Crimes of a Feather

1911-Cornwall

Awake early, Imogen watched from her upstairs bedroom window as the men walked down the road toward the China clay plant. Was the blue-eyed boy among them this time? From this angle, it was difficult to tell. She could hear a lone thrush call out to its mate, and then a mournful cooing.

Her cousin George had been teaching her about bird calls ever since her mother died of Typhoid the year before. Their songs comforted her, distracting her from the endless tides of grief.

During the summer, a baby barn owl had fallen from a silver birch just down the hill from the mine. Cousin George had made her a wooden box for the rescued fledgling, lining it with scraps of muslin from her mother's sewing basket. Now the box sat in the corner of her room by the washbasin, empty and dark. Maybe the hollow sound in the night was her owl, calling to her.

Wrapping her soft shawl around her slim frame, the sixteen-year-old orphan peered out the opening of the lace curtains where she could see lanterns hanging from the men’s arms, swinging between the rows of linden trees. Their boots crunched softly on the gravel. The first wisp of dawn hovered over the distant stubble of the fields. Above the gas flame, the angles of the men's chins changed shapes, making them look like shadow puppets.

Yes, it was him. She could see the tall boy clearly now. He walked between the older men, his face upturned, moonlight polishing his cheekbones, his slight limp shifting the light patterns cast by the lantern he held. Was he 17, 20? Tall shadows of trees frolicked and darted beside the potting shed and around the men in the road.

There were four of them wrapped in darkness, carrying buckets and small cloth sacks of food dangling from their belts. Imogen could see her own breath travel from her warm mouth to the window where it blurred the men in a fog, melting the edges of the frost on the plate glass.

Sliding her feet into soft knit slippers, she tiptoed down the stairs and moved to a window in the kitchen where she could see them better. The coals in the grate peered at her with their diminished red eyes. The smell of cedar smoke and bacon grease hung in the air. She followed the men down the narrow driveway with her eyes as she curled her long black hair behind her ears, sucking on the end like the point of a thread. Already, these men looked exhausted even before the sun had a chance to lend its energy to them. 

The dark figure of cousin George appeared from a distant bend in the road. Since her father had gone to find work at the docks, George managed what was left of the farm. The cows followed behind him like the approach of a small army. Imogen watched him grow larger as he came up the road from the pasture for milking. She wondered what would happen when he reached the strangers on the road, these men who worked for her Uncle Ben at the clay pits.

At length, both parties slowed as they approached the other. With hushed politeness, the workmen stood to the side, holding up the lanterns to let the cows pass them. The tall boy put his hand on the flank of a heifer as she passed. Imogen imagined the warmth under the young stranger’s hand. He must be kind, she thought, because he did this gently, without any sense of ownership or privilege. He did not own this land or these cows. It was the Willoughby’s land. Maybe Squire Willoughby owned the cows too now since her father hadn’t paid last month’s rent.

The mottled shorthorns passed the silent gauntlet of men, their heads bobbing, their jaws chewing. Cousin George nodded at the strangers, unsmiling, and followed the cows up toward the milking barn. Most mornings, he passed groupings of strangers like these on their way to the clay pits, their sleepy nods a quiet comfort to him in the solitude and darkness of six A.M.

Imogen had watched men like these working a mile away in the clay pits. She had heard their barks, their axes banging on the wooden scaffolding of the pits. She had seen the fire in the kilns and the white water spilling through the pipes into the bay, turning it into a sea of milk.

She had seen how sweat clings to a man's cotton shirt as his muscles shift. And when the dry wind whips at his clay-dusted hair, she had seen how he wraps his arms around himself to keep warm. Yesterday she saw the shacks where the men slept behind the clay processing facility by the river. Then, cousin George brought her into the kilns and showed her how the bal maidens work.

“You could be a bal maiden someday,” he laughed. He explained that these women, known as bal maidens, would separate the mica from the clay, then shape and turn the mixture until it resembled dry blocks that could be cut and transported up-country to the Wedgewood factories and overseas. Clay had dried on their hands and forearms as if they were wearing long white gloves like the ladies of the London season. But they were not elegant women. Their burlap dresses, tied at the waist with rope, made them look like strange, tired shepherds.

