In Appreciation of Squirrels and Other Urban Wildlife

Science + Story would like to point out that tomorrow is Squirrel Appreciation Day. Founded in 2001 by North Carolina-based wildlife rehabilitator Christy Hargrove, it is a holiday with no greater agenda than to further the appreciation of the Sciuridae. Hargrove suggests putting out extra food or learning something new about your backyard squirrels.

If you are motivated to celebrate the occasion in a manner other than scattering some peanuts in the shell, you might visit the website of Project Squirrel at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago. Become a citizen scientist and log your observations of your neighborhood squirrel species into their database and contribute to the body of knowledge about the Gray Squirrel, the Fox Squirrel, and urban ecology more generally.

If your feelings toward urban wildlife run to darker or more ambivalent emotions, I recommend visiting the website of visual artist Amy Stein. An exhibit of her photographs, Domesticated: Modern Dioramas of Our New Natural History, premieres at the Harvard Natural History Museum January 22 and will remain up until April 18, 2010. From the Museum website:

Informed by actual newspaper accounts and oral histories from residents of the small town of Matamoras in northeastern Pennsylvania, Stein’s photographs are staged scenes, often using taxidermied animals, illustrating real-life encounters between humans and animals. A girl and huge bear stare at each other from opposite sides of a fence surrounding the family pool. Coyotes howl at a street light. Stein’s images, at the same time both surreal and paradoxical, explore the increasingly permeable boundary between the human/built environment and the wild. Stein writes, “We at once seek connection with the mystery and freedom of the natural world, yet we continually strive to tame the wild around us and compulsively control the wild within our own nature."

Stein opens the exhibit with a gallery talk January 22 at 4:00 pm.  The museum is also hosting wildlife biologist Stephen DeStefano, reading from his book about urban wildlife, Coyote at the Kitchen Door, January 23 at 2:00 pm. You can bring peanuts for the squirrels on the museum's snow-covered lawn.

Photo from Domesticated by Amy Stein.

Wild Music

Berkeley-based artist Gail Wight is speaking tonight in the refurbished Mammal Halls of the Harvard Natural History Museum. I'm looking forward to her talk on taking a walk with Darwin's ghost and learning about her recent projects. The talk is teasing her upcoming book and exhibit, Restless Dust, at the San Francisco Center for the Book, where Wight is artist in residence. I am very sorry I am going to miss that show, because I love the off-kilter wonder-cabinet-meets-Wonderland aesthetic that infuses everything Wight does. Here is Wight's statement from the SFCB website:

In attempts to understand life, I have: made maps of various nervous systems, practiced art while under hypnosis, conducted biochemical experiments on myself and willing others, executed medical illustrations in black velvet, documented dissections of humans, dissected machines and failed to put most of them back together, removed my teeth to model information systems, translated EEGs into music, painted with slime mold, made music with mice, drawings with bones, and have attempted to create models of my own confused state.  The interplay between art and biology, theories of evolution, cognition and the animal state-of-being form the groundwork for my thoughts. In what ways do we resemble worms? Is a machine more or less reliable due to its lack of endorphins, emotions, and opiate addictions? Can an artist collaborate with other species? What does compassion look like at the neuroanatomical level? My artwork investigates issues in biology and the history of science and technology. It explores the cultural impact of scientific practice, and our ongoing redefinition of self through epistemological constructions. I try to follow the ways in which these ideologies--both metaphysical and manifest--travel through time, moving from the scientific to the social sphere, the social to the scientific, and so often become the overlooked of the everyday.

Her past projects as documented on her website are really something else. I love invented instruments (see: Harry Partch) and music and instruments based on natural and animal sounds (such as the daxophone, a bowed instrument modeled on the great vocal range of the badger). When you combine invented instruments and animal music, well, it just doesn't get any better, in my book. Wight is the mastermind behind Rodentia Chamber Music, La Traviata staged for crickets, and a Plexiglas cello in which whisker switches (and of course they have to be whisker switches) are tripped by mice, playing prerecorded cello music and amplified mouse scufflings.

I had just taken my resident nine-year-old to the Museum of Science's exhibit Wild Music: Sounds and Songs of Life. A bad idea: school holiday, for one thing, and they have a Harry Potter exhibit on at the moment, for another. We love the MOS, but not when it's that crowded with Potterites. We skipped quickly through Wild Music and headed to the planetarium show instead. On a quieter day, I might make my way back to the Wild Music exhibit at the MOS, to try my hand at the parabolic microphone, but wishing they'd brought in some artists and musicians who could have explored music in a wilder way.

More about Wight here.