The Race to Save the Lord God Bird Page 4
William Brewster collected tens of thousands of bird specimens and displayed them in his personal museum
CHAPTER FOUR
TWO COLLECTORS
There is one instance of Ivory-bills apparently disappearing from an area from reasons other than logging, and that is when the Ivory-bills were wiped out of the Suwannee River region of Florida by the collecting of A. T Wayne in 1892 and 1893.
—James Tanner, The Ivory-billed Woodpeckers (1942)
South Carolina and Florida—1892–1894
ARTHUR WAYNE WAS BORN IN CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, IN 1863, THE YEAR that Union cannons began a daily bombardment of heavy shells that lasted a year and a half. Wayne’s parents fled to the countryside until it was safe to go back. One writer described the Charleston to which they returned in 1865 as “a city of … vacant houses, of widowed women, of rotting wharves, of deserted warehouses, of weed-wild gardens, of miles of grass-grown streets.”
The Waynes were able to scrape together enough money to educate Arthur until he could go to school. From the very beginning, it was all his teachers could do to keep the slight redheaded boy inside any building at all. He spent as much time as he possibly could hunting birds in the deep green swamps and oatmeal-colored marshes around Charleston, or climbing through the branches of trees looking for nests and eggs. Often he was far beyond reach of the voices that were constantly calling him to “come inside, Arthur, come inside.”
But there was one building that seemed to have a tidal pull upon him. It was the Charleston Museum, a few dark rooms at the College of Charleston cluttered with stuffed specimens of plants, animals, birds, and eggs. The oldest museum in the United States, it was established in 1773, when South Carolina was still a British colony. Later, during the Civil War, as Union general William T. Sherman’s troops closed in on Charleston, the museum’s staff hastily packed the dead birds and mammals and the jars of insects and frogs into 108 crates, hoisted them onto horse-pulled carts, and shuttled them out to the curator’s plantation home in the countryside. Even that almost failed to save them. Union troops swept over the plantation and broke into the building in which the crates were stored. Soldiers pried two of them open. Peering in, they apparently decided that spiders in labeled jars and drawers of stuffed birds posed no danger to the Union.
When Arthur was about ten, he began to go straight from school to the museum nearly every day to help the museum’s director, Dr. Gabriel Manigault. Manigault had never met anyone so thirsty for knowledge, especially about birds. The boy never ran out of questions. How could you tell this warbler from that? Why was there no specimen of this or that bird? Soon Wayne was scouring the countryside with his rifle, bringing dead birds back to Dr. Manigault for the museum.
But shooting the bird was only part of the job of creating a museum specimen. The next step was to prepare the specimen so it could exist for eternity in a cabinet or a drawer. This wasn’t easy, since the bird had to look real to be of any use to a scholar or to impress a patron. Here Wayne had a wonderful teacher, an elderly British-born curator named John Dancer who had been hired to prepare the museum’s specimens. Wayne’s apprenticeship began when the two of them went to work on a mockingbird that Wayne had shot and brought in.
Slowly, painstakingly, the old man led Wayne through the tedious steps of taxidermy. First you had to cut open the back of the skull and remove the brains, which, like all internal organs, would rot if left intact. You stuffed the skull with cotton and sewed the skin back up. Then you cut slits into the chest and abdomen of the bird, pushed its legs inside, and pulled the skin off the body as if you were removing a glove, throwing away the flesh and internal organs. Then it was a matter of stuffing the empty skin with cotton to restore the original form of the bird. That was the hardest part. A preparer of specimens had to know the bird really well, as a painter did, to get the proportions right. The most common mistake was putting too much cotton in the chest to puff the bird up and make it look heroic. Finally you sewed the bird back up and combed out the dirt and pellet fragments from the feathers, trying hard to conceal any injuries the shot might have caused.
