by Tim Birkhead
Baldner spoke and wrote with enthusiasm and originality and in way that Willughby had probably not encountered previously. Here was someone driven by curiosity, very much like himself, but in Baldner’s case, fuelled by a unique connection with the watery world in which he worked. Willughby was thrilled.1
We don’t know who tipped Willughby off about Baldner, but his colleagues apparently didn’t think it worthwhile to accompany him that day. One can only imagine Willughby’s delight at meeting the man and – possibly with a guide and interpreter, or just possibly with Philip Skippon who almost certainly spoke German – hearing about his passion, and then seeing his extraordinary and beautifully illustrated homemade book. In a world where published zoological illustrations consisted of black-and-white engravings or crude woodcuts, the vibrant colours and lifelike poses of Baldner’s animals must have seemed incredible. Willughby decided there and then to buy the book. Measuring just 30 by 20 centimetres and made up of some 156 pages, it comprised both text (in German) and paintings of fifty-six birds and forty fishes as well as various mammals, amphibians and an array of aquatic invertebrates.
Regardless of how detailed a written description was, Willughby knew that there was no substitute for a superbly executed, coloured image to convey exactly what a particular bird, fish, dragonfly or dormouse was really like. Good pictures also inspired one’s readers. Baldner’s book is a gem.
Willughby’s copy of Baldner now lies in the British Library in London. It is dated 1653, which is presumably when it was completed, and is accompanied in the library by a translation of Baldner’s German text made after Willughby’s death. In his volume on John Ray, Charles Raven refers to this book, rather condescendingly it seems to me, as Baldner’s ‘not very literary notes’.2 Let’s look at what Willughby would have learned. Baldner records where and when he shot the birds and whether they were worth eating – both of which would have been of limited interest to Willughby, since these topics were not the focus of his and Ray’s studies. Baldner’s comments on the birds’ ecology and behaviour, however, would have been very germane. Of the kingfisher, for example, which Baldner noted ‘smells very rankly’ and is not good eating, he said that it makes its nest in a deep hole in the riverbank ‘exactly as straight as a carpenter’s square’ and the female lays her eggs in a small chamber at the end, fledging five or six young in August. ‘And when one findeth a nest and doubteth whether or not there be young ones therein let him observe in the morning and he shall hear the young ones crying, or when their dung runneth out of the hole, then be sure there are young ones therein.’3
To prepare birds for the table Baldner had to open them up, but being of an inquisitive nature, this was done more as dissection than butchery. Indeed, Baldner’s knowledge of his victims’ internal anatomy may have made his work especially attractive to Willughby. Of the bittern (again, not ‘dainty eating’), Baldner commented on its huge intestines that he felt must in some way enhance their extraordinary booming courtship call – a call that sounds like someone blowing over the top of a large bottle. In Baldner’s day most people believed that bitterns boomed either by blowing through a reed or by thrusting their beak into the mud, but Baldner watched booming bitterns and saw for himself that the sound emerged through their closed bill ‘lifted high up’. Willughby and Ray mention the bittern’s unusual call in the Ornithology, but they offer no explanation for how it is made, other than the erroneous folklore. Had they read Baldner’s account they would have known the truth.
The stone curlew is a rare bird in Alsace (which lies just outside its current breeding range in Western Europe), and Baldner only ever saw one. He shot it, and recognising that it was unusual, made sure he produced a painting of it highlighting one of its most unusual features – a characteristic mark – the lack of a back toe.
