BirdCast: You Can Now Forecast the Migration of Birds Across the U.S. Just Like the Weather

in Maps, Nature | March 26th, 2021

We talk about the weath­er more often than we talk about most things, oth­er nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na includ­ed. We cer­tain­ly talk about the weath­er more often than we talk about birds, much to the dis­ap­point­ment of ornitho­log­i­cal enthu­si­asts. This could be down to the com­par­a­tive robust­ness of weath­er pre­dic­tion, both as a tra­di­tion and as a dai­ly tech­no­log­i­cal pres­ence in our lives. We can hard­ly avoid see­ing the weath­er fore­cast, but when was the last time you checked the bird fore­cast? Such a thing does, in fact, exist, though it’s only come into exis­tence recent­ly, in the form of Bird­cast, which pro­vides “real-time pre­dic­tions of bird migra­tions: when they migrate, where they migrate, and how far they will be fly­ing.”

Devel­oped by Col­orado State Uni­ver­si­ty and the Cor­nell Lab of Ornithol­o­gy, Bird­Cast offers both live bird migra­tion maps and bird fore­cast migra­tion maps for the Unit­ed States. “These fore­casts come from mod­els trained on the last 23 years of bird move­ments in the atmos­phere as detect­ed by the US NEXRAD weath­er sur­veil­lance radar net­work,” says Bird­Cast’s web site.

Unprece­dent­ed in both the kind of infor­ma­tion they pro­vide and the detail in which they pro­vide it, “these bird migra­tion maps rep­re­sent­ed the cul­mi­na­tion of a 20-year long vision, so too the begin­nings of new inspi­ra­tion for the next gen­er­a­tion of bird migra­tion research, out­reach and edu­ca­tion, and appli­ca­tion.”

You can learn more about the devel­op­ment and work­ings of Bird­Cast in the record­ed webi­nar below, fea­tur­ing research asso­ciate Adri­aan Dok­ter and Julia Wang, leader of the Lights Out project, which aims to get Amer­i­cans spend­ing more time in just such a state. “Every spring and fall, bil­lions of birds migrate through the US, most­ly under the cov­er of dark­ness,” says its sec­tion of Bird­Cast’s site. “This mass move­ment of birds must con­tend with a dra­mat­i­cal­ly increas­ing but still large­ly unrec­og­nized threat: light pol­lu­tion.” The goal is “turn­ing off unnec­es­sary light­ing dur­ing crit­i­cal migra­tion peri­ods,” and with spring hav­ing begun last week­end, we now find our­selves in just such a peri­od. Luck­i­ly, our fine feath­ered friends should­n’t be dis­turbed by the glow of the Bird­Cast map on your screen. View live Bird­Cast maps here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore an Inter­ac­tive Ver­sion of The Wall of Birds, a 2,500 Square-Foot Mur­al That Doc­u­ments the Evo­lu­tion of Birds Over 375 Mil­lion Years

What Kind of Bird Is That?: A Free App From Cor­nell Will Give You the Answer

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

Watch “The “Art of Fly­ing,” a Short Film Cap­tur­ing the Won­drous Mur­mu­ra­tions of the Com­mon Star­ling

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear Marianne Faithfull’s Three Versions of “As Tears Go By,” Each Recorded at a Different Stage of Life (1965, 1987 & 2018)

in Music | March 26th, 2021

When a 17-year-old Mar­i­anne Faith­full fin­ished the final take of her 1965 hit “As Tears Go By” — penned by a young duo of Mick Jag­ger and Kei­th Richards as one of their first orig­i­nal songs — Rolling Stones man­ag­er Andrew Loog Old­ham “came and gave me a big hug,” she recalled “‘Con­grat­u­la­tions dar­ling. You’ve got your­self a num­ber six,’ he said.”

Richards remem­bered the song in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy as “a ter­ri­ble piece of tripe” and “mon­ey for old rope,” but it actu­al­ly peaked at num­ber 22 on the Bill­board Hot 100, where it stayed for nine weeks, no small thing. So pop­u­lar was “As Tears Go By” that the Stones them­selves record­ed a ver­sion the fol­low­ing year. Their take also entered the Hot 100, where it peaked at num­ber six.

The sto­ry of the song rep­re­sents in brief the evo­lu­tion of its orig­i­nal singer. Fat­ed in her ear­ly years to be known as lit­tle more than Jagger’s muse, an image she grew to hate, Faith­full went from hang­er-on in the six­ties, “an essen­tial com­po­nent of the Swing­ing Lon­don scene,” writes review­er alrockchick; to a home­less hero­in addict; to a leg­end revived, her “whiskey-soaked” croak of a voice the per­fect vehi­cle for deliv­er­ing smoke-filled tales of weari­ness and betray­al.