Most people never find the job that fits their greatest talents. But Arthur T. Wayne found out early in life that he seemed to have been born to collect and prepare birds. He was a keen-eyed observer, able to concentrate so intensely that he could even tell which sex a bird was as it flew in the sky at a great distance. He rarely made a mistake in identifying birds, and was a superb marksman. But good as he was at finding birds and bringing them down, he was even better at preparing specimens. Like a great painter, like an Audubon, Arthur Wayne could bring a bird to life with cotton and a combing brush. Throughout his teen years he collected and put up specimens for his beloved museum, all the while honing his skills.
After he decided to devote his life to bird collecting and study, it was said that Arthur T. Wayne rarely even went to the post office without his shotgun
And yet, after he graduated from high school, life looked like a dead end. He had been an honor student, but his family—like those of most southern high school graduates in the years just after the war—had no money to send him to college. He had to get a job. And so he did: Arthur T. Wayne, bird genius, began filling out bills of sale in a cotton warehouse like a great musician with no paying concerts. Each day, he counted the hours until he could grab his gun and rush out the door to the field, or hustle to the museum after work. Then, almost by magic, he met the man who would set him free. In the spring of 1883, William Brewster of Massachusetts, one of the best-known bird experts in the United States, arrived in Charleston to visit the museum. Dr. Manigault introduced him to Arthur Wayne, then twenty. Wayne was, as one friend later wrote, “thrilled to the depths of his being.”
THE MOST PERFECT MAN
During William Brewster’s funeral, one ornithologist remembered him as the most perfect man he ever met. At age thirty-one, when he was introduced to Arthur Wayne, Brewster was a tall, slender, dignified man who dressed with simple taste, moved slowly, and spoke almost poetically.
Brewster prepares a specimen during a collecting trip along the Suwannee River in 1890
On the surface, William Brewster and Arthur Wayne had nothing in common. The only child of a wealthy banker, Brewster grew up in a Boston mansion and enjoyed a boyhood of riding lessons and private schooling. After he graduated from high school, his father urged him to take up banking, but William resisted. So they struck a bargain: William would give banking an honest try for one year. If he disliked it, his father would drop the matter and never bring it up again. William started at his father’s bank as a messenger boy, climbing up the ladder to a management position. When the year was up, he informed his father that his heart just wasn’t in the world of finance. And that was the end of banking.
Like Wayne’s, Brewster’s heart belonged to birds. His father had taught him to shoot a single-barreled shotgun, and a neighbor had given him lessons in stuffing specimens. By the time he visited the Charleston Museum in 1883, William Brewster had been studying and collecting birds for nearly twenty years. He had invested his curious mind, most of his time, and much of his wealth in beginning one of the world’s great private collections of bird specimens and eggs. For the first time in his life, Arthur Wayne saw someone he wanted to be like: William Brewster.
Wayne and Brewster hunted birds together nearly every day in the wide swamps and marshes around Charleston during Brewster’s visit. Brewster was especially eager to rediscover Swainson’s Warbler, a chunky brown-capped songbird that hadn’t been seen anywhere for forty years. Early naturalists like Audubon had noted that it was a summer resident in South Carolina, but it was now considered a lost species—maybe even extinct.
Wayne knew in his bones that the warbler was still around and that he could find it. The two men began their search by revisiting the flooded swamps and bamboo thickets where it had last been reported. They spent weeks sloshing about without success. Undaunted, Brewster
returned the following spring to search again. On April 22, 1884, Wayne suddenly raised his shotgun to his eye and swung it around to follow a small brown dot. A shot rang out. The bird that fell into the brush turned out to be just what they had hoped—a Swainson’s Warbler. A week later Brewster shot another one. Overjoyed, he stayed around Charleston for three more months, during which time the two men killed a total of forty-seven Swainson’s Warblers, including several young birds. After Brewster left, Wayne discovered eggs of this species, something no one had ever done before, and proudly wrote about his find in a scientific journal.
THE PASSENGER PIGEON
Before white settlement, more than one-quarter of all the birds in what is now the United States were Passenger Pigeons. They were so abundant that in 1810 Alexander Wilson saw a flock pass overhead that was a mile wide and 240 miles long, containing over two billion birds. That flock could have stretched nearly twenty-three times around the equator. Passenger Pigeons were pretty and brown, with small grayish heads, barrel chests, and long, tapered wings that sent them through the sky at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour.