Discussing the common wild duck or mallard, Baldner makes an intriguing observation that ‘they have a very quick scent, in so much that they smell out a man though they do not see him if only they have but the wind of him’. While it is often difficult to ascertain which of its senses a bird has used to detect a predator such as man, there is now good evidence that the sense of smell in birds – once thought to be all but non-existent – is well developed in certain species, including the mallard.4
Baldner also kept some animals in captivity, including pet otters; a gull he had hatched in a homemade incubator;5 and a tame cormorant – a scarce bird on the Rhine – that was ‘tied to a string, who catch’d the fishes himself that he eats’.6 It is widely known that cormorant fishing was (since the third century) common practice in China, but it is less well known that European cormorants were also used in this way. In the Ornithology Ray gives a second-hand account from Johannes Faber, who describes how captive cormorants are ‘hood-winked’ (i.e. have a hood placed over their eyes, as falconers do with their birds), ‘that they be not frightened’, and ‘When they [their keepers] come to the rivers they take off their hoods, and having tied a leather thong round the lower parts of their necks that they may not swallow down the fish they catch, they throw them into the river.’7 Once the cormorants have caught five or six fish the birds are called to their keeper, and ‘little by little one after another they vomit up all their fish a little bruised with the nip they gave them.’8 James I of England employed a keeper of cormorants in the early 1600s and enjoyed watching his captive birds fishing. So popular was this aquatic form of falconry that the king had birds imported both from the Isle of Man and Reedham in Norfolk, but also from Sevenhuis in the Netherlands where he ordered ‘yearly two ships full’. The cormorant fishing tradition was continued by Charles II, who instructed his servant Richard Edes to ‘keepe and breede three cormorants for our recreation’.9
The illustrations of the fish in Baldner’s book are arguably more beautiful than the birds, and he clearly liked fish and knew a great deal about their biology. He describes a wels, Silurus glanis (the sheat-fish or European catfish), kept in a pond for five years, a fish that reached five feet in length. This is Europe’s river monster. They can grow even bigger though: the record is 2.8 metres (9 feet: 144kg or 317lb); it is an ugly pin-eyed fish, with an enormous head and a cavernous mouth. Baldner’s image of it gives no sense of its size and gluttonous ferocity, although I like the fact that his specimen does have an evil glint in its tiny eye.
Baldner knew all about the curious reproductive and anadromous (migrating up rivers from the sea to spawn) habits of salmon – facts that took others two more centuries to rediscover. His relentless curiosity is a joy to observe: just how many eggs has this gravid female pike got inside her? He counts them and finds an astonishing total of 148,800.10
I was somewhat puzzled to see mentioned in the Preface to the Ornithology that Baldner’s notes were appreciated, with Ray commenting that his curiosity was ‘much to be admired and commended in a person of his condition and education … For my part, I must needs acknowledge that I have received much light and information from the work of this poor man, and have been thereby inabled [sic] to clear many difficulties, and rectify some mistakes in Gessner.’ This is puzzling given how little of Baldner’s information appears in the Ornithology.11
We don’t know how much Willughby paid for his copy of Baldner’s book, but it seems likely that Baldner was thrilled, both with the money but also by the fact that someone of Willughby’s standing considered it worth purchasing. It is possible that Baldner anticipated something like this happening for there are several – at least six – copies of his handcrafted book in existence. He cannot have sold his sole copy to Willughby and then decided to create another, for the illustrations and text are similar across the various versions. How and why Baldner produced multiple copies is not known.
The copy in the British Library is annotated in Willughby’s hand, and science historians are confident that this was the one bought by him. We do not, however, know how it ended up in the British Library.
For a long time only three other copies of Bal
dner’s book were known to exist: two in the Strasbourg Library, one of which was destroyed by a fire in 1870, the other thought to have been (very poorly) illustrated by Baldner’s twelve-year-old son, Andreas. The third copy, inherited in 1686 by Landgraf Karl von Hessen, later placed in the Heidelberg Library, and subsequently in the library at Cassel, is generally considered to be the most beautiful. It was studied by Robert Lauterborn in the early 1900s and a very attractive, but expensive, facsimile was made of it in the 1970s.12
In the 1920s another, previously unknown, copy emerged, and luckily its owner – John C. Phillips, who obtained it through an English dealer – decided to publish a short account of it. With fifty-seven bird plates, forty of fish, three of mammals, and seven of reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates, it was similar in many respects to Willughby’s copy in the British Library. One difference, however, was the inclusion of ‘a large collection of inferior pictures with French and German legends’ – very obviously not by Baldner, but curiously, containing a portrait of him.
