5. Hammerhead
What the hammer?
—William
Blake (Songs of Experience; The Tiger)
There is
a bird in Africa, and only in Africa, called the hammerkopf; that is a German word, meaning “hammer head,” a name
based on the bird’s profile. Since 1926, there have been only twenty-three
scientific papers published about this species, a number so low that it
typically reveals lack of interest in, importance of, or access to, some
species, at least in the minds of scientists. That number also reflects what
most biologists know well, namely, that our supposed understanding of life on
Earth is based on a remarkably small number of organisms, and that the vast
majority of known species have rarely been studied beyond their original discovery.
And that’s just the ones we know about; based on the rate, and in some cases
the ease, of discovery, scientists estimate there are massive numbers of
species from bacteria to beetles yet to be found. The hammerkopf thus becomes a
symbol of how amazingly ignorant we are of Planet Earth, an ignorance sustained
by lack of interest, lack of perceived importance, or lack of access. But like
Karen with her lions and fourth grade dreams, I have a personal reason for
wanting to see a hammerkopf alive: half a century ago, I was handed a dead one
and given a chance to draw its picture.
Lack of
interest in the natural world is a relatively modern phenomenon, brought about
largely by urbanization and technology. Post-industrial changes in developed
nations have diminished our collective concerns for nature by separating us
from it, and such separation continues at an accelerating rate during
humanity’s so-called Information Age. Admittedly, there are active
conservationist movements throughout much of the world, but in 2013, a stroll
across almost any college campus provides a glimpse into our future. That kid
with ear plugs, his eyes locked on the tiny screen, will run right into you
unless you move aside, so don’t expect him to stop by that magnificent linden
tree next to the humanities building where he’s headed this morning, read the
label, and give even one second’s thought to the origin of that scientific name
on the label or the person who described and named Tilia americana back in 1758, or the rich cultural history, going
back centuries, associated with this genus—Tilia.
And if you tried to talk to him about a hammerkopf, he’d look at you with a
blank expression then, maybe, after checking out your clothing and briefcase,
ask if it would be on the next exam.
Perhaps
if that tree had a hammerkopf nest in it, however, and this young man had to
walk around that nest in order to get to class, he might be forced to notice
something relatively large, convoluted, and of seemingly inexplicable origin
standing between him and his goal, rather like some of the most knotty social
and economic problems he’ll face in the next decades, instead of being quite so
consumed with whatever is happening at the moment on that little instrument in
his hand. If he were on his way to English class, where he knew the assignment
for today would be to write, extemporaneously, a highly metaphorical narrative,
then the construction of this particular nest, an architectural monstrosity,
from commonly found items, would be his ticket to an A+. Or maybe if, instead
of seeing a digital image of a hammerkopf on that three inch screen, he’d been
handed a dead one, and encouraged to draw its picture, he’d be even more
inclined to stop and study that mass of sticks blocking his path to this
morning’s calculus quiz. Physical encounters with the real thing affect a mind
in ways that computer screens cannot, and the reverse is probably true, too.
In his
landmark book, noted biologist E. O. Wilson reminds us that Homo sapiens—the human being—is an
extraordinarily social species. Other writers tell us in many different ways
that we are also perhaps the most narcissistic of all those organisms that
occupy this planet. Information technology promotes that narcissism, pushing it
at an accelerating pace to higher and higher levels. If we could actually
measure our interest in ourselves, converting that self-fascination into
numbers, a graph showing an exponentially increasing narcissism over time would
look fairly similar to that showing human population numbers. In other words,
we’re shooting upwards faster and faster with no apparent limit in sight. Does
this feature of my world make me feel isolated, alone, and abnormal in some
way? No, it makes me exceedingly curious about this day’s trip into the
Botswana bush, and very privileged, to have spent thousands on the chance that
I’ll see a particular kind of bird, a species that lives only in Africa.
Perceived
importance is a strictly human trait, one that drives so many of our actions,
both individually and socially. It is important
to know, for example, how a hammerkopf nest is constructed? The answer
depends entirely on the people involved. To the few scientists who actually
went to Africa, spent their time and energy trying to discover the origin of this large, mysterious,
phenomenon, such knowledge was obviously important although we don’t know, and
can’t discover, why. Was it simple curiosity that sustained them in this work?
