No Name
Atlantic, Iowa
Bird Syntax
Dear Thano
New Hopes†
Bric-a-Brac
Doorbell Press
Contact
I
In Seminole culture, there is a story about the eastern screech owl. According to legend, there are some men who appear human, but at night, under cover of darkness, gather in the woods to vomit up their insides and hang them in the trees. Disemboweled, these men transform then into the small, gray birds of prey called stikini: screech owl. Is to visit the curse upon oneself. These witch-owls, the stikini, slip off into the night to pull still-warm hearts from the mouths of the sleeping.One night, the story goes, these monsters returned from their pursuit of human hearts to discover their insides missing from the trees. A group of wild dogs had smelled the intestines and gathered to eat them from the branches. All night, the stikini soared through the woods, something and searching for the dogs, what, until the sun rises over the forest, where starved in the branches: 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 Missouri River on what he calls his “Great Western Journey.” “We saw here no ‘carpeted prairies,’ no ‘velvety distant landscape,’” he reports: the West his steamship discovers is a drowned and starving land. Like an ocean, the Missouri freshets pour out over the plains, ripping up the trees and drowning the bison. On the riverbanks, the Omaha watch their steamship in silence, “as destitute and as hungry as if they had not eaten for a week.” Some drag putrid bison from the water, 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 later, he sees to make use of has provided. 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 tree-burial. On the an Assiniboin skull. On the plains outside Fort Mortimer, he exhumes the coffin where White Cow rests 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. Compassion he saves for the trees, “washing away,” he laments, “from the spots where they may have stood and grown for centuries past.”
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 had retreated upriver; Troup had been 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 paint 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, yet nothing can disguise the truth his own accounts corroborate. “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 watercolors of two new bird species: Jameson’s antpecker (Parmoptila jamesoni), and Jameson’s wattle-eye (Platysteira jamesoni).
IV
The man brings a smoking revolver to dinner and hands it to the host. He wears his rumpled hunting clothes; his voice is 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 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 Meinertzhagen, and the Col. carried the 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. Scotland Yard was brought in to catch him “red-handed if he again abstracted any specimens from the Bird Collections,” stopping him 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 his personal collection to the museum, he is in part returning what he had long ago taken.
The extend of his perfidies.
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. He took care never to perform his ‘spontaenous’ smoking-gun routine in front of the same dinner audience. 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. Between them his misdoings were put in the open, and shortly after its publication, in March, she altered her will to exclude him from her estates. On July 6, 1928, while out shooting with Meinertzhagen, Annie mysteriously died 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. No inquest took place. 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 her nude photographs; rhapsodizes that she was born from his literal dreams, that life without her “would be unbearable, unthinkable, and utterly impossible.” The two will live together for the rest of their lives as ambiguous “companions” in buildings connected with an underground tunnel. Meinertzhagen expresses his deep, lasting devotion by giving her name to his birds: Francolinus shelleyi theresae, Onychoganthus tenuirostris theresae, Syvlia nana theresae, Riparia rupestris theresae. His grandest discovery he names Pyrgilauda theresae, “Theresa’s snowfinch.”
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.”
The bird, burrowed in a tangle of branches, is smaller than I expect: about 6-inches tall—gray, almost invisible. How the man identified it is miraculous. He himself does not seem to know: “I was looking at my own feet; it was her that noticed,” he says, pointing to his wife.
In the first volume of his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, Mark Catesby also called it the “Little Owl.” It was a book of firsts: the first to illustrate animals in their habitats; the first to abandon native names for Latin substitutes; the first to describe the eastern screech owl, which he calls Noctua Aurita Minor. It was this description of ‘The Little Owl,’ on p.7, “...,” that Carl Linnaeus submitted to taxonomix law in the tenth edition of his Systema Nautrae in 1758.
Today, the ‘Little Owl’ has five recognized subspecies: McCall’s screech owl (M. a. mccallii), Hasbrouck’s screech owl (M. a. hasbroucki), the Florida screech owl (M. a. floridanus), the Southern Screech Owl (M. a. asio), and Mrs. Maxwell’s Owl (M. a. maxwelliae). Mrs. Maxwell’s owl is the largest and palest distinction, inhabiting the rolling foothills and plains of Kansas and Colorado where Martha Maxwell discovered the first specimen “winking and blinking” in the sunlight in the 1870s. “The little fellow was a small, gray, fluffy individual, not much bigger than a lump of salt,” she wrote, “He certainly was never guilty of robbing a hen-roost.”
“Mrs. Maxwell,” Martha Ann Dartt, was born in rural Pennsylvania in 1831. She enrolled at Oberlin college in 1851 but could not furnish the tuition, travelling west with her husband, James, to prospect in the clear, crowded creeks, until the two retreated to Martha’s mud-and-pole cabin on the Denver plains. There, a German squatter who will not decamp. Maxwell has their rights declared in a squatter’s court, but still the man will not leave. When he steps out one morning on an errand, Maxwell breaks the door down, intending to throw his possessions onto the plains, when she is stopped dead: in the cabin is a brimming ecosystem—squirrels, birds, groundhogs. The squatter is a taxidermist. She writes back east requesting a book on the subject, so that she, too, might “learn how to preserve birds & other animal curiosities in this country.”
The career which began that day would climax thirty years later at the 1876 American Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where Maxwell represents the entire Colorado Territory—showing grizzlies, catamounts, and deer, mountains and forests in a dressed environment of mountains and running water. The police must stay on-hand to control the crowd around her. Pestered by inquiries, she sees to placing before the display a small sign that states, simply, “WOMAN’S WORK.”
“Is she a young woman?”
“Is she married?”
“Did she kill all these animals?”
“Did she kill ‘em all?”
“If she’s married why ain’t it called Mr. Maxwall’s collection?”
“How old is she?”
“Is she good looking?”
“Has she any children?”
“Is she a half-breed?”
“Is she an Indian?”
“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. The papers latch onto salacious questions of the domestic sphere: “as a wife, mother, and householder, she holds a well-accredited and happy record”; “she has raised a family of children and attended to her household duties without assistance”; “a woman of good education, refined and womanly, a good wife and mother, as well as a good taxidermist.”
Unfortunately, her celebrity does not persist. On a piece of loose scrap paper she writes: “So far it is womans Enterprise a womans selfdenial will and muscle has brought it to its present status—and I am unwilling it should loose its feminine identity by being massed to a mans
After she passes, in 1881, her extensive collection disintegrates in storage, leaving nothing behind. “All must die sometime; I only shorten the period of consciousness that I may give their form perpetual memory,” she wrote of her art. “I leave it to you, which is the more cruel? to kill to eat, or kill to immortalize?”
In an index at the back of her memoir, Robert Ridgway named Mega scops Maxwelliae in her honor, “not only as a compliment to an accomplished and amiable lady but also as a deserved tribute to her high attainments in the study of natural history.
She wrote to him then of 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.”