Like a Real Haunt of Birds

A WONDERFUL EXHIBIT IN THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM.

Made From Photographs taken on a lonely Islet Off the Virginia Coast So You Could Hardly Tell the Imitation From the Original Birds in Their Home.

There is a glistening stretch of real beach sand up in the American Museum of Natural History arrayed with a background of painted beach and painted sea so natural that you can almost hear the waves ripple. Tufts of beach grass and stray clumps of beach goldenrod actually growing in the sand and many shells are supplemented by pictured grass and bushes so that the two blend and produce a most realistic scene.

But even more natural than the setting are the groups of birds, the habits, growth and appearance of which the whole thing is intended to show. The exhibit has just been opened and is the most striking in the museum.

There has been but one unfavorable comment from those who had a preliminary view and the critic spoke as a gunner or procurer for a milliner rather than as a naturalist or lover of birds and beaches. He gazed at the sixty-three birds in the exhibit for a long time and then remarked:

"They are flying and nesting just as if they were alive, but the whole thing is unnatural because you never could stand so near as this and see so many birds at the same time."

Perhaps not if you stood with a gun cocked ready for a shot. But that wasn't the way the preliminary pictures for this group were obtained.

The locality represented is Cobb's Island, a shell covered sand reef seven miles long about seven miles off the Virginia coast. That island was selected and the museum group was arranged from views there by Frank M. Chapman, assistant curator of mammology and ornithology -- in other words, the bird man.

Mr. Chapman visited Cobb's Island last July in the nesting season and camped out for days behind a screen of banked up sand, armed with a camera. He took many pictures of the birds on their nests and in the air, and when he got back he had 63 birds mounted and arranged so that the finished exhibit is in exact accord with his pictures taken on the island. These six species are represented by the stuffed specimena: least tern, gull-billed tern, common tern, skimmers, Wilson's plover and oyster catcher.

In addition to the full-grown birds shown in flight or nesting, are the young, the eggs and the rude circle of shells which the sea birds heap together for nests. Mr. Chapman brought some of the nests away with him and restored them on the beach sand in the exhibit.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the exhibit is the series which shows the development of the skimmer, a bird protected by its lack of beauty and lack of flavor from both the milliners and food hunters.

When the skimmer is first hatched he is the exact color of the beach sand, and that saves him from being seen by his bird enemies. As he is born and brought up on a barren strip of sand that wouldn't support a church mouse the skimmer has no four-footed enemies. As he grows and gets able to fly and fish and fight for himself he grows darker and finally becomes a jet black.

The skimmers in the group are in all the stages of development from the sand colored chicks, one baby half hidden in a big shell, up to the big fellows.

The terns, sometimes called summer gulls, are less numerous because they have long been the victims of milliners. The tern was the first of the wild birds selected for trimmings hats, and his kind has become almost extinct. In one day on Cobb's Island 1,400 least terns were shot. Another record of slaughter for three days was made by three baymen who shot 3,500 terns of the various species. But the Virginia Legislature came to the rescue and now the tern is protected by a game law.

The most artistic feature of the exhibit is the way in which the effect of actual flight is produced. The birds ride together and fly in single, sometimes double file. With Mr. Chapman's photographs for models, the birds, with their wings outstretched, have been suspended by platinum wire, finer than hair, and each wire is painted the color of its particular background - the blue of the sky, the green of the sea or black or white to match the plumage of a bird flying the other way. The balance or poise of each bird in the air is secured by using three or four wires for each specimen. The wires are not visible twelve inches away from the group.

The Cobb's Island exhibit is a companion group to the Bird Rock group arranged by Assistant Curator Chapman from photographs and specialties which he secured on the famous rock in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, that Audubon tried to reach but failed because he never found the sea quiet enough to admit of his landing.

Mr. Chapman was more fortunate. He rigged a windlass on top of the rock and had himself hoisted up and down the face of the cliff till he had photographed ever part of it and had learned all there was to learn about the murres, the razor-billed suks, the gannets, the puffins, the kittiwake gulls and the petrels that inhabit it. The petrels are the birds that the North Atlantic skippers refer to when they talk about Mother Carey's chickens.