Jon Dunn - The Glitter in the Green

T HIS STORY BEGINS IN A MORE INNOCENT TIME, A TIME WHEN , whilst we maybe worried a little about pollution and saving the whale, most of us still had no inkling that our appetite for consumption and an easy life might have profound and far-reaching consequences for the well-being of the very planet upon which we lived. That era was the early 1980s, a time of unfortunate hairstyles, recording mixtapes from the Sunday chart show on Radio 1, and a day trip to London with my mother on a Trathens coach.

This, in itself, was a notable event. We rarely, if ever, left the boundaries of southwest England. Other families took themselves further afield, but we only ever went west, back to my grandmothers house in Cornwall. London was unthinkably foreign and had, in my mind, assumed a dangerous presence of Dickensian proportions. My curiosity was reserved entirely for the natural world and was not piqued by the lure of red buses or black cabs, Buckingham Palace or the Changing of the Guard. All of these, to a greater or lesser extent, figured during our day out in the capital, but it was the London Dungeons and the Tower of London that I, a boy who was happiest when outside in the open countryside, found to be the most depressing places of all, the very fabric of which reeked of despair. Black rats, kept to illustrate the story of the Black Death plague, scurried ceaselessly behind a glass screen inside a too-small vivarium in a dimly lit room. I knew how they felt. I wanted to escape into the open air as soon as I possibly could.

I was stopped in my tracks, however, by the Crown Jewels. In that dark, soulless place they were excruciatingly brilliant and intense, emanating stabbing shafts of white, blue, red, and yellow light. I found them mesmerising, and their memory lingered and danced on the back of my eyes like sunspots. I was drawn to colour like a moth to a flame, and so, when we entered the entrance hall of the Natural History Museum in the late afternoon, I gave the suspended diplodocus skeleton above my head barely a second glance. This was the one place in London Id been looking forward to visiting. I didnt know what to expect, but in the event one exhibit above all others proved irresistible. Like the Crown Jewels before them, a large glass case filled with hundreds of hummingbirds impaled me with colour. Here was something otherworldly, something quite extraordinary.

I was used to seeing British birds in our garden and in the Somerset countryside that surrounded our village home. Some of those birds, the Blue Tits and the Goldfinches, wore gaudy plumage that set them apart from the subtle sparrows and the drab warblers. These hummingbirds thoughthey were dipped in rainbows, with plumage that sparkled and shone, that changed colour depending on the angle from which one looked at them. With my nose pressed against the glass of their display cabinet, I refused to be drawn away from them.

That they were long-dead, shot many decades ago by forgotten men with fowling pieces loaded with dust-fine shot, and prepared for awkward display by a dexterous taxidermist who had never seen them in real life and had no idea of what poses they might naturally strike none of this mattered to me at the time. While I was dispassionately aware that these birds were shapes and sizes quite unlike those of the birds with which I was familiar, I was swiftly lost in the spectrum of their gorgets, their mantles, their wings, and their tails.

The history of this display was, of course, completely wasted on me at the time. It was only in later yearswhen the craving to see my first, exuberantly animate hummingbirds where they belonged in the wild had grown to the extent that I was devouring every scintilla of information I could find about themthat I learned some of the colourful story of the contents of the Natural History Museums hummingbird cabinet.

Their very genesis is uncertain. They may, or may not, have been amassed in the early nineteenth century by William Bullock, curator of museums in Liverpool and London. Bullocks career was as rich and varied as a hummingbirds plumage. Benjamin Haydon, an artist and contemporary of Bullocks, recalled he loved the game of ruin or successWestminster Abbey or Victory.