary day, I asked Mr. Chardon to come up to our room and give us an account of the small-pox among the Indians,” Audubon recounts. Chardon obliges. “Early in the month of July, 1837, the steamer ‘Assiniboin’ arrived at Fort Clark with many cases of small pox on board,” he says. “An Indian stole the blanket of one of the steamboat’s watch-men (who lay at the point of death, if not already dead), wrapped himself in it, and carried it off, unaware of the disease that was to cost him his life, and that of many of his tribe—thousands, indeed… They died by hundreds daily; their bodies were thrown down beneath the high bluff, and soon produced a stench beyond description. Men shot their wives and children, and afterwards, driving several balls into their guns, would place the muzzle in their mouths, and, touching the trigger with their feet, blow their brains out.”
“I pity these poor beings from my heart!” Audubon writes, two days before he begins to pillage their graves. Outside Fort Union he debates “when it would be best for us to take away the skulls, some six or seven in number,” from a trees-burial. On the what. On the plains outside Fort Mortimer he tumbles down a what reveals White Cow wrapped in an American flag, crawling with worms. Audubon takes his head, “twisted off in a moment, under jaw and all,” and leaves the rest on the ground to rot. His compassion he saves for the trees, “washing away from the spots where they may have stood and grown for centuries past.” “On looking along the banks of the river, one cannot help observing the half-drowned young willows, and cotton trees of the same age, trembling and shaking sideways against the current,” he laments, without melancholic the river “in its wrath, determined to undo all that the Creator in His bountifulness has granted us to enjoy.”
As Audubon sits onboard the Omega contemplating this dark and drowned land, a novel song emerges delicately from the grasses. “We saw Meadow Larks,” he writes, “whose songs and single notes are quite different from those of the Eastern States; we have not yet been able to kill one to decide if new or not.”
III
On August 17th, 1889, Sir Henry Morton Stanley travels back down the Congo to discover the “Rear Column” of his rescue expedition devastated. Major Barttelot had been killed, Ward retreated upriver, Troup sent home ill, and James S. Jameson, the young naturalist appointed second-in-command, lay dying in hospice in Bangala.
On this point morbid rumors begin to circulate. Their interpreter, Assad Farran, claims the naturalist had partaken in cannibalism. He alleges that Jameson had paid six “cloths” to purchase a 10-year-old girl and watch her be cannibalized by the men at Riba Riba so he could watercolor the scene. “There were six of them, all neatly done,” Farran states: “The first sketch was of the girl as she was led to the tree. The second showed her stabbed, with the blood gushing from the wounds. The third showed her dissected. The fourth, fifth, and sixth showed men carrying off the various parts of the body.”
Jameson, near-dead, has time to telegram his wife once more before he succumbs: “The reports about me, emanating from Assad Farran, a distinguished interpreter, are false,” he writes, “if made public, stop them.” But already it is too late. Desperate, Mrs. Jameson submits his diaries to the New York Times. “I sent my boy for six handkerchiefs,” Jameson had written on August 8, “thinking it was all a joke, and that they were not in earnest, but presently a man appeared, leading a young girl of about ten years old by the hand, and I then witnessed the most horribly sickening sight I am ever likely to see in all my life,” he explains. At last, he admits, “I tried to make some small sketches of the scene while still fresh in my memory.”
At Yambuya, his sketches of the murder sit beside his crude watercolors of two new bird species: Parmoptila jamesoni—Jameson’s antpecker; and Platysteira jamesoni—Jameson’s wattle-eye.
IV
The man is known for his stories. He brings a smoking gun to dinner and hands it to the host; he what. He brags about the time he killed a Kikuyu man and ate him just to learn the taste: he did not taste good, the man says, and he decided to eat waterbuck instead, laughing.
The man’s name is Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, and he has more stories to tell. It was he who had planned and executed the famous “Haversack Ruse” in Palestine in WWI; who had met Hitler hiding a pistol in his pocket; who had ended the Nandi resistance by shooting the leader point-blank during a peace meeting; who had beaten his own servant to death with a polo mallet; who had killed his own men for disobeying him; who had ordered an entire village massacred for murdering a white man. “I gave orders that every living thing except children should be killed without mercy,” he wrote in his Kenya Diary in 1902. “Every soul was either shot or bayonetted, and I am happy to say that no children were in the village.” He is also the man called “the last of the great British bird collectors”: Chairman of the British Ornithologist’s Club, winner of the Godman-Salvin Medal.
As a boy, Richard Meinertzhagen had been bounced on Charles Darwin’s lap, admired by Thomas Huxley, and mentored by Herbert Spencer. “Observe, record and explain,” Spencer told Richard, and Meinertzhagen carried his mantra across the globe. He cataloged redpolls in France, named the “Meinertzhagen Warbler” in Morocco, and discovered th
forest owlet in 33 years. His collection 25,000.
