S6E2: Hummingbirds - Warrior birds and feathered jewels

Using a feather fan as her base, Rosa Dyer traces how Victorian fashion turned fierce hummingbirds into quiet ornaments. The object brings into focus the differences between indigenous mythologies and western ideas of hummingbirds and what the impacts of global trade were on how we understand them today. 

• Pitt Rivers Museum
• How hummingbird and vulture mediate between life and death in Latin America by Nicole Sault 
• The disguise of the hummingbird: on the natural history of Huitzilopochtli in the Florentine Codex Montero Sobrevilla 
•  The Hummingbird Warrior by Ze Frank 
• Animals and Experience on The Animal Turn. 
• Compassionate Conservation with Daniel Ramp on The Animal Turn
• Sonic Methods with Jonathan Prior on The Animal Turn

Credits:

• Recorded: 9 November 2023 
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from Freesound, Prelinger Archives, Internet Archive
• Learn more about the team here. 

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Transcript

Season Focus And Guest Intro

Siobhan O'Sullivan 0:01

This is another I roll podcast.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 0:14

Welcome back to season six of the Animal Highlight, where we're focusing on animals and museum collections slash objects. My co-host of the season is Rosa Dyer, who is a collaborative doctoral project PhD candidate at Birk Bay College, University of London, and the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Her practice-based project at the Pitt Rivers Museum focuses on featherwork collections made by South American Indigenous peoples. Her work aims to reveal the dynamic relations that exist between birds, people, and environments by working with Indigenous collaborators to reimagine how the feathered objects are represented in the museum. And in today's episode, we speak about a feathered object that brings hummingbirds into focus and the ways in which they're differently represented. At some point in the episode, Rosa mentions that something interesting happens as the birds were transported, where they were transformed from feisty animals into these kind of domesticated beauty objects. It's really fascinating. It's really interesting. I hope you enjoy it. Hi Rosa, welcome back to the Annal Highlights. Hi. So uh you gave us a fantastic highlight last time. Uh looking at the bird whose name I can't say.

Rosa Dyer 1:27

The Whoya? Which I'm also not convinced I'm pronouncing correctly, but as I said, I'm gonna be confident in my incorrectness, I think.

Why Hummingbirds And The Feather Fan

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:34

Like I said to you in the green room, I think there's a bit of a disconnect between my brain and my mouth. Um, there's so many words. Like I did a season, uh season two was focused on of the animal tone was focused on animals and experience, and it was on the first episode was on phenomenology, and that's still a word without a doubt. I have to stop and be like, think before. Anyway, um, so we're back at the Pitt Rivers Museum this uh this show or this episode, uh, and uh with a with a different kind of object and and animal in focus.

Rosa Dyer 2:08

Yeah, we are. So we're flying over, as we were, from New Zealand over to South America, um, specifically Brazil. Um and we're going, I'm really excited about this episode because we're going to be looking at one of my favorite animals, which is the hummingbird.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 2:21

Um, I love hummingbirds. They're so cool. They're really, really cool little birds. And you know, do you know they're moths that look like hummingbirds?

Rosa Dyer 2:29

Oh yeah, we had them in my garden over the summer. I literally like spent hours watching them on the Budlea. Yeah, they're so beautiful and they're yeah, just their movement is mesmerized.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 2:39

I thought I was seeing a hummingbird. I saw one in South Korea and I was like, it's a hummingbird. No, they're moths that just they they move, they look a lot. I mean, I don't know what anyway. Sorry, I'm getting so attracted. Hummingbirds, hummingbirds, what what have you got in store for us today?