Along the way, there was “As Tears Go By,” a song Faith­full came to embody, though she didn’t think much of it as a teenag­er. (See Bri­an Epstein intro­duce her on Hula­baloo, above, in 1965.)

She was “nev­er that crazy” about it, she said. “God knows how Mick and Kei­th wrote it or where it came from…. In any case, it’s an absolute­ly aston­ish­ing thing for a boy of 20 to have writ­ten a song about a woman look­ing back nos­tal­gi­cal­ly on her life.”

The “boys” had help — at first they cribbed the title “As Time Goes By” from the famous tear­jerk­er in Casablan­ca. Accord­ing to Loog Old­ham, he locked the two Stones in a room togeth­er and said, “I want a song with brick walls all around it, high win­dows and no sex.” How that became a Mar­i­anne Faith­full sig­na­ture is some­thing of a mys­tery. At times she claimed Jag­ger wrote the song for her; at oth­ers, she emphat­i­cal­ly denied it. But as the con­trast between her voice and the song’s sac­cha­rine, maudlin nature changed, so too did the pow­er of her deliv­ery, which is not to say her first record­ing didn’t war­rant the atten­tion.

“The voice on ‘As Tears Go By’ and ‘Sum­mer Nights,’” altrockchick writes, “has an airy, sur­re­al qual­i­ty; the voice on Bro­ken Eng­lish,” her 1979 come­back (which does not include “As Tears Go By”), “is as real as it gets” and only got more real with time. In a Nico-esque monot­o­ne drone, she revis­it­ed the song she made famous in the mid-six­ties in the 1987 take above for the album Strange Weath­er. She had just recent­ly got­ten clean and lost a lover to sui­cide.

The weath­ered vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty she projects is worlds away from the dreamy melan­choly of the past, her voice “a far cry from the 60s sweet­ness,” The Music Afi­ciona­do blog notes. “Years of sub­stance abuse and con­stant smok­ing dropped her pitch and made it raspy.” These qual­i­ties are even more pro­nounced in a 2018 ver­sion of the song from the album Neg­a­tive Capa­bil­i­ty. It func­tions almost as a coda for a career as an inter­preter of the songs of oth­ers, though she’s writ­ten no few of her own (and may yet release anoth­er ver­sion of “As Time Goes By.”)

She is remem­bered for much more than her first hit, but Faithfull’s revis­i­ta­tion of “As Tears Go By” over the years seems to speak to an ambiva­lent accep­tance of Mick Jagger’s con­stant pres­ence in her sto­ry — and a grace­ful, if not exact­ly uplift­ing, accep­tance of the inevitable rav­ages of age and fame.

You can hear her very recent inter­view on the Bro­ken Record pod­cast below:

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Jean-Luc Godard Shoots Mar­i­anne Faith­full Singing “As Tears Go By” (1966)

David Bowie Sings ‘I Got You Babe’ with Mar­i­anne Faith­full in His Very Last Per­for­mance As Zig­gy Star­dust (1973)

Watch the Rolling Stones Write “Sym­pa­thy for the Dev­il”: Scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s ’68 Film One Plus One

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Leonardo da Vinci Made His Magnificent Drawings Using Only a Metal Stylus, Pen & Ink, and Chalk

in Art, History | March 25th, 2021

The mod­ern artist has what can seem like an unlim­it­ed range of mate­ri­als from which to choose, a vari­ety com­plete­ly unknown to great Renais­sance mas­ters like Leonar­do da Vin­ci. Few, if any, can say, how­ev­er, that they have any­thing like the raw tal­ent, inge­nu­ity, and dis­ci­pline that drove Leonar­do to draw inces­sant­ly, con­stant­ly hon­ing his tech­niques and exploit­ing every use of the tools and tech­niques avail­able to him.

What were those tools and tech­niques? Con­ser­va­tor Alan Don­nithorne demon­strates Leonardo’s mate­ri­als in the video above, with exam­ples from the hold­ings of the Roy­al Col­lec­tion at Wind­sor Cas­tle. Leonar­do “drew inces­sant­ly,” the Roy­al Col­lec­tion Trust writes, “to devise his artis­tic projects, to explore the nat­ur­al world, and to record the work­ings of his imag­i­na­tion.” He used met­al­point, a method of draw­ing on coat­ed paper with a met­al sty­lus; pen and ink, with pens made from a goose wing feath­er; and, after the 1490s, red and black chalks.

