Page 90 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

It’s a late April morning, mid-week and I am standing before a diorama display at the

Royal Ontario Museum. The display is titled “Empty Skies: the Passenger Pigeon

Legacy” and it is placed in a high traffic area, between the bat cave and gift shop. School

children are running around and there are parents with strollers but I have the tall glass

display to myself.

Arranged throughout the case are ten taxidermied passenger pigeons. Russet-breasted

and elegant—a few are suspended in ‘flight.’ Five ‘rest’ on groundcover of oak leaves

and flora meant to replicate a southern Ontario spring. And, finally, one female with

duller plumage ‘studies’ the diorama backdrop as though viewing a painting at a

museum.

Of all the birds, it is the female by the background canvas that intrigues me the most.

She does not seem at all convinced by the scene, which depicts an April morning in the

1860s.1 She does not seem to believe in the great flight of pigeons filling the sky. She

bears all the skepticism of an art connoisseur who has caught whiff of a forgery; or

perhaps more poignantly of a bird that has stopped believing she will ever be reunited

with her vast migratory flock. I stare at her slender figure and try to see her beyond the

swirl of my anthropomorphic projection: a bird made extinct by slaughter, habitat

destruction, trapped now in this airless theatre.

"What does it mean to write in a time of exterminations and extinctions?" asks Deborah

Bird Rose (quoted in Haraway 2010.) What is the vocation of literature at a time of

ecological consternation and narrative failure?