Rosa Dyer 2:52

Yeah, so um, as with the previous episode, we're kind of going to be focused on one of the objects that we find in the Pitt Rivers Museum, which is uh a feather fan. Um, but through that, we're going to going to explore a bit about the hummingbird's life and its kind of particular ecologies, because I think they're such like beautiful, fascinating birds. And I think there's a lot about their ecology and behaviour that people don't know about because everyone kind of focuses on their on their beauty, which is undeniable. But I'm hoping that we're going to be able to explore a little bit about, you know, the fierce nature of this tiny bird, because that's what I find so like compelling and wonderful about them. Hopefully, through exploring the object, talk a little bit about firstly hummingbird ecologies, but then also think about their presence in Latin American mythologies, particularly indigenous mythologies, because I think they have a really interesting presence that links quite closely to how hummingbirds kind of exist in their natural environments. And then, as with our previous episode with the Huya, we're then also going to move on to think about how these birds moved from their natural environments in Latin America and moved across into museums in Europe and America and what this did to their bodies, what this kind of did to imaginations about what these birds were. So we're hopefully going to explore quite a lot of yeah, interesting themes, I hope. So the object that I'm kind of focusing on is, well, firstly, it's kind of inspired by a particular object, but then specifically I've kind of been thinking about it because of how this object has interacted with my own kind of feelings and encounters with hummingbirds as kind of living, living beings. So they're obviously undeniably beautiful birds. You know, everyone I think has an image of a hummingbird. They're kind of these beautiful, bright green and purples and you know, sparkling in the sun. Um, and they have these kind of iridescent jewel-like qualities, which has made them kind of quite popular for bodily adornment. So when I've kind of been studying Latin American feather work, the birds that I come across most are parrots' toucans, and then I'd say the third one is hummingbirds. So their feathers kind of do come up a lot when I've been looking at objects. What's kind of, as I said, been interesting for me is how this kind of use in their objects has kind of been linked to my own encounters with them. So I think I'll first start by describing the object I'm talking about, because I think that can kind of place everyone where we are and we can all be together before talking about the hummingbirds themselves.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 5:08

And just to remind, just to remind listeners that you're also coupling this with blog posts, right? Where folks can see this.

Inside The Brazilian-Style Victorian Fan

Rosa Dyer 5:14

So you don't have to rely on my quite garbled description of what the object is. You can go and look at it. And actually, I think for this object in particular, we have really beautiful, um, kind of high, high-quality scans available for it. So you should be able to explore those feathers in quite a lot of detail, which is nice. So the object I'm looking at is one again that's on display in the Pitt Rivers. It's um a beautiful feather fan. Um, and we don't really know much about the particular history of this singular object, but it's representative of kind of a broader category of feather fans that existed in the mid-19th century. So this hand was probably made around that time, although it only came to the museum in 1944. It follows a trend in Victorian fashion accessorizing for uh kind of displaying brightly coloured feathers, beetles, and taxidermide birds together on fashion accessories. So these were things like fans, they were also on hats, um, also as part of jewellery, so things like um earrings, brooches, even necklaces. Um, and this particular piece is in what was known as the Brazilian style. So it's a combination of South American feathers and taxidermide birds that were then linked with these very beautifully crafted um flowers that were made out of feathers themselves. And they also often incorporated these um kind of brilliant green insect skins, which are known as elytra, which are kind of the the wing cases of these of these um beetles that are found um across Latin America. So at least parts of the fan were probably made in artisanal manufacturing houses in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and other parts of it were probably made um in Asia. So it has a beautiful i carved ivory handle. Um and then I think probably what happened just from reading about the trajectories of other objects similar to this is that these different components would have been brought together and kind of um assembled? Assembled, yeah, that's the better one. Assembled um in Europe and then was kind of sold as part of the European fashion industry. So it has fascinating.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 7:07

So the fan itself isn't entirely from Brazil, just the actual fan with the handle. It's it's kind of like an early globalization kind of. Totally.

Rosa Dyer 7:17

It's a completely, you know, global object, and you know, the the ivory comes from um, we haven't been able to identify whether it would be an African or an Asian elephant, but comes from an elephant. The fan the feathers themselves come from all sorts of different birds. So the feather itself is kind of circular in shape, and the kind of base of it resembles to me something between a bird's nest or some kind of beautiful fantasy flower. So it has these kind of bright orange and navy blue um feathers around the edge, which come from an Amazon parrot.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 7:45

So this Sorry, you mean the you mean the fan? I think you said feather there earlier. You mean the fan. The fan is the fan has a kind of nest base, and then it has these other feathers around it.

