The Secret Stuffed Animal Museum!

Mileage 185
Carbon Footprint 52kg
Expenses Food 12 euro Photocopying 13.70

A couple of weeks ago, I got a phonecall from a man in response to the ad I placed in the Nenagh Guardian looking for stuffed animals. He said he had 'a few birds'.

I finally got around to visiting him today. First of all, we went into a kind of workshop where he showed something he had just bought over the Internet - it was a fox about to pounce on two rabbits, a magnificent thing - the fox was enormous, nearly as big as my part-labrador mongrel. He reckons it's about 100 years old.

Then he showed me a case with an assortment of ducks and fowl type birds; maybe 12 or 13 in total. Again, very nice, male and female of each species.

'I have a few birds of prey upstairs' he says and up we go. At the top of the stairs is a lovely pair of peregrine falcons under a glass dome; really beautiful. 'There are a few more in here' he says, unlocking the door of a room

. . . . . . . It's so hard to put a word on how stunned I was. There must have been 30 cases or more, stacked three high, containing every bird of prey in the British Isles. Red Kites, Golden Eagle, Golden Auriole, Snowy owl, Barn owl, Buzzards, Goshawks - loads of others I can't remember. A heron, squirrels, - so many things, and a lot of them Victorian, at least 150 years old but immaculate.

Then he opens a cupboard which is full of uncased songbirds, waders, woodpeckers . . . . .

I asked him if he goes bird-watching. 'Not really' he says, in his lovely, soft-spoken, unassuming way. 'I think these are better than the real thing. Real birds can be very dirty'.

Even though I had my camera I was relucatant to photograph anything. It seemed - too beautiful to capture that way. Or I felt it would be kind of voyeuristic. I explained to him that what I really want to do is photograph the creatures outdoors, without their cases; to my amazement he says 'well, this case comes off, and this one slides out, and these are not in a case. . . about half of them might come out'

'Do you have any green space out the back?' I asked him. 'No' he says, and we both fell silent.

And then, he says 'you could take them away somewhere in the car' . . . . I nearly fell over. 'Um, I wouldn't like to do that' I said 'I wouldn't want to risk your precious collection in any way.' 'Oh, they're fairly strong' he says.

???????? Such trust - he doesn't know me from Adam. He's not looking for money, hasn't asked me what's in it for him.

So, I tell him I will make a plan and come back in a couple of weeks; I take my leave and drive around the small town looking for suitable locations. Then it hits me - what is a suitable location? There's not a lot of green space anyway, and as I look at them and drive out into the surrounding countryside looking at fields I feel confused about how to place these extradorinary objects in a setting in a way that reflects what I am trying to do - tease out some strand of the complex relationship between nature and culture.

Apart from that part of the day, I spent some hours in the Library in Thurles gathering maps and things together for the Silvermines project. I hardly spent any time in the glorious sunshine, which felt even worse after I got a phone call from my family who were at the beach!!

Also did some work organising the trip for artists from North Tipperary to go to EV+A.