even*cleveland: gunshot ornithology

gunshot ornithology

My angst in seeing the Evans photo was realizing that the swam could have been the last Trumpeter in North Dakota [collected in 1891]. Early naturalists, including John James Audubon in his 1843 sojourn to Fort Union, saw swans in large numbers during summer. Valued for their meat, skin, and feathers, Trumpeters were gone from North Dakota and Minnesota by 1900. Until rediscovery in the 1930s in Red Rock Lakes, Montana, and later in Alaska, Trumpeter Swans were widely believed to be extinct. Since 1960, Trumpeters have spread from introductions into Minnesota and South Dakota ... Ironically, in the same year the North Dakota Museum of Art acquired the Terry Evans photo for its permanant collection, a pair has come to nest. Once again, the trumpeting call of the largest of all waterfowl, snow white feathers, contrasting with the black bill, facial sking, eyes, legs and feet, can be heard in North Dakota.

Dr. David Lambeth

Terry Evans: Trumpeter Swan, North Dakota, collected 1891, photographed 2001. Cuygnus Buccinator, Iris print. ©Terry Evans.

(Thanks, Martha.)

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

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