Leonar­do pro­duced thou­sands of draw­ings dur­ing his lifetime“many of them of extreme beau­ty and com­plex­i­ty,” says Don­nithorne, “and it’s incred­i­ble to think that he pro­duced them using these very sim­ple ingre­di­ents.”

The Roy­al Col­lec­tion owns around 550 of these draw­ings, “togeth­er as a group since the artist’s death in 1519,” when he bequeathed them to his stu­dent, Francesco Melzi. These works “pro­vide unpar­al­leled insight,” the Col­lec­tion writes, “into the work­ings of Leonardo’s mind and reflect the full range of his inter­ests, includ­ing paint­ing, sculp­ture, archi­tec­ture, anato­my, engi­neer­ing, car­tog­ra­phy, geol­o­gy, and botany.”

The rest­less­ness of Leonardo’s mind and hand also reflect the need to move quick­ly from project to project as he pur­sued some com­mis­sions and aban­doned oth­ers. “Across all these themes,” how­ev­er, Christo­pher Bak­er, direc­tor of Euro­pean and Scot­tish Art and Por­trai­ture at the Nation­al Gal­leries of Scot­land, sees “a rav­ish­ing range of tech­niques and mate­ri­als…. The pre­ci­sion required by met­al­point proved espe­cial­ly appro­pri­ate for some of his most inci­sive human or ani­mal obser­va­tions, while iron gall ink and red and black chalks allowed an explorato­ry free­dom fit­ting for com­po­si­tion­al tri­als, fic­tive works or cap­tur­ing move­ment.”

The artist’s “prodi­gious skills” are evi­dent among his many shifts in style and sub­ject and we see even in util­i­tar­i­an illus­tra­tions how “he over­turned so many con­ven­tions and some­times mixed his media to won­der­ful effect.” Leonardo’s choice of media was hard­ly expan­sive com­pared to the dizzy­ing­ly col­or­ful aisles that greet the bud­ding artist at art sup­ply stores today. But what he could do with a sty­lus, goose-quill pen, and chalk has nev­er been equalled. Learn more about how he used his mate­ri­als in Donnithorne’s book, Leonar­do da Vin­ci: A Clos­er Look, pub­lished on the 500th anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tions of Leonardo’s death.

via Core77

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Old­est Known Globe to Depict the New World Was Engraved on an Ostrich Egg, Maybe by Leon­dar­do da Vin­ci (1504)

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ele­gant Stud­ies of the Human Heart Were 500 Years Ahead of Their Time

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ear­li­est Note­books Now Dig­i­tized and Made Free Online: Explore His Inge­nious Draw­ings, Dia­grams, Mir­ror Writ­ing & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Street Artist Creates an Optical Illusion That Lets People See the Art Inside a Shuttered Museum in Florence

in Art, Life | March 25th, 2021

The pan­dem­ic will end, but the coro­n­avirus could become endem­ic, most virol­o­gists believe, “mean­ing that it will con­tin­ue to cir­cu­late in pock­ets of the glob­al pop­u­la­tion for years to come,” as Nicky Phillips writes at Nature. The dis­ease will pose much less of a dan­ger to us over time, yet the prob­lem of its per­sis­tence rais­es a ques­tion many of us are ask­ing our­selves as pre­cau­tions drag into anoth­er year: what kind of world will we step into when this is (most­ly) final­ly over?

Many restau­rants, the­aters, and music venues are shut­tered for good, while the impact on the art world has been dev­as­tat­ing. Accord­ing to an Art Basel report, sales con­tract­ed 36% in gal­leries world­wide in 2020.

Daniel Langer pre­dicts that up to 40 per­cent of gal­leries will close after the pan­dem­ic, even as the high-end “‘lux­u­ry’ art mar­ket is grow­ing dur­ing the pan­dem­ic” as wealthy investors “look to art as a long-term val­ue play.” The coro­n­avirus has only exag­ger­at­ed con­di­tions in which “99 per cent of all artists are paid mis­er­ably, while the top 1 per cent enjoys a celebri­ty sta­tus and can sell their art with enor­mous pre­mi­ums.”

