The Hummingbird Cabinet

Abstract

In bird gallery of The Natural History Museum London there is a nineteenth-century glass cabinet size of a circus car that may have once belonged to William Bullock, London Museum curator. The cabinet is large but easy to overlook--from a distance it looks like a neglected herbarium, one which foliage has been allowed to go brown and twiggy. Up close, this desiccated forest blooms with hundreds of hummingbirds posing stiffly every branch, their iridescent plumage only slightly dulled by passage of two hundred years. Sapphire hummingbirds cluster one area of cabinet, and ruby-breasted birds another. If you try to work out, an ornithologically challenged kind of way, which birds might be star-throats, and whether orangey birds with speckled tail feathers are coquettes, you will only feel confident about sword-billed humming-birds; they must be birds with beaks as long as swizzle sticks and slightly curved. There is not, Bullock stated of hummingbirds 1824, in all varied works of nature her zoological productions, any family that can bear a comparison, for singularity of form, splendour of colour, or number and variety of species, with this smallest of feathered creation (Six Months Residence 263). Bullock described appeal of hummingbird for collectors early decades of nineteenth century, a moment when number of bird species known to English naturalists proliferated. The tenth edition of Linnaeus's System Naturae, published 1758, identified only eighteen hummingbird species; by 1829, when R. P. Lesson began publishing his magisterial Les trochildees ou les colibris et les oiseaux-mouches, first illustrated work devoted exclusively to fly-birds, he described over a hundred species. To be a collector of hummingbirds Romantic period was to experience most inspirational collecting conditions: a endless supply of new types, each lovelier than last. Racket-tailed hummingbird, fire-throated hummingbird, emerald-crested hummingbird--each flitted enticingly across collector's field of vision. In sole surviving engraving of Bullock, he is dressed elegantly a double-breasted half coat and ascot, his amiable expression calling to mind neither a rapacious collector nor a Barnumesque huckster. He was both. Bullock traveled to Orkneys order to hunt down one of last surviving great auks. Paddling a six-oared boat, he came close to catching one harried bird, but had to settle for purchasing its carcass from another hunter following year (Alexander 119). He sought advice whether he might put show the Head of Oliver Cromwell still intire with flesh on and fastened a Pike (Bullock to Earl of Liverpool). But no counsel prevented him from exhibiting a family of Laplanders as if they were reindeer antlers or leggings or any of other Lapp accoutrements he featured same show. Hummingbirds were for Bullock an enduring fascination. His museum catalogues record rises resident hummingbird population, as if stuffed birds procreated posthumously confines of his display cabinets. A case containing 24 species with their Nests, featured 1805 catalogue of Bullock's Liverpool Museum, had expanded into a cabinet holding seventy hummingbirds by time Bullock moved his collections to London 1810 (Companion to Liverpool Museum, 4th ed., 33; Companion to Mr. Bullock's Museum 37). By 1812, Bullock boasted of having nearly one hundred various hummingbirds, the finest collection Europe (Companion to London Museum and Pantherion 62). Hummingbirds elicited that longing which Colin Campbell describes as a defining attribute of modern consumer, who, began his own materialistic pining at very moment when new species of hummingbirds appeared before collector's avid gaze (192)--the moment when Romantic poets worried over elusiveness of perfect pleasure, either past or evermore about to be. …