My guess is: probably. So was it important to them simply to satisfy their
curiosity? I hope so. Or did they have access to the birds and nests for some
secondary reason, rather like mine, out on a tourist safari watching for lions
and elephants but suddenly, as our driver emerges from tangled trees into a
floodplain, confronted with this massive ball of vegetation lodged up in a
tree? Possibly. Then their study of a hammerkopf nest becomes serendipity,
something every scientist knows well.
Sometime
during our morning drive, I make a mental note to find out what humanity,
actually knows about hammerkopf nests, once I return home half a world away and
am able to pull up the past century of scientific reports with a few key
strokes. At the time I know only what Joseph Molekoa, our driver-guide, is
telling us, and that is plenty: he knows about the inner architecture of these
nests, he knows that other birds, including owls and spur-winged geese, also
sometimes appropriate them; he knows that both sexes participate in the
construction; and, he knows that it often, if not regularly, takes thousands of
collecting trips before the nest is complete. I think about that bird-work for
a while, watching the nest, taking my pictures, as we negotiate the soggy
ground to our Sundowner site and my late afternoon vodka on ice. A pair of
crow-sized birds searches six, or eight, or maybe ten, thousand times, through
the African vegetation for exactly the right kind and size of sticks, picks
them up, carries them to the selected tree, and pokes them in to the growing
structure according to some unknown, and perhaps unknowable, set of inherited
instructions.
Karen
might have her fourth grade dreams and her lions, but I’m saddled with,
actually blessed with, that long-ago encounter with George M. Sutton at the
University of Oklahoma, the man who handed me the hammerkopf specimen and sat
watching, patiently, with a gentle smile, while I drew its picture and made
notes of the feather shapes (pointed, on the head). Sutton was a person who
knew no bounds when it came to the study of birds, and consequently of all
other subjects. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was being taught
transferable skills, as well as transferable attitudes. For example, in a
course entitled “History and Literature of Zoology,” Sutton started his first
class with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The
Wind Hover, and in so doing, instantly validated any effort to make similar
kinds of associations regardless of what my future colleagues in the Ivory
Tower might think about such teaching techniques. Then came that day when
Sutton said, in essence, “now you’re going to learn about taxonomy,
nomenclature, evolution, and the geographic distribution of various species.”
Instead of lecturing, or assigning a section of some textbook on these topics,
he handed me a hammerkopf, one that’s he’d borrowed, for that express purpose,
from the Field Museum in Chicago.
So I had
access to a dead hammerkopf because of a teacher, a museum, and someone long
ago who’d shot it and converted it into a “specimen.” My pencil was
well-sharpened, 4H, wooden, and yellow, just like the ones John Steinbeck used
to write Grapes of Wrath. The paper
was plain white, the kind you’d use in a mimeograph machine. The specimen lay
on that large, beautifully-finished, oak table in the Bird Range, a WWI-era
stables converted to museum research space at the University of Oklahoma. I
reached for the bird, held it in my left hand, measured the proportions with my
pencil, then marked dots on the page: tip of bill, rictus, depth of bill,
placement of the eye, distance from the bill tip to the back of its head. I
laid the bird back on the table and began filling in the lines. An hour later,
finished with the profile portrait, I made another small drawing—a detailed
sketch of some pointed feathers on the head; I made a note about those feathers
then wrote more notes below the larger drawing. Later that day I trimmed off
one edge of the paper, glued it to another sheet, this one punched for a
three-ring binger, and put the page in my Birds of the World notebook. It would
be fifty years before I looked at that page again.
At some
time during that semester, Sutton obviously examined the picture because he
studied everything his students produced, down to the smallest detail. On other
pages of this two-inch thick loose-leaf notebook are subtle comments in his
tiny script, comments about tiny things only a careful reader would discover.
The words themselves were not all that important; I could easily correct small
mistakes and misspellings. The fact that he’d caught those little slip-ups told
me more about the life of a professional scientist than he could have told me
directly. Like all his students, I was allowed to study his paintings,
including the unpublished ones, and expected to read his books, especially
those in which the paintings were reproduced. Every one of these exquisite
watercolors also had notes—small, straight lines of cursive, in pencil—Sutton’s
reminders of what he saw and thought at the time he handled a bird. Thus that
day, sitting in his Bird Range, hammerkopf on the table in front of my drawing,
I did the same:
“bill black
Crown above eye brownish black,
or light chocolate brown (no reddish)
feathers somewhat pointed, smaller
on forehead.
