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This article relates to The Conjurer's Bird
Where is
Ulieta? The island of Ulieta,
or Ulietea, is too small to
appear in our atlas but if you
were to travel roughly
North-West of Tahiti you'd
likely come across it. We
"Google Earthed" it (16° 49' 60, 151° 25' 0 W) and
it looks like a very nice place
to spend a few days - green
island surrounded by blue seas
and a barrier reef (if you
haven't yet discovered
Google Earth you should give
it a go - it's a lot of fun!)
Captain Cook visited Ulietea on
his second voyage to the South
Pacific - you can read his
observations of the island and
its people in chapter 15 of
Volume 1 of A Voyage To
The South Pole and Around The
World, and this
engraving will give you an
idea of what it looked like in
the late 18th century.
Joseph Banks turns up
frequently in historical novels
- and for good reason, he was a
fascinating person. For a brief
biography and portrait try the
BBC's website (a
surprisingly useful historical
information resource).
Could the Mysterious Bird of
Ulieta brought back by Captain
Cook still exist? It's
unlikely because very few
examples of taxidermy from the
18th century survive. The oldest
known is the
Duchess of Richmond's African
Grey Parrot from 1702. For
reasons unknown it's stored in
Westminster Abbey, London. The
fact that it has survived this
long is put down to the
conditions in the Abbey which
are unsuited to insects. Few
other specimens from before the
1790s exist.
The word
'taxidermy' is derived from
the ancient Greek words taxis
(movement) and derma (skin). You
wouldn't find me chasing after a
200-year-old stuffed bird, in
fact quite the opposite - over
the years, one of the things
that has united my mother-in-law
and me is that neither of us
were prepared to house her son's
collection of flea-bitten
stuffed birds that he'd acquired
'for a song' at auction at some
point!
Filed under Cultural Curiosities
This "beyond the book article" relates to The Conjurer's Bird. It originally ran in February 2006 and has been updated for the August 2006 paperback edition. Go to magazine.
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