A review by Julia Zarankin
The Owl That Fell From the Sky: Stories of a
Museum Curator, by Brian Gill
Awa Press, 2012
152 pages, $23.99—softcover
ABA Sales / Buteo Books
13913
The curious visitor to a museum filled with
zoological specimens and curiosities has to wonder: Who are the people who
organize these collections? What stories do the collections tell? What makes
them relevant?
And what happens in natural history museums behind
closed doors?
Brian Gill’s Owl that Fell from the Sky takes the
reader on a riveting journey into the rarefied world of a natural history museum.
The curator of birds and other land vertebrates at the Auckland Museum, Gill provides a
luminous, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the workings of a collection that
contains thousands of avian specimens, including copious bones, study skins , and the eggs of extinct
birds.
Gill doesn’t hide or apologize for the
strangeness of his world. On the contrary, the book celebrates the fact that
the seemingly outlandish, obsessively documented objects that make up a natural
history collection are actually closer to our everyday than we could have
imagined.
The Owl that Fell from the Sky presents
fifteen anecdotal essays about the histories of the curious objects held in New
Zealand collections, ranging from a gigantic stuffed elephant named Rajah to an
enormous moa egg and a tortoise allegedly given as a gift by Captain Cook. The
author weaves those anecdotes into a larger narrative thread that emphasizes how
museums preserve a record not only of individual memory, but also of the biodiversity
of our planet.
In his introduction, Gill affirms that “as
natural history collections grow, they become directories of animals and plants
that have lived in different areas at different times, and may hold the key to
how characteristics and distributions of species have varied with place and
changed with time.” Museums are not just repositories of curiosities and dusty storage
spaces full of obsessively catalogued information; they “help us understand
life on earth in all its exuberant diversity—and understanding nature is a
crucial step toward protecting it.”
Gill points
out that natural history museums could not meet that lofty goal without the input of the
public. “An unexpected telephone call or visitor, heralding what may be a rare
or unusual find, adds spice to the natural history curator’s day.” It is this
community involvement—and the conversations it ignites—that bring the essays in
this book to life.
Today, museums big and small all over the world depend in part on specimens salvaged by birders, and some of those finds lead to surprising discoveries. A “strange white bird” delivered by a
young girl to the Auckland museum turned out to be a vagrant Barn Owl—only the
fourth ever reported in New Zealand. What follows the arrival of the mysterious
owl is detective work at its best. The reader accompanies Gill as he conducts a
postmortem examination and consults an entomologist after discovering an
accidentally swallowed ant in the bird’s gizzard. The ant turns out to be
endemic to Australia, a fact that both solves the mystery and gives the book its title: The owl was probably hunting near an Australian
airport, roosted in the undercarriage of an airplane, and dropped to its death
as the plane landed in New Zealand.
Some inquiries from the public verge on the
surreal. Although bird identifications predominate, Gill is often asked to
identify “dinosaur” bones, which usually turn out to be whale or horse bones. One
anxious caller assumed that Gill would be able to identify a bird based on the
similarity of its song to “a phrase in the third movement of Bruch’s violin
concerto.” The questioners range as widely as the questions, from urban
planners to students working on science projects to the speechwriter who desperately
needs to know whether kiwis mate for life.
One of the
heroes of this book is Thomas Cheeseman, a self-taught natural historian who
spent nearly half a century as curator of the Auckland museum. As we follow
Cheeseman’s career from from 1874 to 1923, we see the city and its museum
transformed into a professional institution in a
budding colonial capital.
The essays revolving around Cheeseman’s contributions
remind us that museums are anything but stagnant; in fact, the specimens that make up collections often circumnavigate the world before ending up in a museum.
Thanks to Cheeseman’s exchanges with far-flung institutions, the Auckland
museum has ended up with birds from Siberia, China, and Sulawesi—and in return,
museums across the world hold specimens from New Zealand. The tiny skin of a Black-thighed
Falconet, for example, arrived in New Zealand on a particularly circuitous
route, traveling from New Guinea to Auckland by way of Italy.
What makes The Owl that Fell from the Sky such a
lively read is that Brian Gill invites his reader to witness and participate in
the work of his museum. We follow a taxidermist in his meticulous and slightly
gory preparation of a nearly 9,000-pound elephant for display; we are privy to how
the author himself skeletonizes an albatross, a Mute Swan, and two wallabies by
burying them in his compost pile (with “worthwhile results”); we watch a talented
young American prepare a terrifyingly vivid diorama of a Kea pecking at a
bloody lamb.
Like the collections he describes, Gill’s prose
is filled with wondrous and surprising detail. Names, dates, scientific
information—including a fascinating excursus on the requirements of the
International Code of Zoological Nomenclature—and historical factoids fly at
the reader quickly, voluminously, and sometimes out of left field. I found
myself underlining and taking notes simultaneously, and almost always wanting
more.
On the one hand, I wished that Gill would
slow down and dwell longer on the historical details, but on the other, I
realized that the book’s design was different. The exuberant tempo of the
historical background information builds toward Gill’s principal point, that
natural history museum collections are modern—rather than arcane—institutions
in the service of science and humanity. For instance, museum specimens can help
biosecurity officers identify unknown and perhaps unwanted animals. Though
stereotypes of the curmudgeonly, obsessive curator abound, Gill shows us another
side of his profession: endless curiosity and remarkable knowledge coupled with
a humble desire to learn more and to ask more questions, and a decidedly quirky
sense of humor.
The journeys of the objects and specimens
themselves are often action-packed, and the stories they tell vivid and related
with compassion. In a particularly moving passage, Gill follows the trajectory
of the New Zealand skins sent by Cheeseman to a Florentine museum. Those birds "survived the turmoil of one hundred and twenty years of
Italian history,” and were still lying on their backs in the drawers when in August 1944 New Zealand Army units entered a newly liberated
Florence. History, both individual and collective,
is woven into the narrative told by the objects in a museum collection.
Gill’s book
demands some work of its reader. The book lacks an overarching narrative or
any kind of summing-up. Though I would have
appreciated a bit more commentary from the author—and perhaps a conclusion—I
realize that what Gill has done here is to emulate the very spirit of a museum
collection, which urges the viewer to connect the dots and to shape meaning out
of the discrete elements of a collection. We construct our own narrative based
on the stories he has given us. In a sense, the stories Gill tells are
simple, but they reveal a deeper concern about the ethical imperative to record
and to remember, and a full awareness of the uncanny ability of objects to tell
stories.
- Julia Zarankin is on her way to becoming a birder. In her
other life, she is a writer, editor, writing coach, and lecturer to later-life
learners in Toronto. In her former life, she worked as a professor of Russian
literature and culture at the University of Missouri. She blogs regularly about
birds, words, and other essential matters at Ontario
Nature.
Recommended citation:
Zarankin, J. 2013. Behind Museum Doors [a review of The Owl That Fell From the Sky, by Brian Gill]. Birding 45(4):67.
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