Crest similar color to crown, slightly
lighter
Cheek patch & area below eye,
distinctly
Lighter, with buff streaks (individual
feathers long,
with darker centers and buff edges,)
Throat & lower head, & neck about
color of
dark portion of cheek patch.
feathers of cheek, lower crest & back
of neck
very loose webbed, neck & throat less
so.”
The note
directly below the sketch reads
“Scopus
umbretta hammerkopf –
life size
from
specimen on loan from Chicago Mus. Nat. Hist., to GMS.”
The last
line of those notes reminds me again what one individual did for the express
purpose of giving another person access to a particular kind of animal. Now,
half a century after being introduced to an endemic African bird, one that
lives only on that continent, I have one regret: at the time I was making that
drawing, I was so taken with the privilege of handling the specimen, and so keenly
aware of why I’d been given that privilege, that I forgot to write down the
information on its foot tag, or even if there was a tag. Now, in the early
morning darkness of Lincoln, Nebraska, in an attempt to rectify that mistake
made half a century earlier, I join my hypothetical college student by calling
on Information Age technology to solve some nagging internal need. I open my
computer’s browser, pull up Google®, and type “Field Museum Chicago” into the
text window. Exactly fifty seconds later, a second per year, I think, after
three more clicks, and the word “Scopus” typed into a dialog box, I get a list
of all the hammerkopf specimens in the Field Museum’s research collections.
There are exactly fifty such specimens; one specimen per year since I made that
sketch. Fifty: seconds, years, specimens.
I remind myself that I don’t believe in ghosts, especially ones that live in
machines.
With the
museum’s spreadsheet right there in front of my eyes, the temptation is simply
too great to resist: I wonder if I can figure out which of these specimens was
the one I actually handled. By checking collection dates, I immediately narrow
the search down to twenty-nine out of the fifty, namely, those collected prior
to the time I drew the picture. The latest such specimen, the skin of a male
from eastern Kenya, was collected on February 5, 1959. Whomever shot it
recorded the weight at the time, 494.6 grams, the color of the iris, brown, and
the size of its testes, 3 x 6 mm. Its upper bill, lower bill, and lower leg
(tarsus) were all black. The body had “much” fat. This one could not have been
the bird I handled; there is too much information about it on record. Such
information makes a specimen valuable; a valuable specimen doesn’t get shipped
to Oklahoma just so some grad student can draw its picture.
I
suggest that whatever you might be thinking, at this very moment, about the
relative value of iris color and testes size from a bird shot in eastern Kenya,
should be considered a privileged look inside the arcane world of classical
biology. That specimen and the notes associated with it are tangible evidence
for what the world was like on February 5, 1959. Regardless of what elected
officials and the entertainment industry are telling you about what the world
is like, or should be like, a specimen—be it bird, insect, or fossil
dinosaur—provide irrefutable proof that something lived somewhere when, and
that proof can be touched, studied, and confirmed year after year, if
necessary. Thus one dead bird has a quality that simply cannot be duplicated by
someone designing tiny computers and writing apps to infect the brain of that
hypothetical kid we mentioned earlier.
There
are three hammerkopf specimens in the Field Museum that have no record of where
they were collected. These three are prime suspects for the one I handled. Of
those three, two were collected after I drew the picture, so could not have
been the one Sutton borrowed. The remaining one, number 378637, has no
collection date listed in the database, thus is most likely to be used in
teaching. We have no information about its weight, its bill and leg colors, its
sex, or the amount of fat in its body. In the database, the subspecies of
378637 is listed as Scopus umbretta
umbretta, the trinomial indicating it was likely collected somewhere in
southern Africa, instead of west Africa or Madagascar, a conclusion probably
based on bill size. In a land mass larger than the combined areas of China,
India, western Europe, England, Argentina, and the United States, a single bird
died, perhaps, if not probably, as a result of gun shot, ended up being
skinned, stuffed with cotton, laid on its back to dry, and delivered by some
unknown means, and unknown reason, to Chicago, where is probably still lies in
a wooden tray within a tightly-sealed, white, steel cabinet.
