In his natural history courses, Professor Stephen Trombulak has been using a 19th-century ornithological collection ever since he discovered the treasure buried in the far reaches of an overcrowded College storage room.
And that’s just the beginning of this fascinating tale.
“I realize now, after many years of association with colleges and educators and curriculum committees, that we were being unconsciously and pleasantly educated through the bird hobby in ways that we ourselves, let alone our elders, did not dream of.”
Albert D. Mead, Middlebury Class of 1890, expressed this sentiment in a letter to Biology Professor Samuel Longwell. Writing in the early 1930s, when he was a trustee, Mead was discussing an ornithological collection he had gifted the College in the hope that Longwell would use it in his courses. Mead had designed the collection, which consisted of Addison County birds captured and “stuffed” (in the parlance of the day) by Mead and his childhood friend Chester Parkhill.
Mead and Parkhill were self-taught, picking up the hobby while in high school after receiving a tutorial from a Middlebury senior named Frank Knowlton (who would later become a paleobotanist of some renown). They continued through Mead’s student years at Middlebury. (Parkhill was working on his family’s farm.) And as Stephen Trombulak relays later in this photo essay, their work progressed to exacting standards—much of what remains in the teaching collection is of museum quality.
Some mystery still involves parts of the collection (beyond what Trombulak describes in his cover essay on page 1): namely, the provenance of the eggs and mounted birds (such as the Great Horned Owl opposite this page). While all of the museum skins are affixed with labels documenting that Mead and Parkhill collected and prepared them, the mounts and eggs aren’t denoted the same way. (Still Trombulak believes that the mounts and eggs did come from Mead; more on that later.) What’s not in dispute is their value in the classroom. As Trombulak says, “Not a single one of these is replaceable, because it represents the condition of the species at a point in time that we can never go back to.”
The collection also displays inherent artistic value. Though Mead reportedly didn’t see his work as art, in his letter to Longwell he noted the “graceful lines” and “the texture and the patina” of his specimens. He also likened his and Parkhill’s work to that of a sculptor: “[Our work] conduced to attentive study of form and pose in nature, and the bird skin, when freshly mounted, was a plastic medium, identical in texture, of course, with the thing we tried to represent, by which our conjured-up mental images could be adequately represented.”
Heightening the artistry are these commissioned works by world-renowned photographer Rosamond Purcell, who is best known for her work with natural history collections, with specific attention paid to birds and eggs. (One of her 12 books is the exquisite Egg & Nest.) Purcell spent the better part of two days in Bicentennial Hall exploring these and other teaching collections. Watching her in action, one was reminded of something she told National Geographic a few years ago: “I just like the way certain things work. If I don’t take a picture of these things,” she says, “I just have this feeling that they are going to [disappear] back down that hole. I have to put out a line [with my camera] and get it. It is discovery. I say to myself, ‘People have to see this.’”
While we’re confident that Trombulak won’t allow this collection once again to disappear “back down that hole,” we completely agree with Purcell’s raison d’être: people have to see this.