Читать книгу Animal Internet - Alexander Pschera - Страница 12

At first it was just a knee-high shadow that darted past me, disappearing into the underbrush on the other side of the narrow, winding gravel path. The animal was there one moment, gone the next. But the shadow lingered: it ended up becoming my first animal Facebook friend.

The aviary at Tierpark Hellabrunn, the Munich zoo, is accessible to zoo visitors and consists of an impressively large wire enclosure. Walking through it, one has the feeling of moving freely through the wild. The bird cage is inhabited by colorful ducks, ibises, a majestic black stork, and that scampering shadow that—this much I was able to discern—had a wrinkly red head and a crescent-shaped beak. It certainly wasn’t pretty, but the bird was distinctive. But what kind of animal was it? An ibis? A spoonbill?

A sign in the aviary provided the answer. It turned out that the shadow was a waldrapp, a wading bird that, following its almost total extinction in Europe, is now being bred in captivity and released into the wild. The bird won me over instantly with the name “waldrapp.” It sounded friendly, onomatopoeic, warm. It reminded me of early Germanic history, evoking deep, dark pine forests. Vignettes from the old folk songs and poems collected in the anthology known as The Boy’s Magic Horn swirled through my mind. I could imagine the waldrapp on a punched copper frontispiece adorning a yellowed tome of romantic verse. The bird’s Latin name, on the other hand, had rather a jarring effect. It snarled at me in a gravelly voice: Geronticus eremita. “Gerontic eremite”—it seemed to suggest organized bus tours for senior citizens swathed in blankets. Without further ado, I decided to leave the astonishing creature alone and continue my exploration of other parts of the zoo, rather than pursuing a more extensive interaction with this peculiar bird. After all, Hellabrunn has many interesting—not to mention, actually beautiful—animals that do not take cover at the sight of visitors and that furthermore do not remind you of your own future decline. Farewell, then, waldrapp.

For now. I couldn’t quite get the weird bird out of my head. Something about the way it sounded … It was the poetic name that stood out most in my memory. I knew that I had encountered this animal before, but where? After a long search, I found the source of my memory. It was Anita Albus’s On Rare Birds, a book of portraits of extinct and endangered birds, presented in eloquent language and exquisite images. There are chapters on the kingfisher, the northern hawk owl, the corncrake—and, as it so happens, one on the waldrapp. Most important, there is a picture of a small waldrapp colony that immediately sparked a feeling of recognition during that brief encounter at the zoo.

Anita Albus’s portrait of the waldrapp is not a naturalistic illustration. It looks almost like a medieval panel. It is suggestive of paintings by Lucas Cranach or Albrecht Altdorfer and could easily hang in the Alte Pinakothek art museum in Munich: overlooking an idyllic riverbank that dissolves into the blue of a distant horizon, a brilliant member of Geronticus eremita sits enthroned above a city dotted with towers, a seemingly enchanted cliff face serving as its backdrop. The bird’s greenish-black plumage takes on the landscape’s color palette, a symbol of the unity of animal and environment. No one would dream of using so prosaic a term as “habitat” at the sight of this idealized landscape. The natural world depicted here knows no habitats, no delineated preserves, because it all still belongs to the animals. The animals are at the heart of this world: the waldrapp’s yellow eye glints at the center of the picture. Its gaze speaks of wisdom and perspective, dignity and supremacy. This eye is the gravitational center of the preindustrial cosmos, before it all spun out of control.

So there it was, my Hellabrunn shadow, but rather than some timid phantom of a bird, it was a fine ornithological specimen, captured on thick canvas in choice, handmade pigments and printed in a handsome volume. There was just one thing I could not reconcile: of these two animals, the one had nothing to do with the other. Despite concerted attempts at association, the real bird defied connection to the panel, as the aura of the two creatures was simply so different. There was even less connection between the picture and the waldrapp ibises living in the wild, which are currently being reintroduced in Europe. These animals have forgotten how to migrate and must be guided over the Alps by an ultralight aircraft. Many are lost in the process. Others are plucked from the skies by trigger-happy Italian hunters. The life of the modern-day waldrapp is anything but idyllic. Its existence is a scientifically monitored project with many dangers and setbacks. Anita Albus’s fantastical illustration has nothing to do with this reality. The plumage looks deceptively real. The iridescent play of colors enchants viewers, who can hardly tear themselves away from the old-world precision of the painting. This precision does not, however, translate into a palpable presence. The exactitude of the brushstrokes does not call the bird to mind, allowing it to come to life and demand our involvement. Rather the opposite occurs. The bird is relegated to a timeless, distant place. It resembles a mythical creature, an animal drawn from poetry and fairy tales.

