The narrative of rheas historic realationship with humans #2

This is Francis Patrick Fowler again.  After reading William Cronon’s  article “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative” in the Journal of American History, I realized the importance and potential danger of narration in a conservation history.   Narration’s goal is to make something mannered seem natural.  It is to connect different pieces of information rather then simply place them in a chronicle.  While this is good, it is a problem in conservation history where the natural and artificial are supposed to be honestly defined. 

Suppose I was to craft a story about the relationship of humans and Rheas through a typical beginning, conflict, climax and end format: the story could become very human-centrist and omit certain facts.  Rheas would, not surprisingly, be very silent on their opinion on the nature of their relationship to humans.  For example, I wanted the narrative I am working on for my internship to explain how Rheas influenced Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, but I wound up talking more about Darwin.  I wanted to talk about Rheas survived the plumage trade, but I ended up writing more about early members of the Audubon society. 

How was I to create an engaging story while staying truthful and giving Rheas their fair time?  I realized that connecting legacies to the past and the various people that helped conserve the species would be secondary to the task of balancing conservation history and wildlife history.  And the point of conserving history along with wildlife is to reveal an equally authentic and dependent relationship between people and Rheas.  

It is for this reason that I chose to use a narrative that stated that people and Rheas were equally dependent on each other, using mythology, the theory of evolution and the plumage trade as my major themes.  I did this by organizing raw data, then narrating and mediating that data, and then ending with my conclusion.  For mythology, I mentioned the various insults in Brazil for the way a Rhea ran, but then showed that there were indigenous tribes that revered the Rhea.  For the theory of evolution, I used Darwin’s notes on two different Rhea species to demonstrate how Rheas influenced the beginnings of the Darwin’s ideas.  Yet, I showed how these notes at their beginning were disjointed and barley coherent until Rheas were studied again and again.  For the plumage trade, I highlighted the amount of Rheas killed to make dusters and brooms.  But I used an analogy from one of my key sources, Birds and People, that the destruction of Rheas by the undisciplined use of technology ended up being equally destructive to humans in World War One.  It is not a coincidence that much legislation protecting bird species were created right before and after this second carnage.  I finally concluded by tying these themes together with the turn-of-the-century event of the first two Rheas entering the Philadelphia Zoo. 

This natural history of Rheas was limited in how much it explained.  I did not want to distract from the intention of the studbook to give reliable data.  However, I hopefully made the topic more reachable to the human mind while at the same time I did not loose sight that this project was about Rheas more so than humans.

 

A Scene in South America with Rheas and Patagonian Cavies.,” NYPL Digital Collections, accessed May 13, 2019, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-7a67-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.