But they had two problems: they were good to eat and they destroyed crops by eating seeds. Farmers not only shot them, but also cast huge nets over fields to trap them by the thousands. It took only a few decades to wipe out what may have been the most plentiful bird ever to live on the earth. A fourteen-year-old boy named Press Clay Southworth shot the last wild Passenger Pigeon in 1900. The species became extinct in1914, when Martha, the last captive pigeon, died quietly in the Cincinnati Zoo.
As they hunted and prepared their specimens, Brewster and Wayne spent hundreds of hours together talking about birds. Wayne yearned to stop selling cotton and live a life like Brewster’s—even though he realized that the Bostonian’s independence rested upon an inherited fortune. Brewster encouraged him to try. He needed people like Wayne to provide specimens—birds that would build his collection. Wayne was not only someone who could find the birds he wanted in the South, but someone who could stuff them properly and send them to Boston in good shape. Brewster reminded Wayne that there were also other collectors eager to buy well-preserved specimens and eggs of rare and showy species.
MARKET HUNTERS
Collectors like Arthur Wayne were usually rough and ingenious outdoorsmen who carried the tools of their trade with them. In hot, humid climates they had to separate the skins from the innards of dead birds right away, or else they would find themselves gagging from the stench of rancid meat and battling swarms of flies. A field collector named Henry Henshaw described what he took with him on a California collecting trip on horseback in 1878:
My equipment … was simple enough. A pair of roomy saddlebags enabled me to carry a few bottles for the reception of small specimens … and a supply of cartridges, cotton, [and] matches. I also carried an insect net attached somewhere about my person, while a good double-barreled shotgun, slung on the horn of the saddle, completed my everyday outfit … Two stout boxes, one for supplies such as powder, shot, arsenic, cotton and the like, and the other fitted with trays in which to dry and carry bird and mammal skins, a copper tank of alcohol … enclosed in a stout locked box, and a plant press, also (went with me]. My skinning table was improvised by placing one collecting box on top of the other, and a folding stool enabled me to sit down and skin birds with reasonable comfort, although several hours of work usually developed a number of different sorts of backache.
Still, Wayne hesitated to quit his job until he met a second person who set him free. In 1889 Wayne married Maria Porcher, the daughter of a South Carolina plantation family. She dedicated her life to his happiness. The couple settled into a home overlooking a great marsh outside of Charleston, and Arthur Wayne never had to inspect another bale of cotton again.
In the springs of 1892, 1893, and 1894, the Waynes journeyed to Florida so that Arthur could collect rare birds for Brewster and others as well as hunt Manatees for Professor Henry Ward’s Natural Science Establishment. By then, Brewster had shifted into a more serious phase of collecting. When his specimens outgrew his family home, he bought three hundred acres of land on the Concord River and built a museum at the rear of his living quarters. He began to buy specimens in larger and larger quantities from all around the country, and hired librarians to help him organize his vast collection. Though Brewster made no promises to Wayne, he was definitely interested in obtaining high-quality Ivory-bill specimens and their eggs. Wayne was confident he could give Brewster exactly what he wanted.
The Waynes arrived in Branford, Florida, on the Suwannee River, in March 1892. After setting up his collecting table, Arthur went out to find men to help him. He asked around for local hunters and trappers who knew the countryside, letting it be known that he would pay four to five dollars per skin for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in good condition.
Away from home for the first time, the Waynes found themselves living in poverty, depending on payments from bird buyers that came in the mail. Brewster was slow to pay. Sometimes months passed between the time Wayne sent off specimens to Boston and the time he received Brewster’s replies, which didn’t always contain money.
On September 16, 1892, Wayne wrote Brewster in desperation, “On the Suwannee River from March to August … I secured thirteen [Ivory-billed Woodpecker] specimens, and have sold all but the finest … Will you advance me $25.00 on the trip and I will give you the refusal of all the birds I get?”