Imogen knew she would not become a bal maiden. Her arms would be covered in a rainbow of paint, not clay. She would be an artist and draw birds.

As cousin George followed the cows into the barn, the four men shrank smaller and smaller on the road where they eclipsed a lone figure growing larger, galloping up toward the house on a black gelding. Squire Willoughby.

2011-Washington DC

As Bruno took his place on the small stage, Harriet watched from the table where stacks of freshly printed copies of the new book lay in piles. There was a taste in the air of newly minted money and olive tapenade. A reverent hush held the massive Beaux-arts-style atrium as she studied the notes of the remaining part of her speech.

As Bruno spoke about mass extinction, Harriet watched the evening sunset slice the balustrades with columns of orange light from the crescent windows above the fourth-floor balconies. She hoped their presentations would transform this flock of erudite donors from passive spectators to impassioned bird champions. Was that so much to ask? It might be, especially now that the disturbing allegations about Colonel Willoughby had come to light.

Her mind fell to the crimes of her great grandfather as she listened to Bruno’s gentle, confident voice amplified through the speakers. How many of the donors knew about the allegations, she wondered? Just the week before, London’s Museum of Natural History had opened an investigation into a crime in which one of Darwin’s Galapagos finches had been switched out for a fraudulent specimen. The leading suspect was none other than her late great grandfather, Colonel John Willoughby of Cornwall. This certainly threw a wrench in their plan to appeal to the Smithsonian donors for their high-tech bird museum presented in the late colonel's name.

The truth was, rumors had batted around for nearly fifty years about how the old ornithologist used to occasionally “borrow” bird specimens from museums. But this was different. In response to the rumors, Harriet guessed that his curiosity must have gotten the best of him. Perhaps he needed to compare a tail feather from a willow ptarmigan to one from a sandgrouse. Or, maybe he simply had to feast his eyes on the birds for more time than the hours the museum allowed. But if this were the case, what kind of scientist would that make him? His legacy had inspired her to study birds. Now, she wasn't so sure she could respect him at all.

If the allegations weren't true, perhaps they were born of envy, she thought. Fueled by the need to disparage his legacy, some lesser ornithologists had accused him of this ugly crime involving Darwin’s finches. She bristled. It reminded her of her own sister; always trying to sabotage her accomplishments. The eccentric old fellow could have just borrowed a couple of specimens and forgotten to return them. Was that really such an unforgivable crime? She didn't want to believe the things her grandmother had told her, but part of her knew there was truth to them.

Applause rained through the atrium as Bruno nodded in her direction and made his way over to the table. “You’re up, my dear,”  he said as he felt for the leg of the chair with his walking cane and lowered himself down beside her, his seeing-eye dog Puck sitting protectively at his side. Harriet squeezed Bruno's shoulder as she slid by him and made her way back to the podium with a copy of the new book. She opened the glistening pages to the bookmark and cleared her throat. The pages still smelled of printer’s ink. 

“Allow me to read to you from our chapter about the belted kingfisher.” She peered out at the blurry rows of people through her reading glasses. Turning toward the stuffed polar bear in her orbit, she cleared her throat. To her left, a stuffed eagle perched at eye level inside a glass case. It stood frozen in time with its beak half-opened as if it were about to sing its song of valor, wings spread as wide as the bear’s arms.

“As with many other species,” she read, “the belted kingfisher’s habitats are quickly vanishing with deforestation, chemical pesticides, and, of course, the warming planet. If we fail to protect them, unimaginable losses will ensue.” They had all heard this before and looked bored. Harriet slid off her glasses and pointed to the audience, going off-script. She had to reach them. 

“We need to show everyday people, like your grandson, or your nephew—people who may have no previous interest in birds. Young people. We need to convince them that birds are worth saving.”

An elderly woman in the second row wearing a puffed sleeved ensemble nodded vigorously. “Bruno and I have stumbled upon a way to reach them; a kind of love potion,” she continued. Confused cadences of restless laughter spread through the room. Silk-covered limbs rasped against each other.

