Sharing Space

Sharing Space Miranda Brandon May 2014 MFA Thesis Supporting Paper Committee Members: Jan Estep (advisor), Christine Baeumler, Valentine Cadieux Quietly stalking through the fleshy grass, boots saturated with the morning’s dew, the wind pulling at you gently, urging you to traverse the terrain at its will and not your own. And through the chattering leaves you imagine a faint and distant sound, familiar and foreign all at once. Yearning to know the source of such musical utterances you course correct, forging stealthily forward in your new direction. Anticipation scratches at the walls of your mind, curiosity pulsing through your limbs, inspiring each hand to tremble, but softly. Minutes feel like hours. You stop as if by some force outside your body, just before reaching a small clearing. Slowly, you part the vegetation before you to reveal what must surely be the most perfect spot any terrestrial or arboreal creature could wish for. Cautiously you enter the seemingly untouched space, careful to disturb as little as possible. The leaves and grass sway, unbothered. The insects carry on with their daily chores. You sit respectfully imagining the various histories that may have occurred in the space you now occupy. Was the sound you heard earlier just an echo of the past, your mind longing for some long lost connection? Loss How can we address issues of loss proactively and guard against the vanishing act of species, induced by habitat change? How does human intervention help or hinder the lives of nonhuman animals? These are questions I consider in my two current bodies of work: DIY Bird Populator and Impact. Both projects are bird-centric with DIY posing specific questions and altering the view of spaces through participatory requests and with Impact raising awareness of bird to building strikes through large-scale photographs. 2 Top: DIY Bird Populator (Bismarck Kingfisher) front and back of flyer Bottom: From Papua New Guinea to the Minnehaha Creek, the Bismarck Kingfisher appears in Minneapolis, MN (from DIY Bird Populator) 3 A History with Birds Humankind has long been curious about avian life, with varying approaches and results. Birds have been incorporated into art, ritual, religion, and identity, and have served as our companions, insights, warnings, explanations, and muses. Graeme Gibson’s work The Bedside Book of Birds provides many such examples of the intertwined nature of humans and birds, across time, culture, and fields of knowledge. The range of avian influence is vast, from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians human-bird depiction of gods to 18th century seafarer warnings and to current practices in tribal medicine. Gibson walks us through Australian myths of envious admirers cursing their human objects of affection to take the form of a bird so that no other person can possess them (60-61), to the Canadian Micmac tale of a Chickadee, a Robin, a Blue Jay, and a Pigeon chasing a bear across the sky in the form of stars as a way to explain the rotation of the Earth and the cyclical nature of life (48-50), to folkloric lessons. Gibson states, “in folk tales and parables, the bird is our ventriloquist’s dummy: the voice we hear is our own” (79). Projecting onto another species our own deviations, fears, or premonitions. Of particular resonance in Gibson’s collected tales is that of Carl Safina’s account of the violent sea voyage of George Shelvocke from 1719 to 1722 in which a dark albatross accompanying the ship for several days was seen as the cause for the storm the sailors were fighting. A speculative and rash officer shot the bird in hopes of relief from the storm but instead the crew was met with oppressive winds that greatly prolonged their time at sea. The record of this account was the inspiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of Ancient Mariner, written in 1798, from which the following verse comes: “And I had done a hellish thing And it would work ‘em woe: For all averred, I had killed the bird That made the breeze blow.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge (89). The ship and crew find themselves in a doldrum. The offending Mariner is made to wear the dead albatross around his neck while the ship is adrift in the sun. All but the offender perishes. He is left 4 alone with the corpses of the bird and the men to remind him of the consequences of his actions. Days go by and still no relief of death comes to the Mariner, until one day he feels his heart fill with love for all things while watching creatures swim in the water near the ship. His love breaks the curse, the albatross falling from his neck and the ship coming to life. Eventually the Mariner reaches the shore of his home but finds his life is one of servitude now. His heart aches only to be relieved by the telling of his tale (Safina 87-89). A History