Within the days when color printing was extraordinarily costly, the Avicultural Society had particular appeals for funds to help the looks in Avicultural Journal of the occasional color plate. A well known chicken artist was then commissioned. Though the entire run of the Society’s magazines will be discovered on-line, the plates not often see the sunshine of day. Due to this fact I made a decision to indicate one, every so often, on this website. That is the nineteenth within the collection.
– – – – – – – – – –
The artist of this plate and creator of the accompanying article was Karl Plath (1886-1970). Plath had educated and exhibited as an artist in Chicago earlier than being requested to turn out to be Curator of Birds at what’s now referred to as Brookfield Zoo in 1935; he retired in 1961. He additionally had a big personal assortment of birds.
Plath describes how three Waved or Galapagos Albatrosses (Phoebastria irrorata) had been stored at Brookfield Zoo ‘some years in the past’. One died after seven months, one other after ten. However one lived for 4 years and 6 months—not lengthy in albatross phrases however thought-about a hit on the time. Unable to take off within the giant flight cage (30 x 12 metres and seven metres excessive) the chicken, regarded as a male, walked round swinging its head back and forth.
Plath doesn’t present a date however I’ve discovered a press {photograph} on the market on-line which exhibits two of the birds and is dated 25 July 1935, i.e. shortly after Plath joined the zoo. Who collected the birds—and why?
This date of 1935 means there’s extra to this text than a easy description of occasions as a result of the best way by which the chicken was fed on the time is of curiosity to these of us who’ve been concerned within the physiology of marine birds and the historical past of a key discovery on this area within the Nineteen Fifties. I’ll broaden on this thread in a future article.
Avicultural Journal 75, 1969