Rosa Dyer 7:56

Yeah, so it has this kind of round base um that is made of Amazon parrot feathers. So these are a species of parrot that um are found in Brazil and other other countries in Latin America. Um, and then on top of that, there's this kind of down base of white feathers, which are probably from a swan, although white feathers are notoriously difficult to identify, so we're not completely sure. Um, but then in the center, the kind of most compelling bit, I think, are these two beautiful tiny taxidermied hummingbirds that are posed as if they're in flight and kind of are looking at each other as if they're kind of circling at the center. And they're associated in the fans, so they're kind of around the edge, and then in the middle are, as I say, these beautifully constructed um feather flowers that look like roses, but they're made, if you look at them closely, they're made out of tiny red and green parrot feathers. I mean, as a piece, in terms of just thinking about the artistry and the skill that's gone into it, it's absolutely amazing. And I think that's kind of the first thing that struck that kind of strikes you about it when you see it is it's this amazing assembly of materials and of kind of craft techniques. But I think what kind of I think struck me about it is that's your initial reaction. But then followed by it for me was quite a sense of kind of unease almost that it seems a bit kind of frivolous to have these tiny birds posed in these kind of imaginary flight that would have been on a woman's hand at a Victorian party and shown off to people. And it was kind of the the thing that kind of led me down looking at this object was a kind of compulsion to want to know more about the hummingbirds themselves. Because I think they've kind of been made into these little kind of jewel-like things that would be shown off at a party. But it was only when I actually properly kind of encountered hummingbirds in the wild that I realized, you know, it really struck me what a disconnect that was to the actual lives of the birds.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 9:42

Yeah, they become kind of deficient, they become objectified, not only as objects, physical objects, but also um in terms of ideas, right? They've they become things.

Awe And Unease At Objectification

Rosa Dyer 9:50

Yeah, and so it was this kind of first-hand experience of seeing the hummingbirds in South America that really kind of brought this home to me. Um, I was really lucky last year to be able to work on a bird monitoring project in the uh cloud forest in Ecuador. And part of that was that we were capturing hummingbirds and then um examining them, collecting data on them, and then putting little um metal rings on, which is known as bird rigging or banding, depending on where you are, um, and then releasing them. Um and so it was kind of the first time I'd encountered, you know, these birds as living, as living beings and seeing them interacting with their environment, seeing them also them interacting with each other, interacting with flowers that really brought home the difference that was not encapsulated by how they were represented on this fan that I really wanted to explore and kind of learn more about them. Just as a bit of a side note there about the kind of ethics of bird handling and stuff, because I think I just got a signpost that I'm gonna talk about this later, because it's a huge thing with museum collecting as well.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 10:44

And it's something I was gonna ask, I was gonna ask you at the end, but we can't do whatever you want.

Rosa Dyer 10:49

I like I wrote a little thing about it.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 10:50

No, no, no. No, no, go go ahead. Like um, because because yeah, as someone who's interested in animals, I think it's it's a it's a challenging thing when you want to know more about them and you want to study, especially if it's related to kind of conservation, but there are kind of ethical questions to be asked, right?

Fieldwork: Banding Hummingbirds In Ecuador

Rosa Dyer 11:05

Yeah, totally. And it's one of those things. I mean, I think there's more layers that kind of come on top of it when you then think about killing birds specifically for museum collections. And I think that's something that you know deserves a whole episode, and I hope I will do later. But in terms of the kind of just specifics of handling the birds, I think it kind of really feeds into this question of like the individual versus the species as a whole. And, you know, I think most people who do bird banding would make the argument that, you know, the level of stress that that one individual encounters through that process of being, you know, captured and, you know, data taken from it and then a band put on it, that is probably worth it on an individual basis when compared to the good that that data could do for the conservation of the species. And obviously, I think that's an ongoing debate and can be a bit kind of you can kind of get rid of the individual quite easily then when you talk about it in that way. So yeah, I think that's something I've definitely struggled with when working with birds. And it's been very, it's one of the things actually that has really helped me frame how I think about the museum objects and like as I say, thinking about the kind of link between the lived lives and the objectified lives of these objects, I think has been like a constant tension that I've been thinking about in my research.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 12:19

