In Winter, There's an Art to Birding

January 31, 2003
By MARGARET MITTELBACH and MICHAEL CREWDSON

For birdwatchers in New York City, winter is a slow time.
Sure, if you're willing to endure the cold, you can see
tufted titmice and black-capped chickadees clinging to bare
branches in the parks or a few ducks bobbing along the
shoreline. But what about those dark, dreary days when the
birds themselves go into hiding?

Mark Dion, an artist and avid birder, has found a way to
beat the winter doldrums. He bird-watches at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He got the idea a few years ago when he went to Central
Park to do a little cold-weather birding, got caught in the
rain and ended up taking shelter in the museum. As he
walked soaking wet through the galleries, he paused to look
at Goya's "Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga" and
noticed a black-and-white bird in the foreground. His
birding instincts kicked in, and he identified it as a
magpie, a species of European crow. Since then, he has
encountered many avian species at the Met: mute swans
floating through panels of Tiffany glass, vultures skulking
on Egyptian urns and raptors in Renaissance paintings.

Mr. Dion was particularly delighted by these sightings
because he frequently uses bird themes in his own artwork.
For example, since 1993 he's created several sculptural
works in a series called "Library for the Birds." In these
installations, the branches of real trees, brought indoors,
are festooned with books that birds would find useful if
they could read. These include field guides, histories of
hunting, and biographies of naturalists like John James
Audubon and Rachel Carson. For one such piece, he persuaded
the Museum of Contemporary Art of Antwerp to let 18 of his
putative readers (live African finches) fly free around the
gallery. "I like to sensitize people to the
ornithological," Mr. Dion explained.

Recently, we asked Mr. Dion if we might accompany him on
one of his indoor bird-watching trips, and he was happy to
oblige. On the day we met, it was drizzling an icy rain.
The three of us wore hiking boots and hooded barn jackets,
the pockets of which were stuffed with pads, pencils and
various bird guides. Our binoculars were slung around our
necks. As we clomped into the museum's high-ceilinged,
marble lobby, Mr. Dion set the parameters for our
expedition: find as many bird species as possible. Time
limit: four hours.

The Met has more than two million artworks in its
collections and miles and miles of public corridors. Even
if you're just planning to look at art like a normal
person, it's hard to know where to begin. Mr. Dion
suggested we start with the American Wing. "We should be
able to recognize more birds there, since it's our native
habitat," he reasoned.

On the way there we started our search, eyes darting over
rare and ancient objects, from a massive Byzantine
sarcophagus to a set of tiny gold coins minted in the
fourth century A.D. Passing through the dimly lighted
medieval galleries, we sighted our first pair of wings,
taking flight on a 15th-century wool tapestry. A closer
look revealed they didn't belong to a bird but a winged
angel, hovering protectively over a scene of the
Annunciation. Tricky.

A Gold Eagle

Despite this false start, we soon made our first avian
identification. Taking a right at a Baroque choir screen,
we found ourselves entering the sky-lit, airy garden court
of the American Wing, with its glass wall overlooking
Central Park. As if in an aviary, we saw a larger-than-life
gold eagle, flying with wings outstretched, its giant beak
agape. A little ID card stated that the eagle was carved
from white pine by William Rush for a church in
Philadelphia in 1809. We agreed that the eagle belonged to
the subfamily Buteoninae, but couldn't decide whether it
was supposed to be a golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) or a
bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). Clearly, identifying
species was going to be a challenge in an environment where
the Linnean system took a back seat to artistic whims.

Delving farther into the galleries, we were inundated by
images of our national bird. There was an inlaid bald eagle
on the face of a pendulum clock manufactured when Jefferson
was president, a wooden bald eagle in a picture frame
surrounding a painting of George Washington, and a
cast-iron bald eagle on top of a Federal-period stove.

As we began poring over American decorative art, Mr. Dion
exhibited an uncanny ability to find birds. He discovered a
wild turkey appliqu?d on a folk-art coverlet dated 1850, a
European stork on a fin de si?cle umbrella stand, a great
blue heron carved into a Chippendale highboy, and a
Baltimore oriole embroidered on the back of a Colonial easy
chair. He also located numerous birds of unspecified
species - geese, swans, owls and ducks - in glass, wood,
pottery and textiles.

When we moved on to two-dimensional works, we found a
painting entitled "Hummingbird and Passionflowers" at the
back of a period room labeled "Renaissance Revival Parlor."
Mr. Dion immediately recognized it as a piece by Martin
Johnson Heade, who, like himself, was an amateur
naturalist. "Heade spent years in South and Central
America, and he was practically obsessed with
hummingbirds," Mr. Dion said.