Harriet bent forward and lifted her arms in front of her to emphasize her point. “We need to use the language of our age to speak to the young people of our age. What is that language?” She waited for a moment before continuing. “Bruno and I propose that language is virtual reality. And, the love potion? Real audio and video footage from our bird cams.”

She couldn’t tell if these people were interested or just baffled. A whispery murmuration took hold of them. Hoping to bring them back, she reminded them of her great grandfather, the man whose name had brought them here in the first place. But, thinking of him now just made her angry. She took a deep breath and surrendered, reeling them back in before they dropped off the line by which she tried to hold their attention.

“In the words of my great grandfather, Colonel John Willoughby—,” she said through a muffled, rising applause, “who embraced the scientific innovations of the early twentieth century; who is best known for discovering the lappet-faced vulture and Willoughby’s pygmy owl of Kenya—.” Harriet let the audience anticipate the wonderment that only quotes from dead scientists can evoke.

With mild dread, she spoke the strange quote pulled from the inside cover of the colonel's book about Russian falcons, written just before his wife Imogen's murder in 1925. Imogen had illustrated the book with beautiful lithographs and oils. Harriet could remember the marbled end-pages of the worn fabric-covered first edition nestled amid other vintage ornithology books along the shelves of her UC Berkeley office. She remembered the tender look in the eye of a heron, its head sunken between its wing blades, preparing for flight.

'“If men fail to protect the avian dinosaurs, their songs will no longer comfort us when our own nests grow dark.”' Well, she'd said it. She noticed the corner of Bruno's lips creeping upward as if he were about to laugh.

What exactly the colonel had meant by this, Harriet never fully understood. He was not an early environmentalist by any stretch of the imagination. By the accounts of the sheer number of his hunting trophies in his Kenya diary alone, no case could be made about that.  

A credulous hum snaked through the aisles of well-pressed suits. Ladies uncrossed and recrossed their legs to the restless crinkle of fine fabrics. Harriet wondered if these acolytes of her great grandfather understood the quote any more than she did.  

She gestured to her assistant Lily to roll the video from the projector. Previously recorded footage from one of their Adirondack bird cams illuminated the thirty-foot screen to her right. The overhead lights dimmed. Suddenly, a female barn owl filled the screen. The creamy bird perched on a high limb of white pine, her heart-shaped face framing eyes that gazed off into the forest. A collective gasp rippled through the atrium.

The audience sat spellbound as they watched the handsome bird clean her wings with her beak as she turned her head left and right.

Over the years, Harriet had learned to lump the colonel's legacy with many of the other gentleman natural scientists of the early 20th century. They all seemed to be consumed with an insatiable urge to shoot as many creatures as possible. But maybe he harbored some guilt after all that killing. His writing did reflect an admiration for birds, but no real compassion.

Like many of those early men of birds who were equally indiscriminate in their killing sprees, her great grandfather had carried a gun with him at all times. If not to kill a Boar in South Africa or a German in World War I or anyone standing in the way of colonialism for that matter, he had killed any bird or beast who darkened his path. It was a matter of pride for him as the rooms of his Cornish manor filled with shelf upon shelf of taxidermy.

 Harriet and Bruno had recorded the forest sounds and they rang up through the cathedral ceilings of the Smithsonian rotunda, echoing like a magnificent dream. The flute-like notes of the owl, the endless trills of crickets, the sustained bass notes of swamp frogs—all became a zoological symphony. As the owl wheeled her head away from the camera, a pulsing infant-like sob crooned out over the heads of the donors, tapering into a haunting whinny. Mouths hung open as if in a trance. Then, as if to break the spell, the owl took flight.

At once, the film switched perspectives and panned to the forest below seen through the owl’s eyes, all taken from the footage of the tiny Go-Pro camera that she and Bruno had attached to the front haunch of the bird.

