{"id":9807,"date":"2014-02-11T17:34:41","date_gmt":"2014-02-12T01:34:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=9807"},"modified":"2014-02-11T18:03:59","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T02:03:59","slug":"kill-pose-limn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=9807","title":{"rendered":"Kill, pose, limn"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

I was perusing a digital copy of John Fannin’s Checklist of the birds of British Columbia<\/em> (1891), when I ran across an illustration of a Merlin (well, it was often called a Pigeon Hawk, at that time). \u00a0<\/p>\n

The Merlin’s pose looked familiar. I had photographed a somewhat similar view a few years ago. So, I looked more closely at the description, which read:<\/p>\n

\n

Common east and west of Cascades, and ranging well up into the Rocky Mountain District, in which locality I have taken it in its most perfect plumage.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

“Taken”?\u00a0That word clearly had a different meaning for birders in the nineteenth century. Indeed, Fannin had shot the Merlin! The dead bird was then presented to an illustrator who posed it in a lifelike manner, and sketched it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That is how it was done.<\/p>\n

The renowned illustrator of birds in the United States, John James Audubon, would (as he said)\u00a0harvest<\/em> the birds he painted. His harvesting tool of choice was a rifle. In short: he shot them, then posed them, and then painted them. Curiously, he also then ate (or tried to eat) each of the birds he had harvested.<\/p>\n

Audubon’s work predated photography and there were few other options open to him if he wished to limn birds. While Fannin’s work postdated photography, it probably wasn’t until a century later that camera technology would consistently outclass a rifle in the acquisition of good images of birds. We now have high-quality, long-focus, image-stabilized, lenses mounted on high-resolution cameras. Taking a bird in its most perfect plumage<\/em>, now has a photographic meaning.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here are two Merlins recorded in British Columbia (with only slightly different poses). On the left is a bird I photographed a few years ago. It was unaware of my presence. On the right is the one Fannin had taken<\/em>. It too was unaware of Fannin’s presence, but that is because at the time of the illustration, it was dead.
\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  I was perusing a digital copy of John Fannin’s Checklist of the birds of British Columbia (1891), when I ran across an illustration of a Merlin (well, it was often called a Pigeon Hawk, at that time). \u00a0 The … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birds","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9807"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9811,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9807\/revisions\/9811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}