With our binoculars we could see that the tiny, delicate
bird was creamy white with blue-black wings, tail and cap.
Although our guide to the birds of Costa Rica pictured 57
species of hummingbirds, none of them matched Heade's.
"It's almost certainly a real species," Mr. Dion said, "but
we'll have to mark it unknown for now."

Hunters and Quarry

We had slightly better luck with
Thomas Eakins's painting "Pushing for Rail" (1874), which
was being examined by a tour group. While this piece
focuses primarily on rifle-toting hunters in boats, a
shadowy image of their winged quarry, the rail, is pictured
in silhouette trying to escape. We waited for a few
minutes, hoping the tour guide would mention what species
the rail was (there are five on the East Coast alone), but
she kept going on about Eakins's style and how little he
earned for his paintings. Based on the habitat (it appeared
to be a tidal marsh) and location (she mentioned it
depicted a scene in New Jersey), we decided it was a
clapper rail.

Soon after Eakins, we hit the zone, and identifications
came fast and furious. Mr. Dion was particularly excited
when we pulled him over to a tiny portrait by Washington
Blanchard entitled "Henry Larcom Abbot" (1835), a
watercolor on ivory of a boy in a ruffled shirtdress
holding a bird. No bigger than a thumbnail, the beige bird
had a yellow band on its tail, a red spot on its wing, and
a black streak on its eye. "This is exquisitely rendered,"
Mr. Dion said. "That's a cedar waxwing, one of my favorite
birds to see in the wild."

We also discovered another painting by Heade, "Hummingbird
and Apple Blossoms" (1875). The bird's red throat and
iridescent green sheen tipped us off that it was a
ruby-throated hummingbird, one of only two hummingbird
species found in the eastern United States.

Nearby, there was a still life from 1878 by John Singer
Sargent, "Studies of a Dead Bird," which Mr. Dion instantly
identified as a blue tit, a pudgy, short-billed songbird
that's very common in Europe.

Landscape by Church

Although we had begun to move very rapidly through the
galleries, identifying birds and then moving on, one
painting held us transfixed: Frederic Edwin Church's
enormous landscape "The Heart of the Andes," dating from
1859. A 5 1/2-by-10-foot oil painting, it depicts the
varied landscapes of Ecuador, including snow-capped peaks,
mountain foothills and river valleys covered with lush
vegetation. Almost hidden in the left foreground is a
brilliantly colored exotic bird, perhaps two inches high,
with a long blue-green tail, red breast, blue body and
yellow beak.

It was so unusual looking we asked Mr. Dion if it was an
invention of the artist's. "If there's a plant or bird in
the painting, you can be pretty sure it's a real species,"
he told us. "Church didn't do any fanciful stuff. This bird
is a member of the trogon family." Flipping through our
Costa Rican bird guide, he showed us an illustration of the
same tropical bird. "Here it is, a resplendent quetzel."

Examining Church's painting up close, we flushed out two
more birds on the far right. One was in flight and one was
perched, but they were so tiny all we could see were
flashes of red and black plumage. This time, we couldn't
make an identification and made a note to do more research.


In an adjoining room, dominated by Emanuel Leutze's
painting of "Washington Crossing the Delaware," we found an
extremely rare species perched in a corner by the ceiling.
"Now that's exciting," Mr. Dion said. "They're believed to
be extinct." An oil painting by Joseph Bartholomew Kidd,
after a print by Audubon, depicted three birds with
conspicuous crests and long white bills. It was labeled
"Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers."

The last time ivory-billed woodpeckers were spotted in the
wild was in Cuba in 1987. But ornithologists still make
expeditions to Cuba and the southeastern United States to
search for them. We suspected that the closest we would
ever get to this lost species was the painting before us.

Our last birds in the American Wing were more in danger
than endangered. They were four bobwhites, common game
birds being sniffed out by two spaniels in Arthur
Fitzwilliam Tait's 1874 painting "On Point." With half our
time gone, we decided to head for a different habitat.

Next Up: Goya

Mr. Dion suggested that because of our
limited time, we stick with two departments, American and
European. "We could have done Islamic art, Roman art or any
number of areas," he said. "But like any bird-watching
expedition, you have to make certain choices. You can't do
both the Ramble and the northern end of Central Park in the
same day."

Once we hit the European-paintings section, Mr. Dion went
straight for Goya's "Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga"
(1784-1792), the painting that first inspired him to
bird-watch at the Met. In it a little boy in a red outfit
holds a string at the end of which is a magpie, clasping
the painter's calling card in its beak. In a cage behind
the boy are several yellow-and-black-winged, red-faced
songbirds that Mr. Dion identified as European goldfinches.
The card next to the painting states: "In Christian art,
birds frequently symbolize the soul. In Baroque art, caged
birds are symbolic of innocence."