The expository text does its part in emphasizing the bird’s legendary character. The waldrapp has, it says there, gone by many poetic names, which suggests that difficulties arose in trying to classify it zoologically. It was called Schopfibis or Mähnenibis (crested ibis), Klausrapp or Klausrabe (“hermit raven”), Steinrapp (“stone raven”), and finally, Waldhopf (forest wood hoopoe). The Zurich-based ornithologist Conrad Gesner, whom Albus references extensively, called it simply Schleck, a culinary delicacy, which helps explain why the waldrapp stood no chance at surviving the seventeenth century: its meat tasted “so exquisitely sweet.” The unsightly waldrapp could hardly have served as a grand trophy. The description Gesner gives, as one can read in Anita Albus’s work, supports this suspicion. He describes the bird as “quite black if you look at it from a distance, but if you look at it close by, especially in the sun, you will consider it mixed with green. Its feet are also somewhat like a hen’s, but longer and the toes split. The tail is not long. It has a crest on its head pointing backwards … The bill is reddish, long, and suited to poke with it into the ground, and into the fissures and holes of walls, trees, and rocks, to extract the worms and beetles which hide themselves in such places.” By the nineteenth century, the memory of the waldrapp had already grown so faint that people assumed it was a mythical creature. Anita Albus captures this memory of a memory in her illustration, just as her book is a collection of memories of memories that people have of rare birds.

Then all of a sudden, I understood why the two images—that of the darting shadow and the bird painted in the style of the Old Masters—were uncoupled, indeed, why they contradicted each other. There are two versions of nature: the first is nature as we picture it. The second is nature as it truly exists. This second nature—the real, raw, wild one—has left us. The wilderness, which we have not seen for so long, let alone visited, exists in our minds as a narrated, painted, filmed, and artistically photographed reality. These artifacts range from the works of Jack London to filmmaker Heinz Sielmann’s Expeditions Into the Animal Kingdom that defined my youth and that of many of my European contemporaries, from IMAX nature documentaries in high definition to Anita Albus. These are fragments of a massive arsenal of metaphors protecting the memory of nature and shaped by two fundamental forces: sentimentality and nostalgia. Anita Albus’s book is an extreme manifestation of this nostalgic-sentimental look back at nature that is less about the desire to return to the wild, wading through the muck and dirtying one’s hands, than it is about the urge to transform nature entirely into culture. The goal is artistic perfection, in which nature “as nature” is extinguished in a gesture of aesthetic elevation and preserved thereafter as a symbol. It is a desperate attempt to grasp at what is slipping through our fingers, but it is also the final triumph of man over nature. Although the painted reconstruction may have started as a rescue attempt, its gesture of romantic overwriting reveals it as a form of mummification. This attempt represents the pinnacle of the romantic misconception of nature as a form of beauty, rather than as a form of reality, of objective actuality. The waldrapp—that bald, shy bird—becomes a hyperreal aesthetic vision in Albus’s representation, a fantasy image that shows how “it” may once have lived, and how sadly “it” will never be again. The false symmetries of culture have desensitized us to the real ambiguities and ugliness of nature. And even when we do try to escape the constraints of beauty—as amateur environmentalists, or ornithologists, for example, who organize group trips, study the literature, and travel abroad in the name of nature—we are still driven by a cultural motivation: we want to impose order on our observations, collect bird species, have unique experiences, breathe life back into our green self that’s been deformed by society.

Pictures of the waldrapp thus supersede the reality of the waldrapp. Pictures of animals push the actual animals out of the way. This is a defining characteristic of the postmodern awareness of nature. My afternoon in the Munich aviary was a pictorial flight of fancy, and not a walk through the actual natural world. It showed me that we do not, indeed that we cannot truly see animals anymore, let alone touch them. We content ourselves, instead, with remembering them.