The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie

The Biogeographies of a Hollow-Eyed Harrier

Mer le Patchett, K ate Foster, and Hayden Lor imer The Biogeographies of a Hollow-Eyed Harrier Just the Thing, Itself E veninherreducedstate—andbeforeotherwordsintrude—she remains a thing of the severest beauty (see fig. 1). Breast: a fineweave swatch of caramel and crème. Wing feathers: closeplated , clean-edged, with arching white strips. Eyes: emptied, yet defined by a pale-colored patch, tapering to a hooked V. Primaries, when fanned as if for flight: ring-tailed with dark bars of sober brown, alternating with blocks of white. By their very nature, bird skins are featherlight; husky, and dry to the touch. Though long since ruffled, they still offer whispers of the airy life. For the pure love of aerobatics, these wings dipped, baffled, arrowed, buffeted, and flexed. Once, she threw caution to the wind. The hen harrier’s story is one of a fate sealed as soon as its name was conferred . Commonly known by countrymen of sixteenth-century shires as the “hen harrier,” or “harroer,” this was a bird nominated according to habits and tastes rather than looks.1 The sworn enemy of free-ranging poultry, and by association their keepers, its ill repute for butchery overruled any aesthetic appeal. A penny bounty was placed on its head.2 So it is that harriers must only have enjoyed true prelapsarian freedoms of the skies before man domesticated animals. Unloved for centuries. A breeding population harried back to westernmost isles, only recently recovering proper footholds on mainland The Biogeographies of a Hollow-Eyed Harrier | 111 Scotland. And to this day, in spite of more widespread distribution: red-listed in status. Given this troubled history, it is hard to offer a behavioral description of the hen harrier apart from humans. To begin to know just the thing itself, the briefest notes of introduction must suffice. The harrier is a ground-nesting bird. The female is renowned as “an exceptionally tight-sitter,” and the doughtiest defender of her fledgling brood.3 Nests, built in long heather and rank ground vegetation, are subject to predation by the red fox. Hunting in search of small mammals and birds, harriers favor open country, spying hillsides and working clear-felled ground. During spring come rituals of courtship, the male’s tumbling and toying skydance, a spectacular signature in which he is sometimes joined by the female. During winter, outside the breeding season, they are known to congregate, using communal roosts.4 These few things we know. Fig. 1. Study skin of a female hen harrier, with museum label given as detail. This was used as a title image for Kate Foster’s artwork Disposition (2003). (Image copyright Kate Foster/The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow) 112 | merle patchett, kate foster, hayden lorimer Study Skin, Studying Skins Much attention has been paid to taxidermy mounts, their representation, individual histories, matter, and meaning.5 Yet study skins, as hollowed-out scraps of lightly stuffed preserved skin, present less charismatic objects of study.6 Garry Marvin has commented in response to taxidermy that due to their historical recording as scientific information, “each animal becomes a type, a token, rather than a unique individual.”7 This is especially true of a study specimen as unlike mimetic taxidermy reproductions, which often acquire unique afterlivesin the museum setting, it is usually merely one ofa mass of material exemplars for the distinct species that line the airtight drawers forming the empirical base of natural history study.8 Anonymous, and for the most part kept in the dark, these could be thought of as largely forgotten and overlooked remnants of animal life. Yet the aim of this essay is to return to one such remnant—the study skin of a hen harrier from the zoology collections of the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow—and make use of it. More specifically, the hen harrier study skin offers the departure point for a collaborative “biogeographical” study by an environmental artist (Kate Foster) and two geographers (Merle Patchett and Hayden Lorimer). While “biogeography” traditionally refers to a subdiscipline of geography concerned with mapping patterns of spatial distribution of species, we use it as malleable term which encompasses the different endeavors of artist and geographers interested in renewing the place of life in its multiplicity of human and nonhuman forms, processes, and connectivities .9 More specifically for our joint work, the term titles a series of collaborative works and offers an alternative biographical...