Connections/Birding

My name is Dale Tucker, and I'm an editor at the Museum.

I can't pinpoint a precise moment when I decided that I am a birder. Most people who

haven't gone birding don't realize the little gems that are outside but they're there. There's just this hidden world.

I'm going to be discussing birding the Met, which means you go through the collection like a birder or a bird watcher would in nature

and you try to identify as many specific species as possible. It's very challenging for me to do that as a North American birder. Once you get into

Asian species, South American species, Central American species, they're just far too numerous and I would also have to know some of the artistic conventions.

Some were made with an eye to recording a very specific taxonomic species, but

others are the product of artistic license.

One of my favorite birding artists, Martin Johnson Heade, was obsessed with hummingbirds.

He traveled widely in South America and Central America, basing a lot of of his images on the fieldwork that he did. He's also

renowned for his series of landscapes featuring haystacks on a salt marsh, a critically important birding habitat. And it raises another lesson you learn in birding, that half the time it's more important to know where to look for birds than which species to look for. One of

my favorite photographers, Carleton Watkins, made a photograph of one of the Farallon Islands off the coast of California, a really important habitat, not only for birds but for other animals.

And if you really focus in on the top left quadrant of the rock, you see all of these little profiles of birds perched on it. And this is another great lesson you learn in birding, which is having better optics is very important. I think a really talented pelagic birder could look at some of those profiles and probably identify specific species that are represented nowhere else in the collection.

There are some works that the average birder probably wouldn't be able to get an ID from, because the species represented are abstracted.

A great example of that in Oceanic art is the frigate bird. This pendant from the Solomon Islands has a very specific shape to the wings.

And the same with this breastplate, you see that very diagnostic forked tail shape.

Often, birds were seen as intermediaries between the human and divine realms and because of certain physiological characteristics or behavioral characteristics.

Condors were associated with sacrifice, with death.

The motif of the pelican and its piety, for example on this Netherlandish plate, feeding its young with its blood, is seen as a metaphor for Christ.

I think every birder probably has a secret fantasy of finding some lost or extinct species in his or her backyard, and I'm certainly no different.

I think there's something in me that really appreciates being able to go out into nature and name things. I want to know what something is called.

I want to know what that flower is, what that tree is, what that bird is. And I don't know why, but I just do. That's the kind of person I am.

I think its popular because it can be enjoyed by pretty much anyone from a very young age to a very old age. It's a way to get people out in nature

and in this case it's a way to get people in the Museum. It's just a different access to art, that cuts across all genres, all cultures, all time periods.