of Bird Science Ornithology, the scientific study of birds, has its earliest roots in ancient Greece with Aristotle’s interest in sorting reports from hunters, farmers, and fishermen on bird distribution, behavior, and morphology. Aristotle created some of the first classification groups, which became the basis for a problematic hierarchy system. Additionally, the compilations on natural history by Pliny the Elder brought together information from 2,000 sources that may have been lost otherwise (Chansigaud 14-16). But an interruption of ornithological progression occurred during the Middle Ages as the growing influence of the Christian church tended to stifle scientific investigation while favoring symbolism and superstition, such as the belief that cuckoo saliva could produce grasshoppers (Chansigaud 18). It’s not until the arrival of Renaissance that the field really grows into a concise and systematic science. In the 1500’s, a rise in anatomy studies, continued pressure for critical observations and omission of entries pertaining to fantasy creatures provided for a stronger basis for classification and prepared Europe for the influx of new, foreign species coming back from scientific expeditions abroad (Chansigaud 25-38). A History of Birds as Objects of Desire The flood of new bird species coming back from scientific expeditions represented not just beauty but potential income. It wasn’t just the exterior plumage of the bird but also the interior of the body that held potential interest. In Borneo it is still commonly believed that the blood of the Common Coucal contains medicinal qualities that can be “used both internally and externally as a cure-all, 5 especially for rheumatic complaints” (O’Hanlon 233). To harvest the remedy a nest is located and the legs of the chicks inside are then broken. It is believed that the parent will then forage for “healing herbs” which are used to dress the broken limbs. Upon healing it is believed the chicks retain the healing power of the herbs within their blood and so the chicks are then “collected and bottled whole in brandy or other spirit” and made ready for sale (O’Hanlon 231-233). With exotic species coming in from far away lands, the desire to possess these feathered creatures grew into a market all its own. Wildly appareled birds had come to represent “earthly paradise” in painterly depictions and it was becoming fashionable to create one’s own private paradise, with the construction of aviaries amongst both the nobility and the bourgeois (Chansigaud 38). An example of the power of such beauty can be seen in Cortés’ 1520 attack on Mexico City in which his final blow to terrorize the Mexican people was setting fire to their vast aviaries (Lopez), taking from them their self designed “earthly paradise”, cruelly destroying a space of peace and beauty. It wasn’t just live birds that were sought after; there was also a burgeoning demand for skins for natural history collections, both private and scientific. In the 1800s collections averaged about 20,000 skins alone, in the 1900s 30,000 skins. Trade practices grew, impacting some bird populations significantly as some species were more prized, and hunted, than others (Chansigaud 151). As preservation techniques continued to be refined and collections grew the era of natural history collections began. A History of Hierarchy and Control The indexing involved in natural history serves as a way to organize and quantify the natural world, but also as a way to set humans apart from it. We observe animal behaviors in the field and study their bodily forms in death, then tuck the bodies away in drawers or stuff them and put them on display to eternally act out some role in an idealized setting that is dressed to appear as if it is free from human influence (Vettese16, Buchhart 27). In our efforts to quantify, gather data, understand, and 6 inform others we strive to control our surroundings. Lack of control, or the perception of such, correlates with greater levels of depression and suicidal ideation due to the stress of uncertainty (Burger 71), conversely the perception of control correlates highly with levels of life satisfaction (Hong and Giannakopoulos 554). So, we learn to interpret signs that predict reliable outcomes and when possible we avoid situations that cause distress from the unknown for the sake of maintaining a sense of control. It was a sense of control, or perhaps disregard of consequences, that brought the House Sparrow from England to North America. Although considered to be a pest species today it was originally welcomed for utilitarian reasons of insect control in the mid 1800s. Initially introduced in numbers of only a few dozen, the bird has grown to be one of the most common songbirds due to its extremely flexible and adaptable behavior.

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