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134 7 s Bering Island russia About forty years ago the Great Auk of the Northern Atlantic became exterminated. A vigorous search has been made for it and its remains; fabulous sums have been paid for skins and eggs. . . . Within the same period another large water bird has become extinct in the North Pacific, without having as yet attracted the attention. . . . Yet, this bird was the largest and handsomest of its tribe. leonhard stejneger, 1890 T he most compelling and creative work of art I’ve seen that fea- tures a cormorant is a table. Audubon’s paintings of North American cormorants are extraordinary and often narrative. Maine artist Andrew Wyeth painted a dynamic watercolor of a soaring cormorant in 1942.1 Thanks to a friend, I own a lovely painting in several shades of blue of a pied cormorant, by a talented local artist in New Zealand. Several ancient Chinese and Japanese paintings capture the essence of cormorants with just a few melancholic brushstrokes. Many countries have issued indigenous-bird stamps with cormorants: the cormorant stamps from Serbia and Palau are especially appealing. It is easy to find stunning photographs of cormorants in books or online, but they usually lack a timeless quality. I’ve seen bronze cormorant sculptures at tourist sights and public parks in Laguna Beach,California,and Port Angeles,Washington.2 Among others in England, there is a five-foot cormorant sculpted with a chainsaw in a public park in Gloucestershire, another crafted of salvaged scrap metal that has been installed at a park by the River Thames, and there is a cormorant sculpture that a woman welded and assembled in a park in Peterborough.3 Most of these sculptures evoke a single cormorant King - Devil's Cormorant.indb 134 7/1/2013 11:31:23 AM Bering Island 135 standing with its wings spread. For me, none of these pieces of cormorant art,in any media,holds a feather to that created by the English artist Anna Kirk-Smith. Kirk-Smith crafted her piece in 2011 as part of a large London-based exhibition involving over 120 artists. The “Ghosts of Gone Birds” project was produced to bring attention to extinct birds and those birds currently endangered. Kirk-Smith’s table is titled The Unfortunate Repercussions of Discovery and Survival (Spectacled Cormorant). When you approach the sculpture it appears to be just an old piece of furniture. And it is. Except that she has varnished it to match the color of the body plumage of the spectacled cormorant (Phalacrocorax perspicillatus ). She embedded the table with several glass-covered boxes in which the lining is painted iridescent green or deep blue to match the wing and tail feathers of this largest of cormorants. In one of the boxes is placed an antique sounding lead and a scale set to what would have been the weight of the bird. One end of the table has a historic map of the Bering Sea varnished into the surface. In the middle of the map she embedded the largest of the sunken boxes. In it is a book open to pages created from her sketches during her visit to the extinct cormorant specimens at Tring. I contacted Anna Kirk-Smith after I saw the table.We’ve kept in touch since. Looking back on“Ghosts of Gone Birds,” Kirk-Smith says:“I had a choice of which metaphorical corpses to resurrect. When I first learned about this cormorant it was variously described as a clumsy, stupid, and ludicrous bird so, being English, I guess that cemented my decision to support the underdog. What I didn’t expect however was how involved I would become with this bird and its history, what journeys it would take me on.4 “The Spectacled Cormorant introduced me to an intriguing array of characters, a gripping plot line,” she says. “And I became more delighted with my choice as time progressed, and strangely possessive of this bird’s memory.” It is September 1741. Vitus Bering’s ship the St. Peter gropes somewhere among the long desolate string of Aleutian Islands. No one is admitting this aloud, but nearly all aboard recognize it is unlikely they will ever make it home. Several of the crew are flattened with scurvy. Two men have already died. Bering himself is also terribly ill, perhaps with scurvy King - Devil's Cormorant.indb 135 7/1/2013 11:31:23 AM [18.223.106.232] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 09...

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