French artist JR is one of the few who has done well over the past year, exhibit­ing his large-scale trompe l’oeil pho­to­graph­ic instal­la­tions in Paris and São Paulo. In his most recent instal­la­tion in Flo­rence, JR makes a strik­ing visu­al com­men­tary on “the adver­si­ties that cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions — includ­ing muse­ums, libraries, and cin­e­mas — have faced over the past year,” writes My Mod­ern Met. Called La Feri­ta (“The Wound” in Ital­ian) and “mea­sur­ing 28 meters high and 33 meters wide, this opti­cal illu­sion cre­ates a ‘crack’ in the exte­ri­or” of the Palaz­zo Strozzi, “so that view­ers can see mas­ter­pieces like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Pri­mav­era.”

In JR’s Insta­gram posts, you can see the piece being installed “as Italy entered anoth­er lock­down that will last until April 6, clos­ing the doors of all cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions once again.” Though it func­tions more as a memo­r­i­al to what feels like a lost world than a polit­i­cal state­ment, JR has accom­pa­nied his Insta­gram posts with pub­lic com­men­tary: “They say the muse­ums are closed,” he writes, “but it’s up to us to open them. Here is Flo­rence, the city of Bot­ti­cel­li, Donatel­lo, Machi­av­el, and Dante, we opened the Palaz­zo Strozzi.”

JR con­cludes on a wan note of hope­ful­ness: “we still have the free­dom to dream, to cre­ate, to envi­sion the future,” he writes. “Maybe it’s not much, but we have that!” Maybe we’ll also have more pub­lic art instal­la­tions in place of indoor gal­leries and muse­ums, and more artists bring­ing their work to the streets, “the largest art gallery in the world,” JR has said, and one that can’t be locked down or put out of busi­ness by a virus or the rav­ages of the mar­ket.

via My Mod­ern Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

A New Dig­i­tal Archive Pre­serves Black Lives Mat­ter & COVID-19 Street Art

Banksy Debuts His COVID-19 Art Project: Good to See That He Has TP at Home

A Bio­sta­tis­ti­cian Uses Cro­chet to Visu­al­ize the Fright­en­ing Infec­tion Rates of the Coro­n­avirus

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Sounds Are Faked For Nature Documentaries: Meet the Artists Who Create the Sounds of Fish, Spiders, Orangutans, Mushrooms & More

in Film, Nature, Television | March 25th, 2021

We think of nature doc­u­men­taries as pri­mar­i­ly visu­al works. As well we prob­a­bly should, giv­en the count­less, most­ly dull and uncom­fort­able hours spent in the field they demand of their pho­tog­ra­phy crews. But what comes to mind when we imag­ine the sound of nature doc­u­men­taries — apart, of course, from the voice of David Atten­bor­ough? Lis­ten close­ly dur­ing the breaks in his nar­ra­tion of such hit nature series as Plan­et Earth or Our Plan­et, and you’ll hear all man­ner of sounds: the sound of sharks swim­ming, of orang­utans chew­ing, of spi­ders shoot­ing their webs, of mush­rooms sprout­ing. Hang on — mush­rooms sprout­ing?

Nature doc­u­men­taries, as nar­ra­tor Abby Tang says in the Insid­er video above, are full of “sounds that would either be impos­si­ble to cap­ture, or ones that are straight-up made up.” In this they dif­fer lit­tle from script­ed films, whose actu­al shoots usu­al­ly man­age to record only the actors’ dia­logue, if that.

Work­ing in the wild, far indeed from any stu­dio, nature doc­u­men­tar­i­ans “might actu­al­ly be shoot­ing a sub­ject mat­ter that’s across a val­ley, or they’ll cap­ture objects nor­mal­ly too small to have a reg­is­tered noise to it.” Hence the need for a cat­e­go­ry of pro­fes­sion­als pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture: foley artists, those inven­tive cre­ators of foot­steps, door-knocks, punch­es, sword-unsheath­ings, and all the oth­er sounds view­ers expect to hear.

Here foley artist Richard Hin­ton demon­strates his meth­ods for breath­ing son­ic life into a range of nature scenes. A shoal of mack­er­el? Old mag­net­ic audio tape sloshed around in a tub of water. The vibra­tions of a spi­der­web? A slinky, held per­ilous­ly close to the micro­phone. The north­ern lights? A pair of cym­bals and a set of wind chimes. Often, just the right sound emerges from those of two dis­tinct objects lay­ered togeth­er, a prin­ci­ple known to foley artists since the ear­ly days of radio dra­ma. In fact, though foley sounds today go through a fair bit of dig­i­tal edit­ing and pro­cess­ing to make them more con­vinc­ing, the tools and tech­niques used to pro­duce them have changed lit­tle since those days. The next time you watch a bear onscreen open its eyes after months-long hiber­na­tion, con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty that you’re hear­ing an Eng­lish­man mak­ing nois­es with scraps of fur and his mouth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 50 Hours of Nature Sound­scapes from the BBC: Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Proven to Ease Stress and Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness & Awe