Yeah, it's definitely difficult. And I think it's something that comes up again, like conservation. I taught a class at the beginning of the year and we spoke a bit about uh conservationists. And I was like, you know, a lot of there's a lot of critique that can be directed at conservationists in terms of how they treat individuals. Like when you start to ask ethical questions at an individual level, you know, the killing of one giraffe in a zoo so as to kind of protect the genetic makeup of other other giraffes, there there are, yeah. Anyway, like you say, it's very complicated and difficult, but these are important uh conversations to be had, right?

Rosa Dyer 12:52

They are, absolutely. And I like one of the things that I found really interesting, I kind of almost did like an ethnography of the bird banders while I was there because I found it so fascinating the kind of psychology and conversations that were being had around this practice while I was doing it. And one of the things that was really interesting that kind of showed an acknowledgement of this tension was the fact that so many people that are interested in birds have a list. So they have their lifetime list of birds they've seen. And you're not allowed to count on your list a bird that you've only had in hand. You have to have it, you have to have seen that bird naturally in the wild. So I think that is a really like direct acknowledgement of the fact that when you're holding a bird that you've caught in a net, that is an unnatural dynamic between you and the bird. That is not how you should be encountering it. You should be encountering it in a space where the bird has the ability to fly away if it wants to. And so, yeah, I found that a really interesting thing that even kind of in the in the kind of you know vernacular of how birders talk, your list only counts if you've seen it as it's supposed to be rather than in your hand.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 13:49

Yeah, this idea of supp because that is an interaction. It is an actual lived interaction. Yeah. I spoke to Jonathan Pryor in the the season about sound, and he said there's this interesting thing uh when people try and record wildlife is they purposefully kind of remove any sounds that they make, like the swishing of their own jackets or the crunch of their boots, as somehow that's unnatural in the environment. And there's this interesting kind of the the con like the continued divide between human and natural. Like there's humans and then there's everything else. And I think, yeah, that interaction of actually grabbing the bird, and and this is a natural interaction, it's an interaction that is happening anyway. That's a that's a whole different thing. We're gonna get off another topic again. Yeah, so anyway, okay, back back to the hummingbird.