But Brewster didn’t advance the money, and the Waynes were forced to return to South Carolina. for the winter. They were back in Florida the next spring, hunting in the Orlando area for Carolina Parakeets and more Ivory-bills. The Ivory-bill was the star attraction, fetching a far higher price than any other species.
Though he shot some birds himself, Wayne mainly depended on keen-eyed strangers to bring him specimens. He called these collectors “country crackers,” and was constantly worried that they would deliver Ivory-bills with cracked or chipped bills, or damaged feathers. Wayne also had to compete with other collectors. He fumed about his chief rival, W.E.D. Scott, who also collected in Florida. “Mr Scott did not secure one Paroquet [the soon-to-be-extinct Carolina Parakeet] on his last collecting trip to Florida!” Wayne reminded Brewster. “No one has taken as many Paroquets as I have in the same space of time. Neither has anyone taken as many Ivory-bills, or Bachman’s warblers. I do not mean to brag, but my success is due to the interest I take.”
WARD’S NATURAL SCIENCE ESTABLISHMENT
Who else but Professor Henry Ward had traveled around the world seven times, sat atop Mount Sinai, and survived smallpox? Henry Ward ran away from home at the age of twelve and never quit exploring. Sent to Europe at twenty to tutor a friend, he went on to Egypt to collect fossils, skins, and artifacts.
Returning to his hometown of Rochester, New York, he began to buy and sell massive quantities of skins, skeletons, eggs, and specimens. He filled many a private cabinet (as well as college collections) with his specimens. His headquarters, Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, was founded in Rochester in 1862. Packed into his headquarters were colossal exhibits including Jumbo, P. T. Barnum’s circus elephant, who had been hit by a locomotive—his skeleton is shown below.
Not only was Ward’s a popular tourist destination, it was a huge marketplace for collectors. That’s why Arthur Wayne was eager to help satisfy Professor Ward’s interest in adding the Florida Manatee to his establishment.
A. T. WAYNE’S SAMPLE PRICE LIST AS OF JULY 29, 1893
Ivory-billed Woodpecker, male and female $22.00
Mississippi Kite, price reduced 2.00
4 Carolina Paroquets, adults 15.00
1 (Carolina) Paroquets, immature 3.50
3 South Carolina Swifts @ .50 1.50
1 Scott’s Sparrow 1.25
1 Red-eyed Vireo .25
1 Yellow-throated Vireo .30
1 Acadian Flycatcher .35
1 Bachman’s Warbler 2.50
1 Parula Warbler, Blue Head
1.00
1 Black-poll Warbler .25
1 Worm-eating Warbler .50
4 Manau’s Marsh Wrens 3.20
Total 53.60
All in all, Wayne’s field journals show that he killed or paid for the killing of forty-four Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Florida between 1892 and 1894. According to researcher James Tanner, who interviewed some of Wayne’s “country crackers” in the 1930s, Wayne’s work all but eliminated the Ivory-bill along three Florida rivers. Of these birds, Brewster bought only seven, paying an average of about twelve dollars per bird. Brewster also bought fifty-four specimens from other collectors, eventually giving him one of the largest collections of Ivory-bill specimens in the world.
WHAT’S HIT IS HISTORY
Why did Arthur Wayne need to kill forty-four Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, and why did William Brewster need to buy sixty-one specimens? Didn’t they realize the bird was nearing extinction? If so, didn’t they care?
Of course they knew Ivory-bills were rare—that’s what made them valuable. Wealthy collectors like Brewster competed fiercely to buy the few specimens of rare and almost extinct birds. Brewster was both a scientist and a collector—during the late 1800s there wasn’t always a clear distinction between the two. As a scientist, he wanted a large number of specimens to study all the variations found in birds of different sexes and ages, and from different parts of their range. Males and females look different in most species, as do juveniles and adults, as do birds in, say, the northern extreme of where they live compared to those in southern locations. To really understand a species as a whole, it’s important to observe these differences, and to try to understand what they mean to the birds themselves.