Enchanted by his acquisition, Phillips wrote: ‘Some of the smaller species of insects and their larvae are so delicately drawn and colored that one looks at them with astonishment and admiration; they are so much better than average pictures of that period’.13 Indeed!
In the mid-1930s Phillips’s copy of Baldner passed into the hands of Albert E. Lownes, owner of one of the most important collections of books on the history of science in the United States.14 On examining his newly acquired copy of Baldner, Lownes noticed a number of intriguing things. First, that it bore the same date – 1653 – as the London copy, whereas the other known copies were all dated 1666. He also commented that rather than being a haphazard assortment of images, this was a carefully assembled collection; that the illustrations were by several different artists; that they included some preparatory sketches in pencil, ink or sanguine (a reddish-brown, iron-oxide chalk, sometimes mixed with water to form ink), which Lownes suggests would have been preserved only by a working naturalist (rather than a collector); that many illustrations were labelled with locations, including Augsberg, Antwerp, Brussels and Amsterdam, or annotated with phrases such as ‘on the way from Florence to Siena’, and that many of the images carried the name of earlier naturalists such as Belon, Aldrovandi, Marcgraf, Clusius and others. Even as I write this, reading from Lownes’s report I can feel his – and my own – heart rate rising. At this point he must have begun to realise what he had before him. The final piece of the jigsaw was provided by a drawing labelled ‘Picturam transmisit Th: Browne, MD’ – a picture from Thomas Browne. As was known, Browne helped John Ray as he prepared the Ornithology by providing him with a number of excellent bird images.15
Putting two and two together, Lownes realised that Francis Willughby must also have owned this copy of Baldner. He speculates that Baldner might have presented the second copy to Ray, but this seems unlikely for there’s no mention of it in Ray’s journal. Another possibility is that having seen Willughby’s copy, Skippon purchased the second one, but neither does he mention Baldner in his travel diary.
The other thing that is curious about all this is that in the preface to the Ornithology, Ray talks about Willughby purchasing ‘a’ copy of Baldner. A puzzle still waiting to be resolved.
Several accounts of the Baldner volumes assume that they were illustrated by him. One copy, now in private hands and sold at Christie’s auction house in 1995 for £87,300, may well be the original since it contains some ‘less accomplished’ watercolours that could be by Baldner himself. In contrast, the two Willughby copies and the Cassell one were illustrated by a much more accomplished artist – Johann Walther. That name is potentially confusing, for three different Johann Walthers – a father and two sons – are all associated with Baldner. The father is Johann Jakob Walther, a very skilled bird artist who enjoyed royal patronage and whose consummate images can be found (if not easily viewed) in the Albertina Museum in Vienna. His two sons were Johann Georg, born in 1634, and Johann Friedrich, born in 1639. It was Johann Georg, apparently a distant relative of Baldner’s,16 who executed the illustrations. As an artist he was good, but not as good as his father, with whom he shares some similarities in style and manner of labelling his artwork.17
Willughby’s continental travels with John Ray, Philip Skippon and Nathaniel Bacon: Central Europe 1663.
