N = Nature now

One of the temporary exhibitions at Wellcome is about to change. The objects I've been featuring in my posts are mostly from the permanent exhibitions (I'm allowed to photograph those) but there are other displays that change regularly. 

Making Nature has been concerned with, among other things, the connections between human attitudes to the natural world and the way in which museums, zoos and circuses have exhibited nature for the past 150 years. It's challenging and often confronting stuff. 

I was particularly disturbed, for example, by a small tatty looking preserved platypus, its bill inexpertly removed. Apparently, the first British scientist to attempt to classify the unique creature back in the late 1700s thought his peers were having at laugh with him and had stitched together random bits of various critters. So he ripped its bill off trying to prove his theory.

Horrific though that is, his confusion about such an odd creature is understandable. The wonderful Robin Williams used to say that the platypus must have been designed by committee. Either that, or it is proof that God has a sense of humour: "OK let's take a beaver and put on a duck's bill. It's a mammal, but it lays eggs. Hey Darwin, kiss my ass!' 

But anyway, Wellcome has a new exhibition in the planning stage. They're calling it A Museum of Modern Nature and the exhibits will be objects, stories and ideas provided by members of the public. Great idea, huh!? So I went along to one of the early drop-in sessions when ordinary bods like me can have a chat with official museum types about our relationship with nature today.

Of course, I came away thinking about what I own that might fit the bill. And although I brought very few possessions with me from the Rock, there is something.


When I was very young, I would play bingo with my grandparents, Housie Lotto they called it. The tokens we used to cover each number as it was called were small round shells. One side, flat and smooth, featured a tiny spiral I loved to trace with my finger.The other was nobbly and unattractive. 

Our beach on The Rock

Nan kept them in a jar in the kitchen.

She told me my mother and aunt had collected these treasures on their beach holidays, many of which had been spent on The Rock. So, on family trips to those same beaches, I too would search along shorelines for these little discs. I learned they were not really shells at all, but something more like a lid that sealed sea snails into their homes. I called them trapdoor shells.

Actual sign from walkway to our beach.

I told my own children this story one day not so many years ago while we were wandering along what we call 'our beach' on the Rock, the beach where we have built our retirement home, the same beach where my mother and aunt played. I was holding some trapdoors in my hand, mindlessly running my finger in circles over their flat surface as I spoke. 

But I threw little discs back into the salty surf as we left. 
'Our beach' is now protected parkland the removal of anything natural is strictly prohibited. (I've written about that before.)





The following Christmas, however, I unwrapped the jewellery pictured. My children had found each piece at a different store, so the salty origins of these specific shells that are not shells is unknown, but the kids knew their gift would make me happy.

They knew that wearing those little spirals would remind me of what I love, that wearing and touching these little beauties would connect me to family and home.

What would you exhibit at Wellcome to illustrate what nature means to you?





During the month of April, I am participating in the Blogging from A–Z Challenge.

My posts will all feature images of and by the Wellcome Collection, Euston, London: the free destination for the incurably curious.

...a beguile of magpies

Something of this handsome bird might be said with advantage in a homely way. It appears that in captivity Magpies show an aversion to anyone who has annoyed them, as well as to anyone who looks like the person who has annoyed them.  The voice of the offending person is quite sufficient to agitate the bird and cause it to rush post haste towards its tormentor to wreak a terrible vengeance. Although it is principally children and ladies that they have a grievance against, some children and ladies pass by as very good friends.

The Useful Birds of Southern Australia: With notes on other birds was written by Robert Hall and published by T.C. Lothian (Melbourne and Sydney) in 1907. It was one of very few things handed down to me by my paternal grandmother.

 

Happily, the magpie clans that populate our little piece of The Rock and I have come to regard each other as ‘very good friends’. I know I shouldn’t feed the wildlife. And yes, they leave the upstairs deck looking like this:

They also have a rather nasty habit of barfing up lumps of shiny hard bug-body-ambergris. It’s kind of gross, but who am I to judge.

My neighbour shoos them away from her place. She doesn’t like the way they peck holes in her lawn and she practically wretches at the thought of their poop getting into her water-tanks. But I think when they really pissed her off was when the cheeky blighters worked out that she keeps bees. Easy pickings. Meal in a box. So she shoos them off to come over to visit the crazy-bird-lady next-door who feeds them mincemeat and bacon rind. And they do.

I lob the tasty tidbits high into the air one at a time for my clever black and white friends to swoop and catch in midair all whooshing wings and click-clacking beaks. It’s a spectacular show.

The young birds wait warily on the grass below for any treats that should fall. A clumsy hurried foot-race for the prize ensues . They make me laugh.

In the mornings, they wait at my kitchen door. One cheeky male even taps on the glass to remind me they’re outside. A row of them will be on the railing singing. And oh how they reward me with their warble-garbling  a cappella routines.

I don’t know if there’s a collective noun for magpies, but there should be. A beguile of magpies, maybe? Or a carol?