In my
mind, this bird becomes the one George Sutton borrowed so that I could hold it
in my own two hands and draw its picture. I can envision its current resting
place, following its return to the Field Museum, because I’ve worked in museum
research collections before, opening those same kinds of cases, smelling the
chemicals used to keep insects out, and handling other specimens. But in 1963 a
man gave me access to a dead hammerkopf, and by doing so he also provided me
with a world of knowledge about the distribution of life on Earth and our
efforts to understand how life exists on the only planet known to support it.
That world of knowledge was not written on the bird’s foot tag, and didn’t even
exist in my mind at the time. Instead, it was implanted in my brain as a
desire, a desire to learn whatever I could about Scopus umbretta, a desire to be a teacher of the sort that would
borrow an unusual specimen “simply” to let some student handle it.
The lack
of collection data meant that although the bird was of no scientific value, so
could be borrowed for teaching purposes by an established faculty member at
some university, it was nevertheless enormously valuable to one individual, a
person who would, years later, also be a teacher looking for unusual tricks to
combat those infectious little hand-held devices capturing the minds of young
humans, turning them—I sometimes imagined—into intellectual zombies. Next to
the bed, in our tent-cabin deep in the heart of the Okavango Delta, is a lamp
decorated with rows of cowry shells. These marine shells used as currency for
millennia, shipped like some hammerkopf specimen for thousands of miles, buried
in tombs analogous to those white steel cabinets, have been replaced by real money—printed,
minted, and electronically transferred when used to by a souvenir at a tourist
safari camp. What once might have purchased a slave or a wife now makes a
pattern glued on a lamp beside a tourist’s bed.
But
cowry shells are, like number 378637 lying in its wooden tray beside elite
specimens, or a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem in the hands of the right person,
powerful weapons in my war against all those forces competing for the minds of
young Americans. And so I would use that Sutton teaching technique many times
over the next forty years, passing out not birds, but shells, to literally
thousands of students, asking them to draw pictures and write essays about
those specimens, compare their structures to paintings and sculptures seen in
an art gallery, then return them to me, like Sutton must have returned that
hammerkopf to the Field Museum. Access to dead animals is not so difficult for
those of us in the business. It’s the live ones that are a problem.
But
access to a live hammerkopf is not such a big problem after all so long as you
have a nice place to stay in Botswana, a Land Rover, and Joseph Molekoa as your
driver. Seba Camp is the nice place; our tent is, like those at Banoka, a
beautifully constructed canvas home with front porch, king-sized bed,
electricity, a shower, sink and toilet, clean, fluffy, towels, insect repellant
and an emergency air horn, and large pictures of Kalahari aborigines across the
headboard. The men in these pictures are smoking something, not typical
cigarettes or cigars, but something that looks like a dark twisted root,
although one of them has a pipe. The Land Rover is a given. And Joseph is, like
Chris Nyame, an expert guide. So when he sees a hammerkopf busy poking in a
tire track puddle twenty yards ahead, he stops.
“Hammerkopf,”
he says, pointing. I aim the camera, zooming in for the exact photograph I want
to see back home in a couple of weeks: the whole bird in profile, or perhaps
facing us but with its head turned to the right, and its body reflected in the
puddle. I take picture after picture, zooming in, zooming out, cursing the
autofocus that seems to believe a grass seed head is more important to me than Scopus umbretta, and in the process
demonstrating once again how technology takes control of one’s life, if you let
it.
I didn’t
expect it to be this easy, nor did I expect a hammerkopf to be quite so
disdainful of our presence. From that ornithological homework done fifty years
earlier, under the tutelage of George Sutton, I’d come to think of certain
species as exotic rarities, things you read about, and see pictures of, maybe
in National Geographic, but never, in
your entire life, expect to encounter. Yet here we are, sitting patiently, with
some kind of feeling that I cannot explain, watching this bird with so little
concern for either me or my interest in it. Evidently, in my mind, the species’
taxonomic singularity also implied the probability of ever seeing one, namely,
near or at zero. Thus I sit there in the Land Rover, taking pictures like a
regular tourist, but mentally I’m the quintessential, off-the-scale, nerd:
here, I’m thinking, is a member of a monotypic family, endemic to sub-Saharan
Africa. C’mon, bird, now turn just a little more so your reflection makes a
nice composition.