Ethics: Individuals Versus Species

The Fierce Ecology Of Hummingbirds

Rosa Dyer 14:34

Back to having birds. So I thought I'll just talk a bit about kind of what having birds are, because I think you know, there's so much to them and they're so fascinating. And honestly, this is something I could like talk about for hours. So I'm just gonna give like a little a little breeze stop tour of what they are. So they're found in the Americas. There are six uh 363 species of them. They're all clasped in the family Trachillidae. And they're found all the way from Alaska to the Tierra del Fuego, so only in the Americas, but you know, the entire span of that, you know, two continents. But they're kind of mostly centered around Central and South America, so kind of you know, more tropical rainforest environments, but you know, also high up in the Andes, I've seen giant hummingbirds at the top of mountains in the Andes. They're this kind of very diverse and beautiful range of species. They have the fastest metabolism of any bird or hot-blooded mammal in the world. They're absolutely amazing. So their hearts beat over 1200 times a minute, and their bodies can reach temperatures of over 40 degrees. They're this kind of, you know, they're this high-powered, hugely kind of, you know, the race cars of the bird kingdom. They're absolutely amazing. Um, their wings beat up to 80 times a second. So, you know, they're operating on a plane that, you know, I think we just can't imagine this kind of huge speed, this huge, you know, huge movement, and just, yeah, they're just amazing to look at. I mean, I can't tell you how much I love these birds. Um and obviously with all that movement and all that speed and that kind of frenetic energy, they need a lot of a lot of input. So they they are constantly having to feed on um on flowers. So they're mostly nectivorous, so they're feeding on the nectar of flowers, and they're buzzing around flowers using highly specialized um tongues, which have this kind of amazing tube shape, which kind of collapse in on themselves as they suck up the flowers to create, sorry, suck up the nectar in the flowers to create a vacuum. I don't know whether to shout this out or not, but there's this amazing video by um a YouTuber called Zay Frank, who has done an entire, an entire uh YouTube episode on the tongues of hummingbirds, and I recommend everyone go and watch it because it's amazing. I will link it in the blog post as well. So, on top of this kind of amazing, you know, physiology, this, you know, hugely high metabolism, high speed, high energy, what also struck me, because I kind of knew slightly, you know, knew these things. I think that's one of the facts you learn as a kid if you know the hummingbird has the highest heart rate in the world or is the fastest wing or everything. But the thing that I had never known and didn't know until I saw them was how fierce they are. Like they're really quiet little, like angry birds. They are they fight each other like crazy. Like when we were hanging the feeders to kind of lure them into trap them, the fights that would happen, it was like this amazing. Like you could do it, a whole kind of like Game of Thrones-esque thing about having birds. They like, yeah, chase each other off. A lot of species are highly territorial and they'll fight each other with their beaks. And actually, what's recently discovered is that hummingbirds, um, a few species even have like teeth on the side of their on the side of their bills to make them more effective at defending each other. So they have literal like sword fights in the air. They're absolutely amazing. Um my brain. So I mean, are there other beaks that have teeth? I don't know, you know. I mean, there must be, I think, but um yeah, I don't think I think this is quite the idea of like teeth in the beak is just Yeah, so they have these, yeah, they're like proper little. I don't know. I kind of like imagine almost like fairies riding them and then having these like amazing like warrior birds that they sit on and with these swords. I don't know. I have quite a lot of wild imagination about these birds because they're so cool. Um But yeah, like that was something that I'd never really, I'd never thought about, I'd never seen. And then, you know, immediately my mind then, you know, cans back to this fan, sat there with these beautiful demure hummingbirds posed as if they're best friends around this one little flower that they're sharing. I thought, actually, that's not the case at all. If these hummingbirds were suddenly kind of brought back to life, they would be at each other's throats, probably. But and so that kind of was what got me thinking much more critically about this fan and the processes that must have happened for them to be posed in that way. Like what has been the thought process of whoever has made that fan to pose them in such a way? Why has there been a decision made to pose them as these kind of gentle, delicate beings when that isn't their lived reality? And so it's kind of again got me on a bit of a rabbit hole of reading about the kind of natural history of hummingbirds and how they came into European imaginations, and then also how this kind of compares to indigenous mythologies around them and kind of what are the differences and similarities between the two. Um, so I thought I'd kind of first talk about the Latin American mythologies because I think they're fascinating and also really represent a kind of in-depth understanding of the people that have, you know, developed these mythologies about the actual livecologies of the birds. So their fierce nature is really reflected in their presence in how they're described in mythology in Latin America. So interestingly, across Central and South America, their hummingbirds are represented really consistently. And um uh, what's her name? Uh Nicholas Solt, sorry, uh, did this amazing study in 2016 where um he compared all the all the different sources that mention hummingbirds in mythology from Latin America. And the same themes come up over and over again. And the themes that come up are that they are warrior birds. They're birds that are hugely um, you know, hugely representative of being defensive, of being strong and fierce and defending territory. Um, for the Maya and the Aztec peoples, for example, the hummingbird is seen as a warrior who uses their sharp beak and agility to win battles against their enemies. And when warriors die, it's said that they come back as hummingbirds to kind of reinvigorate their warrior selves. They're also kind of hugely resourceful and wonderful, kind of smart birds that can, you know, outsmart enemies as well. So in the Schwa culture in Ecuador, for example, which is a community that I've been working with, the hummingbird or hempe, it's it's known in kind of the um indigenous language, is the being that brings fire to people. So people were dying because they couldn't cook food properly, and it's the hummingbird with its kind of quick agility and smarts that is able to fly up to a cave where a giant lives and steal the fire from him and then bring it back down. And the thing that I really love about that story is many um hummingbird species have got V-shaped tails, and they explain that the reason why the hummingbird has a V-shaped tail is because its tail got grabbed as it was as it was coming out of the cave, and therefore some of its feathers are missing in the middle, and that's why the V exists is because the giant grabbed it. It's uh it's their representation in in particular indigenous mythology, I think is really closely related to the ecological realities of the bird. They're not preoccupied with the visual splendor of it. They're instead interested in its kind of, you know, its movement, their shape, their um, their ability to defend themselves and you know, really see them as really kind of agentive beings that make decisions that defend themselves and stuff. So yeah, I found I found reading into this kind of quite reassuring that actually it's only in European art actually that they've kind of been really pacified and that in other parts of the world they maintained this sense of like ferocity that I'd seen when I was there. And so I think, you know, as really beautiful, fierce creatures, it's no wonder that they're a big part of indigenous mythology. But then when I was trying to trace these same things in in kind of European representations of hummingbirds, I didn't find any evidence of this at all. And I found that this break was so interesting, and I kind of have been trying to figure out through, you know, reading and research and kind of tracing object histories why that is. And so one of the things we didn't talk so much about when I was kind of like uh explaining hummingbirds. Was that, you know, I think I purposely focused on on their movement and shape and you know how how they exist in the world because I find that so so interesting. But I think we can't downplay the fact that they're really beautiful, they're like stunningly wonderful, they have these amazing, amazing plumage colours. Also, there's a level of iridescence which isn't really found, you know, can't be created artificially as something that exists in nature, particularly these kind of brilliant blues and greens and purples that are absolutely stunning.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 22:27