Chill Out to 70 Hours of Ocean­scape Nature Videos Filmed by BBC Earth

Watch­ing Nature Doc­u­men­taries Can Pro­duce “Real Hap­pi­ness,” Finds a Study from the BBC and UC-Berke­ley

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Real­ly Made: Dis­cov­er the Mag­ic of “Foley Artists”

How the Sound Effects on 1930s Radio Shows Were Made: An Inside Look

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Four Cellists Play Ravel’s “Bolero” on One Cello

in Music | March 24th, 2021

And now for some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent…

Above, the Wiener Cel­loensem­ble 5 + 1–“an untra­di­tion­al cel­lo ensem­ble” found­ed by the Vien­na Phil­har­mon­ic’s Ger­hard Kaufmann–presents an uncon­ven­tion­al per­for­mance of Ravel’s “Bolero.” It’s min­i­mal­ist, in a cer­tain way. Four musi­cians. One instru­ment. And noth­ing more…

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Clas­sicFM/MyModernMet

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear a 1930 Record­ing of Boléro, Con­duct­ed by Rav­el Him­self

Juil­liard Stu­dents & the New York Phil­har­mon­ic Per­form Ravel’s Bolero While Social Dis­tanc­ing in Quar­an­tine

Copen­hagen Phil­har­mon­ic Plays Ravel’s Bolero at Train Sta­tion

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Women Street Photographers: The Web Site, Instragram Account & Book That Amplify the Work of Women Artists Worldwide

in Books, Photography | March 24th, 2021

It’s almost impos­si­ble not to won­der how reclu­sive artists of the past — like anony­mous street pho­tog­ra­ph­er and Chica­go nan­ny Vivian Maier — would fare in the age of Tum­blr and Insta­gram. Would Maier have become inter­net famous? Would she have post­ed any of her pho­tographs? The lit­tle we know about her makes it hard to answer the ques­tion. Maier lived a life of abstemious self-nega­tion. “She nev­er exhib­it­ed her work,” Alex Kot­lowitz writes at Moth­er Jones, “she didn’t share her pho­tos with any­one, except some of the chil­dren in her care.”

And yet, Maier was known to enjoy con­ver­sa­tions about film and the­ater with knowl­edge­able peo­ple. One sus­pects that if she had been able to stay in touch with like minds, she might have been encour­aged by a sup­port­ive com­mu­ni­ty she couldn’t find any­where else. We might imag­ine her, for exam­ple, sub­mit­ting a select few pho­tographs to Women Street Pho­tog­ra­phers, a project that began in 2017 as an Insta­gram account and has since “bur­geoned into a web­site, artist res­i­den­cy, series of exhi­bi­tions, film series, and now a book pub­lished this month by Pres­tel,” Grace Ebert writes at Colos­sal.

For women street pho­tog­ra­phers liv­ing and work­ing today, the project offers what founder Gul­nara Samoilo­va says she need­ed and couldn’t find: “I soon began to real­ize that with this plat­form, I could cre­ate every­thing I had always want­ed to receive as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er: the kinds of sup­port and oppor­tu­ni­ties that would have helped me grow dur­ing those for­ma­tive and piv­otal points on my jour­ney.” The project is inter­na­tion­al in scope, bring­ing togeth­er the work of 100 women from 31 coun­tries, “a tiny sam­pling of what’s out there.”

In her intro­duc­tion to the 224-page book, Samoilo­va describes the impor­tance of such a col­lec­tion:

Street pho­tog­ra­phy is both a record of the world and a state­ment of the artist them­selves: it is how they see the world, who they are, what cap­tures their atten­tion, and fas­ci­nates them. There’s a won­der­ful mix­ture of art and arti­fact, poet­ry and tes­ti­mo­ny that makes street pho­tog­ra­phy so appeal­ing. It’s both doc­u­men­tary and fine art at the same time, yet high­ly acces­si­ble to peo­ple out­side the pho­tog­ra­phy world.