The scientific name is Scopus umbretta, but at various times and places, this crow-sized,
heron-like, species has been called not only hammerkopf, but also hamerkop,
hammer head, umbrette, anvil head, umber bird, tufted umber, and hammer-headed
stork. Hamerkop is the Afrikaans name, but the various African language names
are far more colorful: Zulus call it uThekwane;
Tsongas know it as Mandonzwana; to
the Swazi it’s Tsekwane, and in
Tswana, the lingua franca of
Botswana, it’s Mmamasiloanokê. If
we’d had Google when I was a student in the 1960s, I’d have memorized those
African tribal names and used them instead of the German, just out of
orneriness. And out in the bush with Joseph fifty years later, I’d have used Mmamasiloanokê, assuming I could
pronounce it, although given my total ignorance of whatever he speaks on the
radio to other driver-guides, I might have insulted him terribly. Yes, in the
minds of scientists, that brown bird poking in the tire track puddle twenty
yards ahead can indeed bring forth this train of thoughts about language,
history, culture, and communication.
The hammerhead belongs to a monotypic family, which
means that it is the only member of the bird family Scopidae. In lay terms,
that phrase “monotypic family” means that ornithologists were never able to
find enough structural similarity between the hammerkopf and other birds to
warrant inclusion in an existing family, for example Ardeidae, containing all
the world’s herons, or Ciconiidae, which includes species of storks. In other
words, this strange beast has no obvious close relatives, at least in an
evolutionary sense. Nor, evidently, does it have clearly-defined distant
relatives. Some scientists place this family among the herons and storks, in a
group named the Order Ciconiiformes; others place it in with the pelicans and
their relatives, in the Order Pelicaniformes. Scientists argue over data;
that’s what we do; any disagreement over classification of Mmamasiloanokê is as natural to us as conflicting opinions on when
human life actually begins during a reproductive event commonly known as
“unprotected sex.”
However, molecular techniques have empowered
biological scientists in ways never imagined by Darwin. The net result, and not
just with hammerkopf classification, is an admission that appearance can easily
hide one’s history, although most of us knew that already from reading fiction
that had nothing whatsoever to do with birds, or any other non-human living
creatures. But the scientific literature tells me that the molecular wizards
have yet to answer the ornithological question about Scopus umbretta: are its closest relatives herons, or storks, or
even pelicans? All it would take is a cotton swab inside the mouth of that one
out there in the tire track puddle, swabs just like ones taken from alleged
criminals, or innocent men protesting their convictions, swabs sent to some lab
that we all assume does its work correctly. Back would come the results: a long
list of letters that spell “hammerkopf genetic makeup.” We would compare that
list with similar ones from herons, storks, and pelicans. The answer would be
clear: the hammerkopf is really a __________.
“What is it?” is still the most persistent of all
questions about nature. We believe we can answer that question correctly with
DNA, the very genes some creature carries deep inside its cells, the evidence
of its ancestors. Ancestors make us who we are, and that assertion applies not
only to African birds but every other living organism, including those getting
their massage from a Land Rover seat. But the DNA answer deludes us, no less
than one correct multiple choice test answer deludes both a teacher and a
student, into thinking we’ve solved a puzzle. The puzzle we seem to have solved
with this molecular answer is similar to ones presumably solved by some college
kid walking across campus locked into his smart phone, ignoring landscape
vegetation and bird calls. There is no context to a strand of chemical
compounds: no rain puddle, no thirty or forty digital images of a single bird,
no massive nest, no museum specimen locked away in Chicago, no biologist
looking for a drawing he made half a century ago, and no pointed feathers on
the head.
What’s the “take home” from an African hammerkopf in a
tire track rain puddle? The answer is simple if you’re an ornithology student,
but my hope is to make that answer simple for everyone and every species—large,
small, plant, animal, fungus—added to the list, and here it is: as is the case
with most of what we see in nature, the specific leads to the general; like in
a novel, the life and times of one becomes the experience of us all. The fact
that Scopus umbretta occurs only in
sub-Saharan Africa immediately makes you wonder what else is restricted to this
continent that’s so often embroiled in indescribable violence yet retains a
kind of beauty that must be seen to be understood.
©John Janovy, Jr.
2013