What I always find fascinating about colours, especially with colours with birds and fish, is you know, there are numerous colours that we see, and you're like, wow, there's so many colours. But then you realize that many of these animals are seeing colours also at a different. Yeah. So that their colour spectrum is just so much grander and greater than ours. Like the colour is just really, yeah, it's fascinating to think about. Yeah, it's amazing.

Mythologies: Warriors, Fire, And V-Tails

Rosa Dyer 22:50

And I mean, they must, I I imagine that they must see like extra colours because otherwise, you know, hey, why would they be like that? But also they have this such kind of interesting interactions with each other. You like you to kind of imagine that they must mean mean something more than what we can see. But yeah, so it was certainly these, these kind of brilliant colours, which is what captured European naturalists coming in. Um, European and American, I'd say there was definitely also a movement from North America to by naturalists to come and record hummingbirds. Um, I'm kind of focusing on the European perspective here because that is kind of relevant to our feather fan. Um and so while kind of indigenous mythologies around hummingbirds tend to reflect their ecology and their life habits, it's the kind of visual splendor of the hummingbirds upon which European um kind of interest in them was very decidedly centered. So just as we kind of saw with the Huya, it was these systems of, you know, fashion and global consumerism which were really fueling an interest in hummingbirds and hugely shaped their representations and how people imagined them when they kind of came into Europe. And so from the mid-19th century onwards, many naturalists in America and Europe sought to record the natural history of birds around the world. This was kind of not centered only on hummingbirds, it was obviously a kind of general thing. It also encountered with the Huya last week, but all over the world there was this movement to kind of collect three specimens and also through through illustrations to catalogue and describe all the birds that we could. But hummingbirds represented quite a difficult problem for naturalists because their high metabolisms and their kind of, you know, the specifics of their physiology meant that they couldn't be transported to Europe live because their kind of long sea voyages meant that they just couldn't survive that. So they could never be seen by Europeans in their living state unless the Europeans themselves traveled to Latin America, which was not, you know, accessible for the vast majority of people. And what I think this does is that somewhere, you know, in the Atlantic Ocean, the hummingbird got transformed from this fierce, amazing warrior into a passive jewel because that is what arrives in the boats. It's a dead bird that has, you know, it's very difficult to trace that ferocity and that life through that process of kind of extraction and movement across the sea. The hummingbirds were specific to this problem because what other species, like parrots, for example, had arrived in Europe live, they could survive a sea voyage. So they were already established as pets. Um and so these kind of bigger species were already present in zoos, so they could be seen and their kind of specific behaviours and ecologies could be present. But for hummingbirds, their lives as living beings just couldn't translate. It was a physical problem of transport, basically.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 25:29