Central Europe provided other ornithological riches. Travelling towards Nuremberg, via Basel, Zurich and Constance, Willughby’s party shot a vivid blue, crow-sized bird on 21 August 1663 near Augsburg: a roller. It may even be the bird whose rather crude image, as a corpse, lies (or rather, hangs by its beak) in the Middleton Collection at Nottingham. Although Ray and Skippon saw rollers subsequently in Sicily and Malta, the Augsburg specimen – a male – was the first they had seen, the one Willughby measured and dissected, and whose detailed description subsequently appeared in the Ornithology. It is referred to there as the ‘Strasburgh Roller’, which sounds as though Ray might have confused Augsburg and Strasbourg, even though Skippon18 clearly says the bird was killed at Augsburg, which he and Ray both agree was where they were on 21 August. However, it seems that Ray – albeit with no explanation – was using a name employed by some previous writer.19 The great Victorian ornithologist Alfred Newton somewhat cryptically suggests that this was Conrad Gessner (1555), but Gessner never used that name and instead refers to the roller as ‘the blue crow’. Gessner’s knowledge of the roller – and that name, derived from the bird’s aerial rolling display – came from his friend Lucas Schan, an artist who sent Gessner paintings and skins of the roller. Schan wasn’t the only artist to paint the roller. Albrecht Dürer made several paintings of the wing of a roller between 1512 and 1524 in what are perhaps some of the most iconic and beautiful of all medieval bird images.20 It is just possible that Willughby may have seen one of these paintings since we know that he and his friends saw some of Dürer’s artwork during their travels.21
It wasn’t just the roller’s rich blue, black and purple plumage that impressed Willughby and Ray; they also noted four very distinctive features, or ‘characteristic marks’. These were, first, a tiny cluster of wart-like excrescences behind the eye; second, that the two outermost tail feathers were longer than the others; third, that the toes were completely seperate from their base; and finally that the tongue had two forked appendices. I checked with some colleagues who are studying rollers and although they knew about the tail feathers, they hadn’t noticed the three other features, perhaps because if you are an ecologist it isn’t usual to examine a bird’s tongue, toes or eyes! In terms of the wart-like excrescences behind the eye, I was able to see this by zooming in on some pictures on the Internet. The toes were a bit more of a challenge, but in many birds some degree of fusion between the toes is widespread, and indeed in describing the bee-eater,22 a relative of the roller, Willughby comments that the ‘fore-toes … are all joined together to the first joint, as if they were but one toe’. This is a state referred to as syndactyly, both in birds and people (where it is a rare genetic disorder). As a taxonomic feature among birds it isn’t apparently very useful, but in the 1660s Willughby didn’t know that, and his comment on the absence of syndactyly in the roller is further evidence of his meticulous and knowledgeable approach.23
Nonetheless, I was left rather perplexed by those four distinguishing marks because it felt a little like – to mix zoological and botanical aphorisms – not being able to see the wood for the trees. How many cerulean, cobalt and chestnut crow-sized birds had Willughby encountered? The dazzling plumage is the single most important distinguishing feature of this species.
On the other hand, had Willughby known that there are (today) eight recognised species of roller in the world, finding some features that distinguished them would be (and has been) important. Perhaps his focus on the minutiae of the European roller was a symptom of the over-emphasis on detail for which John Ray gently chided him. Even so, those four features that Willughby noted are
of interest in their own right, and as I have indicated, some of them may in fact be characteristic marks that distinguish rollers from their closest relatives such as the bee-eaters.
At Nuremberg, which the group reached on 28 August, they saw that ‘birds alive of all sorts are brought everyday into the market and they sell (to eat) jays, starlings, wrens, titmice &c’. While the idea of eating wrens or titmice might seem abhorrent to us today, that’s only because the creatures have been sentimentalised by us. In seventeenth-century central and southern Europe – and indeed in certain regions still – small birds were simply there alongside fish, crustaceans and snails as part of the diet. However, the fact that Skippon felt it was worth commenting on suggests that he was surprised by it and that such practices were uncommon in England.24
Birds commonly eaten in England in Francis Willughby’s day
bayning – unidentified
bitterns
buntings
bustards – great bustard
char – Thomas Browne’s ‘churr’, a small wader
cranes
curlew
dotterel
fieldfares
godwits
heath-cocks – black grouse
herons
knot
lapwings
larks – skylark
maychit – mentioned by Thomas Browne: a small, very fat wader
merles – blackbird
moor-pouts or grouse – red grouse