One for the Birds

...At the end of the corridor one confronts a handful of pictures that hardly need their captions: fledglings with four legs and warped beaks...

...In rebutting accusations of sentimentality and political quietism, Orwell argued that it was not politically reprehensible to notice, for example, that "the toad has about the most beautiful eyes of any living creature," and he cautioned that we had better start noticing it, right then in 1946: "If we kill all pleasure in the process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves...

...One wonders, though, with all due respect, whether the lacunae in this heartwarming tale will ever be filled in...

...Great Gull is a dot of land off the eastern shore of Long Island that the Museum acquired in 1949...

...Their field already covers anthropology - a quaint word for the doings of non-white peoples-as well as the natural sciences...

...The exhibition is a field station report on the birds, a modest but good example of how much information can be relayed by a few photographs and displays, together with some sound effects...

...In 1955, 25 pairs of birds showed up to lay eggs...

...The white hunter, Theodore Roosevelt, it turns out, was also a birdwatcher and was pleased to compile a list of sightings made around the White House for a reporter from Bird Lore...

...On the left wall is a row of fine color photographs of the two tern species, leading to the simulated nesting area where there are stuffed versions of the subjects along with other birds...

...on the other hand, the curators do emphasize the positive aspects of nature, demonstrating that what must be preserved is something worth preserving, and this message helps at least to counteract the propagandists who preach that science is going to put all of us on Easy Street, under a plastic bubble, where we'll be able to do our thing...

...It is a very small production reporting the findings of the Museum's Great Gull Island Committee, chaired by the ornithologist Helen Hays...

...A strong plea for conservation is nevertheless implicit: the belief that the earth's species would live their lives in concert with each other and the land, if only the top one, man, would permit it...

...It could show the fatuousness of some of the scientific promises, the kind that require a leap of faith slightly more convulsive than that required for belief in an afterlife...

...Speaking of inner necessity, the later works of Kandinsky, the first man to paint from it, are now on view at the Guggenheim until September...

...A small example of this can be seen during the summer season in a short multimedia history of the City of New York, at the museum of the same name...

...Besides giving him a chance to write exquisitely on toads, the essay allowed him to respond to the abusive letters he received from outraged leftwingers whenever he referred to nature in his political work...

...The Natural History Museum, to whom the biological chain is no news, is doing the best it can to combat the general complacency about conservation through exhibitions and an extensive lecture program, but fear of anxiety-saturation and the feeling that at times they are talking to themselves cause the staff to err somewhat on the side of scientific calm...

...Nor could he envision the accelerated rate of consumption of ideas as well as things...

...Meanwhile, the media alternate between leaning on the panic button and selling us the tools of biospheric destruction...

...Living when and where he did, Orwell could not see, as we are beginning to, that the failure to know our station in the biological chain is less a political quirk than a deeply rooted human incompetence...

...It seems that we spend more time revealing to each other the symptoms of our disfunction than examining its causes, let alone grappling with them...

...The emphasis could be adjusted slightly to provide a wider picture of man and his activities in relation to the rest of creation...

...Technical improvements aside, the fantasies about the virtues of technology have not changed much since H. G. Wells, but the difficulty with all of these post-Bucky Fuller promises of pie-in-the-sky is that they deal only with the procuring of leisure...

...The ambiguity of the situation is, as usual, unconsciously presented by many of our artists, who continue their struggle to "liberate art from the ballast of the representational world," as Malevitch put it in 1913...

...Yet the problem already exists...

...Although Easy Street has not heaved into view for some sections of the population, leisure certainly has, giving television the backbreaking job of keeping the victims tranquilized...

...The tweeting overhead draws attention to a flock of origami birds suspended from a blue ceiling, representing terns about to swoop on a hawk menacing their nests...

...from the air and noted the brownish ocean that now laps beaches from Boston to Cape May...

...Most welcome would be any attempt to reroute human energies, or at least question our unverifiable right to act exclusively in our own interests...

...The opposite wall carries two or three watercolors, pictures of the island, samples of trapping and banding equipment, pertinent written matter, and miscellaneous ornithological data...

...it has a black cap, a long red beak, and when folded the wings that carry it on annual migrations to the Caribbean extend back to a swallow tail...

...They will be reviewed here in due course...

...Some, like the environmental sculptors, are even going out and packaging nature...

...In scientific-legalistic fairness, however, it must be stated that not all of the evidence is in yet, and a pollutant is presumed innocent until proved guilty...

...Many of those predisposed toward some form of toad-watching are now forced to do it vicariously through books and magazines...

...Yet this will not surprise anyone who has seen the eastern shore of the U.S...

...cubic eggs, their shells too soft to sustain the weight of a sitting hen...

...The "nature experience," like the "black experience" before it, has become popular leisure activity these days, albeit not in the form George Orwell had in mind when he prescribed it for the citizens of Utopia...

...George Washington gave a dinner for his officers at the Fraunces Tavern, and subsequently invited the black owner, Sam Fraunces, to join his staff at the White House...

...Its use, like sewage disposal, is never discussed...

...Other modern responses include amateur creativity -proliferating wildly as any critic of the arts can testify-and boredom...

...Some of the fledglings recall comic strip conventions, and the eggs might have been done by Dali, but both are probably the work of polychlorinated biphenyls, which are used in the manufacture of electrical equipment, and whose chief commercial virtue is their resistance to biological and chemical degradation...

...This is annoying, because one can't help wishing for a pinch of passion in all that detachment, if only to persuade adults that natural history is more than a suitable pursuit for the schoolchildren who constitute the majority of the museum's 3-4 million visitors a year...

...When the show first opened a few months back it received some local publicity because of its suggestion that Long Island Sound is in very bad shape...

...In the ecology hustle, for instance, Madison Avenue is only inches away from advertising "natural" savings accounts at the Chase Manhattan, and what public goodwill and interest there is may shortly wither from saturation...

...Since its plumes were desired for fin-de-siecle fashions, the Long Island colony disappeared at the beginning of the century, despite early conservation efforts to protect it from hunters...

...Black people and Spanish-speaking immigrants will no doubt be enchanted to find their forebears playing a larger part in the continuing history of the huddled masses...

...It is done very well by means of multiple projections of photographs and paintings, which are augmented by objects on display that are spotlighted at critical moments in the discourse...

...After obtaining the land, the Museum and the Linnean Society leveled the buildings and restored the sandy breeding areas...

...The Natural History Museum is in a strong position to convey a bit of biological reality to the story...

...So this seems a good moment to examine another type of exhibition, one more appropriate to the season though not wholly unrelated to art, at the Museum of Natural History...

...Such modifications, plus new techniques of presentation, certainly give a Now -If not a new-Cast to the story...

...His writing was essentially about the actuality and quality of life, versus the theory, but in Some Thoughts on the Common Toad he dealt very specifically with the role of nature in men's lives...

...Orwell would probably have recognized his old friends in the contemporary "humanists" who maintain that the technological show must go on for the sake of the still starving millions, but who never mention the apparent basis of such progress -a slave class, preferably in someone else's country...

...Smaller than a gull, the tern is a grayish-white sea bird set low to the ground on scarlet legs...

...An Army installation for 50 years, it had previously been a breeding ground for two species of tern, the subject of the current show, scheduled to run until Labor Day...

...Somewhere near the center of this predicament is a human inability to see what kind of figure we are cutting as individuals, nations, or as a species...

...If] nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship...

...They are beginning to feel like voyeurs, since so much photojournalism is done in a rather acquisitive spirit: "Sure the subject is on the way out -but we got some great shots...