“Imagine that you are this owl,” Harriet said, widening her eyes as if she were talking to a group of children. “You are looking for food for your two fledglings back in the nest you’ve made for them in a nearby hemlock.” Harriet’s voice floated, melding with the forest sounds filling the atrium. Wind howled in the trees. The call of another owl farther off beckoned. Twigs broke, insects thrummed, and the constant flapping of wings beat like breath. 

“You fly through the canopy of the deciduous forest that you have always known as your home,” Harriet continued, “navigating streams, fields, gorges, rocky cliffs. You dive through the sky with your mate, looking down at the earth for a mouse or a small rabbit. The owlets back in the nest need you. They are hungry and vulnerable to predators. You must protect them.” As Harriet spoke, the Go-Pro footage revealed a wooded landscape at dusk spreading out below the bird. The film jerked and rocked with the bird's body.

Panning to another bird cam, the film revealed a large nest made with branches and twigs. Two snow-white owlets with wide round eyes filled the nest. The mother had just brought them a small rodent. They tore at the flesh with their claws and beaks, gulping it down into their soft round bodies. “Ahhh,” cooed the audience in atonal unison. Harriet smiled. What better way to steal their hearts than with owlets?

“This is what it will feel like for the visitors of our virtual reality bird museum, but only better. It will be in 3D, up close, and personal. You will become the owls. You will become a thousand other birds. You will hear the sounds that the bird hears. You will sing the song that the bird sings, and in the course of this experience, you will be forced to begin to understand how precious and vulnerable their lives are. Bruno and I believe that when people experience something like what it is to be a bird, they will be more inclined to want to protect them.”

A tsunami of applause engulfed the atrium as Harriet smiled and nodded. “Thank you for helping us make this vision a reality. Please come by the table to my left during our break to talk to us about how you can help bring this museum to fruition.”   

A group of older gentlemen in expensive suits stood together by a stuffed warthog, sipping glasses of champagne, saluting her as she left the stage and headed for the bar. The fake jungle shrubs behind them made them look like a postmodern work of art: suited businessmen on safari. They were like her great grandfather; men of impeccable old-school pedigree whose interest in science almost made them honorary scientists themselves. Other Smithsonian patrons sat at tables or stood with arms crossed, leaning against the heavy marble pillars that circled the gleaming floors and cartouches.

She made her way around the rotunda, smiling and shaking hands as the footage from the bird cams continued to broadcast scenes from the nest. The fluffy fledglings stared out like toys, their soulful black eyes blinking. They seemed to be contemplating their future moment of flight. Harriet felt a maternal gush of love flood through her. “Who-cooks -for-you,” sang the father owl from the speakers, “who-cooks-for -you-all.”

Harriet found herself surrounded by a throng of Smithsonian patrons at the bar. Conversation turned to the hummingbird specimen collection, donated by her great grandfather. 

“Most of the young ornithologists I’ve met,” said a tall sagacious gentleman in a bow tie and a suit that smelled strongly of mothballs, “hardly give the bird skins a second thought. Their minds are on DNA and genomes instead of feathers and gizzards. Your great grandfather prepared a beautiful specimen, don’t you think, Harriet? He had a talent for hiding his stitches.”

Harriet repressed a cynical giggle. Yes, he was good at hiding his stitches; so good that no one knew when he stole and doctored them to look like his own. But with DNA, now there would be proof.

"Yes, I believe he did," Harriet said dryly, gripping the stem of her Manhattan. "But you know, I think my great grandmother had a deeper love for birds than he did."

"Do you now?" said the man dubiously, the furrow in his brow growing deeper by the moment.

"Did you know she illustrated most of Colonel Willoughby's books?" Harriet gazed out at the owlet's eyes. They seemed to ask something of her.

"I can't say that I even knew she was an artist," said the gentleman, twirling his silver mustache.

Still watching the owls, Harriet replied, "Oh, yes, she was an artist. There was something about the way she depicted those birds. You could just tell how much she respected them. Loved them even."

The man looked perplexed and shook his head so that little flakes of dandruff snowed out onto the fine black wool of his shoulder.

"I've just this moment decided this," she continued with a sparkle in her eye, "but I think we'll call it the Imogen Willoughby Museum instead."