The card goes on to explain that Goya's portrait is a
commentary on "the fleeting nature of innocence." But for
us it merely symbolized two more species for our list.

Next we stopped before an oil painting by Jean-Baptiste
Oudry from 1753 called "Dog Guarding Dead Game." It
pictures a red fox strung up by its feet, two birds bound
in similar fashion and two more birds laid out on the
ground. Mr. Dion made quick work of them, like a waiter
reading off the specials for the evening. "European jay,
European curlew, a green woodpecker and a stock dove."

In the same room, we found a Chardin painting, "The Silver
Tureen" (1728), in which a dead hare lies on a table beside
a dead bird. "That's possibly a red grouse," Mr. Dion
muttered while consulting Peterson's "Birds of Britain and
Europe."

But wait. "No, no, it's a gray partridge," he finally
decided. From several other still lifes of this type, Mr.
Dion rapidly identified a rock dove (pigeon), two European
kingfishers, a black grouse, a teal (a type of duck), a
bullfinch and a songbird that was either a chaffinch or a
brambling - all deceased and on the verge of being turned
into soups and pies.

Mr. Dion seemed pleased with our rising tally. "We've
really extended our list," he said. "Thank God the
Europeans hunted and ate every kind of bird."

Too Many Gulls

After the room of the dead birds, we hit a
slump. Museum-itis (or birder's fatigue) was beginning to
get the better of us, and the endless scanning of paintings
for birds was making our eyes ache. Although our initial
goal was to count every bird, no matter how small or
indistinct, we had become jaded about certain types.
Unidentified flying gulls in seaside landscapes, farmyard
fowl and the ubiquitous white doves of Christian art (which
Mr. Dion referred to as albino pigeons) had become the
"junk birds" of the Met, too numerous to count, too generic
to care about.

The paintings began to blur together as well as we rushed
along looking for avian quarry. Masterpieces meant nothing
if they had no avifauna. "El Greco, El Schmecko," we
mumbled to ourselves. "If he didn't paint birds, he's out."
We passed birdless Rembrandts and van Goghs without a
second glance. And we wondered aloud, "Didn't Gauguin paint
exotic birds during his stay in Tahiti?"

Finally, one of the Met's most celebrated paintings came
through. In Pieter Bruegel's "Harvesters" (1565), two birds
are pictured in flight over a hay field in the Netherlands.
Mr. Dion picked them off immediately. "European quail," he
said as we race-walked by.

Things heated up again when we reached the French Realists
and Impressionists, starting with Courbet's controversial
"Woman With Parrot." In the 1866 oil painting, a nude with
her hair unbound lies on a white sheet. She has a blissful
expression on her face, possibly because the parrot that
has alighted on her hand is nibbling one of her fingers.
Mr. Dion informed us that Courbet's work caused a scandal
in its day, because the woman was provocatively posed "in
glorious abandon."

While the woman was certainly comely, we ogled the
iridescent green-and-orange plumage of the parrot (a
blue-fronted Amazon).

Manet's Parrot

One room over, we found Manet's "Young Lady in 1866," which
offered a tamer take on an interspecies duo. In it, a fully
clothed woman is posed next to a large cheerful-looking
parrot with a white speckled head. The avian model in this
work, Mr. Dion told us, was an African gray parrot.

Our final identification was two scarlet ibises in Degas's
"Young Woman With Ibises" (1857-1862). Then we realized our
time was up. It was time to tally the species.

In four hours we had netted 48 species as well as countless
fanciful and unidentifiable birds. To make it an even 50,
we contacted the Met's public affairs office and were put
in touch with Kevin Avery, an associate curator who also
happens to be a serious bird-watcher. First he informed us
that the unidentified hummingbird in the first Heade
painting was a black-eared fairy, a South American species.
"It's a bird he painted after an 1863 trip to Brazil," he
said.

And what about the tiny black-and-red birds in Church's
"Heart of the Andes"? "They're red-ruffed fruit crows," Mr.
Avery said.

And how did he identify these impossibly tiny birds? "When
I was writing a book on this picture, I brought in an
ornithologist from the American Museum of Natural History
who specializes in the birds of Ecuador," he said.

After talking with Mr. Avery and learning more avian
tidbits (he told us that Church owned a stuffed resplendent
quetzel), we decided that he was a bird of a feather that
would be invited to our next bird-watching trip, whether it
was indoors or out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/arts/design/31BIRD.html?ex=1045077644&e
i=1&en=5247bc68623649fd



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