I mean, there is an interesting thing you're touching on here with regards to how I guess imagination works in the absence of animals, but I think imagination also works in the presence of animals, right? So like you would have had animals in menageries, etc., but they also had scripts kind of impressed on them as well, right? So even because again, being a lion in a zoo is very different to being a lion in the African savannah, and you know, they'd be probed and compelled to behave in particular ways to kind of fuel this imagination. And I think, yeah, I like like you've said here many times, the the kind of beauty of the the hummingbird and the fashion trends at the time, I think there was a desire, like you say, to there were objects and they were there were pretty objects, yeah.

Europe’s Gaze: Beauty Over Behaviour

Rosa Dyer 26:10

And I think also like what was interesting is that even when naturalists were trying to, you know, capture them in their natural state through illustration, which you know was the was the main way that people coming into Latin America as naturalists were recording these birds, as if they weren't collecting them as physical specimens, they were drawing them, is that even then where you think, okay, they're physically looking at these birds, they are making a decision to represent them very differently to what their physical reality is. So when you look at naturalist illustrations from this time, you again get this sense of very, you know, demure, fragile, beautiful, tranquil birds, all together, all gathered around the same beautiful flower. It's usually an orchid, they're all kind of blue and green and purple, and the colours are beautiful, and the visual splendor of them is sort of preserved, although the kind of iridescence obviously isn't, there's limitations to what kind of watercolour can give you there. But they haven't preserved any sense of you know the interactions between the birds in any kind of real way, or even the interactions between the flowers. So this kind of bird, bird-flower interaction is the thing that I think probably does translate the best across from the reality, in that you know, they're often associated with flowers, which is you know what they do eat. So that kind of ecological aspect is there, but they're often the wrong flowers, and that's what I find so fascinating is that like on the feather fan, it's a rose that's been represented as flowers, but you know, they're not going to be feeding off roses. Roses aren't, you know, aren't their primary food source, or you know, I don't think any of their food sources really. So yeah, this idea of the aesthetics and the kind of beauty of them almost getting in the way of the eyes of what the real physical reality of the birds is, I think is a really fascinating process. And yeah, as you say, the kind of there's a limit on imagination that has particularly, I think, been shaped to foreground birds as resources. Because I think it really feeds into a broader idea of what lat what South America was for Europe, which was as an exotic place that has resources we can use. So I think placing hummingbirds next to things like gold, like diamonds, like you know, uh high value timber and wood, and you know, even you know, exoticized peoples, I think they're all placed together as this exotic thing we can extract, which is beautiful and which we can then kind of objectify and own ourselves is is what that process is, I think.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 28:37

Well, this has been this has been really, really, really interesting. Again, just the kind of juxtaposition and and seeing the similarity in terms of uh the bird you spoke about last time and the hummingbird here in terms of how they're caught up in, I think, fashion industries, uh colonial histories, um, but also how their own stories are often wiped uh and and how the object itself can really be a great place to illuminate these histories and these stories. This has been awesome. Thank you so much again for a fantastic animal highlight and um yeah, we will we will see you again next time. Yeah, Touchi next time. Thank you, Rosa Dyer, for a wonderful animal highlight and for co-hosting this episode with me. Thank you to Rebecca Shen for doing the episode artwork as well as the logo for the animal highlight and to Gordon Clark for The Bad Music. Sound effects in this episode were taken from Free Sound and the Pre-Linger Archives and the Internet Archive. This episode was produced by myself. This is The Animal Highlight with me, Claudia Hirtenfelder.

Siobhan O'Sullivan 29:56

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