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.