THE GIOTTO BIRD

 

Our hero makes a scientific discovery but has trouble publishing.

 

Strolling in the velvet air of dawn one day came Tome Henry suddenly observing that a young norwegian wren, unusually chirpy for such a sad September, made little beaky circles in the dust.

 

No one had ever noticed this before. The reports of the Royal Ornithological didn't have much to say. So Tome Henry wrote himself a volume on this unlikely habit calling it but a modest contribution.

 

Wanting a perusal he did mail his work to Father Lionel of the Lakes whom, in the first instance, he thought might be a wee receptive. A prompt reply and thank you note was accompanied by a manuscript Father Lionel had completed on the webbing in the extra claw known among the eagles of Peru. Then, three days later, a further work on the common wedgetail awaited Henry's meditation.

 

He decided to try Professor Hastings. "Dear Sir," he wrote, "I have composed a treatise on the beaky little circles of the young norwegian wren." Hastings said it sounded terribly interesting and he would soon be forwarding his manuscript on the myth of suicide among Alphesian sparrows and wondered whether Henry might know a publisher or two?

 

Another velvet dawn young wren scratched among the fluting and then made her beaky little circles. Tome Henry added an appendix and mailed an expression of service to Lady Smythemeadows, a noted advocate of science. Her secretary replied that he would forward the discovery to experts in the field and added a copy of her ladyship's own unpublished volume on the Blue Breasted hornet, almost extinct. It was not widely known, he said, that her ladyship was a keen birdwatcher.

 

In several days the noted but notorious Professor Feather of Leeds, who had once proposed that the low-land cuckoo might have evolved from a high-land owl, had posted a complimentary copy of the galley proofs of his latest work on the mating devices of the sedentary mudlark to Henry with a note that his associate O'Niel had written on it already.

 

O'Neil quickly forwarded a letter in which he said that Tome Henry's discovery was but paltry compared to the eastern wren of Florence, or the Giotto bird, that literally rams its beak into three inches of solid clay, sketches a near-perfect circle every time and then dissects it into nine equal parts to indicate that you are trespassing on its territory.

 

A large parcel arrived the next day. It was O'Neil's 90,000 word typeproof in which he made his case. "Would you," he concluded, "be so kind as to read it through and give me your impressions?"

 

Next our Tome received a long letter from Sir Garsed Holmes, an associate of Lady Symthemeadows. He praised Henry's work and made the interesting observation that Darwin's sister had once owned a norwegian wren. His own work, however, which he then described in detail, concerned the odd resemblances between the almost triangular dance of aggression known among the Walnut Herron of the Falklands and the same marking in the middle of the back of their natural rivals the Narrow-chested Throckmorton Herron.

 

Sedwick Klee, the world's acknowledged expert on cranes, but a man with no formal qualifications, just like Tome Henry himself, sent a draft of what he hoped would be a new departure for him, a careful study of the ferret-faced woodlark of Alabama. It was some 75,000 words.

 

"I note some similarities with my work on the norwegian wren," wrote Tome. Delighted, Klee sent him a further work he had written, but didn't dare to even try to publish, on the colorations of the ovumventrix of this same denizen of the Alabama greens. "I'm glad you liked my work," he wrote.

 

Soon a further draft arrived and then another. And then a letter from an old Jewish man in Canada who had read of the Tome Henry breakthrough in the newsletter of his local. As a youngster in Hamburg his uncle in Oslo had a norwegian wren and they had sung a song on Hannakah called "There goes the beaky little circles."

 

Tome replied. A reply came again. They actually conversed. Then the Canadian connection announced that he has a son Jeremy. His son Jeremy was interested in birds. His son Jeremy wanted to be a scientist. His son Jeremy had written a book on the Canadian blue sniggert and he was wondering if Tome Henry might have a clue.

 

The next morning Hastings wrote wanting to know if Tome had liked his book. Then O'Neil asked the same, stressing that the Giotto bird of Florence is exceedingly rare and that it is entirely understandable that Tome Henry didn't know it.

 

Then Jeremy himself wrote and explained that while he would love to one day read Tome's expose on the norwegian weirdo, the Canadian sniggert is a universal explanation for the origins of intelligence in post-Mesopiscean birdlife and his studies suggest the entire ornothological establishment had been wrong from the outset, although now too many had feathered their nests with false assumptions.

 

Tome straggled out across the velvet once again and in the scary thicket flittered back and forth the young norwegian in the dawn. Beams of gold matched the butter yellow of her legs. Undeterred, he sent a summary of his chapters to an associate of a colleague of a friend. A raft of drafts returned. One on fossils of the dodo by an intense Italian caught his eye.

 

Finally, Tome tried the general secretary of the Birdlovers-on-Kent, Nathaniel Taylor, an expert on the aerodynamics of the famous grey lorakeet. Mr Taylor explained that he received too many manuscripts to read them all but was glad he lived in an age of discovery and enclosed a copy of his latest draft 'The Famous Grey Loreeket: Observations of the Latitudinal Flight Apparatus", a companion to his first volume, just to prove it.

 

In the end Tome went walking once again across the dawning pathways. The norwegians were making merry lest the winter come too soon. The young tit, blissfully unaware of the scientists' gaze, did a quick flutter in the breeze and made those beaky little circles all the way. But Tome couldn't see the point. They seemed like circles of waste.

 

"You know," said Tome, "that the Giotto bird can do it thrice as well." The wren didn't care. It was moved by fear of the arctic storms, and with the sublime wisdom of the lilting voice of morning tunes to which it called, had no time to compare. 

 

- O. Spaniel Murray