As early as 1919, suspicions were raised. “I can say upon my oath that Meinertzhagen’s collection contains skins stolen from the Leningrad Museum, the Paris Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History,” one ornithologist pledged. The British Museum, too, had doubts. “Colonel Meinertzhagen has been in several times in the past year,” coming “just before the lunch hour, during which the Bird Room remains open but with only one of the staff in attendance,” the curator noted. In Meinertzhagen’s absence, birds went missing. Scotland Yard was brought in to catch him “red-handed if he again abstracted any specimens from the Bird Collections,” and indeed, he is caught leaving with nine birds in his suitcase. Yet when the museum finally bans him from the Bird Room, in 1919, Lord Rothschild personally intervenes to reinstate him.
When Meinertzhagen at last donates the museum his 25,000 skins, he is merely returning what he had long ago taken. He had what.
As the ornithologists begin to pull at the stitches of his scientific fabrications, the truth of his wartime heroism begins to unravel too. Meinertzhagen had neither planned nor executed the Haversack Ruse; had never once met Hitler; had not, as he claimed, beaten his own servant to death. There was no train crash in Greece, no Danish ancestry, and no official record of his alleged massacre at Kimbui; indeed, there is little evidence to corroborate any of his alleged accomplishments—even the terrible assassination of Koitalel Arap Samoei during the Nandi peace negotiation was not his to claim. Certainly, he had never met Charles Darwin. The albatross-bone pipe he gifted to the British Museum as Darwin’s own had been built in 1928.
What the revelations suggest he had done, however, was murder his wife, Annie. In March 1927, Meinertzhagen had published a long, two-part article in Ibis which in no uncertain terms fabricated ornithological work the two had conducted together in Morocco. Between them his misdoings were put in the open, and shortly after its publication, she altered her will to exclude him from her estates. X-weeks later, on July 6 1928, while out shooting with Meinertzhagen, Annie mysteriously dies from “injury to spinal cord & lower part of brain from bullet wound at short range.” “We had been practising with my revolver and had just finished when I went to bring back the target. I heard a shot behind me and saw my darling fall with a bullet through her head,” Meinertzhagen wrote in his diary the next month. The bullet had come down through the top of her head.
In her absence, Meinertzhagen’s diary fills with effusions of an intense, all-consuming obsession with his seventeen-year-old cousin, Theresa. He pastes in nude photographs of her; rhapsodizes that she was born from his literal dreams, that life without her “would be unbearable, unthinkable, and utterly impossible.” She takes a job where she helps him steal. and is repaid with a devotion in what. expresses his devotion by giving her name to the birds—Francolinus shelleyi theresae, Onychoganthus tenuirostris theresae, Syvlia nana theresae, Riparia rupestris theresae—including his one true discovery: “Theresa’s snowfinch,” Pyrgilauda theresae. The two, with underground tunnel.
V
On a trail through the Black Hills of South Dakota a man waves us over to peer through his binoculars. He points us upward, to the branches. “Shh, in the tree, there,” he says: “a little owl.”
When Carl Linnaeus submitted the eastern screech-owl to the taxonomic law of his Systema Naturae in 1758, he based his description on the illustration in Mark Catesby. In X Mark Catesby had traveled to South Carolina to compose his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. It was the first in America: the first to illustrate animals in their natural habitats; the first to abandon native names and attempt systematic Latin substitutes. Catesby conducted the field work; made the illustrations; learned to etch and even hand-color the plates, and so his first eight illustrations have no backgrounds. In plate number seven, he draws the screech owl huddled on a tree stump floating in a blank ocean of page, and names it “The Little Owl.”
The Northern eastern screech owl, where we are, in South Dakota, is the largest, palest subspecies. In her what the taxidermist Martha Maxwell, who had discovered a fledgling “winking and blinking” in the sunlight. Her collection in Colorado contained several examples. “All must die sometime; I only shorten the period of consciousness that I may give their form perpetual memory,” she wrote.
Hers was a career inundated with questions—is she married?; what sort of woman is she?; is she a young woman?; how old is she?; is she good-looking?; has she any children?; is she a half-breed? “If there is any one person who at such a place can be regarded as the observed of all observers it is Mrs. Maxwell,” the Philadelphia Press wrote. “I leave it to you,” she asks in her memoir: “which is the more cruel? to kill to eat, or kill to immortalize?” In an index at the back of the book, Ridgway gives her name to the “Little Owl”: “I name this new form in honor Mrs. M. A. Maxwell”: Mega scops. Maxwelliae.
She wrote to Ridgway then about gender: “I will say, frankly, however, that I am very proud of my owl, not particular of the ‘Maxwell’ part, but of the ‘ae.’ There is such a predominance of ‘i’ and ‘ii’ you know.”