There are Vivian Maiers around the world dri­ven to doc­u­ment their sur­round­ings, whether any­one ever sees their work or not. Maier made her pho­tographs “for all the right rea­sons,” says Chica­go artist Tony Fitz­patrick. “She made them because to not make them was impos­si­ble. She had no choice.” But per­haps she might have cho­sen to show her work if she had access to plat­forms like Women Street Pho­tog­ra­phers. We can be grate­ful for such out­lets now: they offer per­spec­tives that we can find nowhere else. Women Street Pho­tog­ra­phers will announce the win­ners of its inau­gur­al vir­tu­al exhi­bi­tion “on or around April 1.”

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Meet Ger­da Taro, the First Female Pho­to­jour­nal­ist to Die on the Front Lines

Take a Visu­al Jour­ney Through 181 Years of Street Pho­tog­ra­phy (1838–2019)

Vivian Maier, Street Pho­tog­ra­ph­er, Dis­cov­ered

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Explore a New Archive of 2,200 Historical Wildlife Illustrations (1916–1965): Courtesy of The Wildlife Conservation Society

in Art, Nature, Science | March 24th, 2021

Between the 1910s and the 1960s, a nature-lover with a sure artis­tic hand and a yen to see the world could have done much worse than sign­ing on with the Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety. Dur­ing those decades, when the WCS was known as the New York Zoo­log­i­cal Soci­ety, its “Depart­ment of Trop­i­cal Research (DTR), led by William Beebe, con­duct­ed dozens of eco­log­i­cal expe­di­tions across trop­i­cal ter­res­tri­al and marine locales,” says the orga­ni­za­tion’s web site. This long-term project brought togeth­er both sci­en­tists and artists, who “par­tic­i­pat­ed in field work and col­lab­o­rat­ed close­ly with DTR sci­en­tists to cre­ate their illus­tra­tions.”

Now the fruits of those artis­tic-sci­en­tif­ic labors have come avail­able in a free online archive con­tain­ing “just over 2,200 dig­i­tized col­or and black-and-white illus­tra­tions of liv­ing and non-liv­ing spec­i­mens cre­at­ed by DTR field artists between 1916 and 1953.”

Their sub­jects include “mam­mals, birds, rep­tiles, amphib­ians, fish, insects, marine inver­te­brates, plants, and fun­gi,” all orig­i­nal­ly found in places like “British Guiana (now Guyana), the Galá­pa­gos Islands, the Hud­son Canyon, Bermu­da, the Gulf of Mex­i­co and the East­ern Pacif­ic Ocean, Venezuela, and Trinidad.”

It was in Trinidad and Toba­go that Beebe estab­lished his first eco­log­i­cal research sta­tion in 1916 — and where his long life and career came to an end more than 45 years lat­er. “Although Beebe’s name is unfa­mil­iar to most today, he was a celebri­ty sci­en­tist in his time,” says the WCS’ about page. “The DTR’s expe­di­tions were cov­ered by the pop­u­lar press, Beebe’s accounts were best­sellers, and he and the DTR staff pub­lished hun­dreds of arti­cles for both sci­en­tists and the gen­er­al pub­lic.” Pub­lished in not just spe­cial­ist media but Nation­al Geo­graph­ic and The New York Times, their illus­tra­tions cap­tured the col­or and move­ment of the nat­ur­al realm with a detail and vivid­ness that pho­tog­ra­phy could­n’t.

“Rang­ing from depic­tions of sin­gle spec­i­mens to com­plex nar­ra­tive images that show where and how ani­mals lived,” these images are avail­able in geo­graph­i­cal­ly and chrono­log­i­cal­ly orga­nized col­lec­tions at the WCS’ online archive. As many as pos­si­ble are cred­it­ed to their artists — Isabel Coop­er, Toshio Asae­da, George Alan Swan­son, Frances Waite Gib­son, and oth­ers — which ensures that this wealth of nature illus­tra­tions will do its part to not just renew inter­est in Bee­be’s life and work but gen­er­ate inter­est in those who entered into this adven­tur­ous col­lab­o­ra­tion with him. But then, Beebe him­self artic­u­lat­ed best what we can learn from appre­ci­at­ing these works of sci­en­tif­ic art: “All about us, nature puts on the most thrilling adven­ture sto­ries ever cre­at­ed, but we have to use our eyes.”

Enter the WCS archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

The Metic­u­lous, Ele­gant Illus­tra­tions of the Nature Observed in England’s Coun­try­side

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

Behold an Inter­ac­tive Online Edi­tion of Eliz­a­beth Twining’s Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants (1868)

A Beau­ti­ful 1897 Illus­trat­ed Book Shows How Flow­ers Become Art Nou­veau Designs

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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