“Almost exactly in the middle of the Pacific, midway between our Pacific coast and Japan, there is a small island, a coral atoll with a surface of about three and a half square miles, which supports perhaps the most dense bird population in the world”.
“Here, on a level plain from which every vestige of vegetation has been worn away, is a mass of these great birds nearly a square mile in extent. He may have seen birds before by the thousand, perhaps by tens of thousands; but surely not literally by the million!”
“(A)lbatrosses, some two million of them, are by no means the most numerous bird inhabitants of this great oceanic aviary. Most of the surface, save that just described, is covered with a coarse, sedge-like, tufted grass among which several millions of terns of about six species, have their homes.”
“In another place is an exceedingly picturesque bit of rocky scenery in which the immaculately white “love birds” have established a rookery. These, unlike other terns are silent birds, and hover like great white butterflies close above the visitor, silently inspecting him without either fear or anger.”
“A very different scene presents itself in the rookery of the great, greenblack ‘man-o-war birds,’ the outcasts and pirates of this oceanic aviary. Graceful beyond compare while on the wing, they have a particularly savage and cruel aspect when seen at close quarters on their nests.”
“But any description of the scene would be inexcusably defective were we to omit mention of the weird color effects produced by the combination of the snow white coral sand, the dark green vegetation, and the intense blue of the tropic sky …”
“… often mottled with purple clouds; while embracing all is the thundering surf of intense green, white crested waves near shore, and, further out, the wonderful deep blue of the Pacific.”
“Try as we may; this scene can not be described, and as day after day the wonder of it grew and deepened, the writer found constantly recurring and intensifying the great desire to have it reproduced as a masterpiece of art for the benefit of the State University and the people of Iowa.”
“And then the ‘Laysan Island scheme’ had its birth.”
“To any one who has seen a really good cyclorama, such as that of the “Battle of Gettysburg,” where the observer gazes upon hundreds of thousands of men and miles of space, a veritable miracle of vast numbers in intense action …”
“… the actual figures in the foreground so skillfully joined to the painted background as to deceive the very elect, the ‘Laysan Island’ scheme will make an immediate appeal.”
“The plan is, briefly, to construct in our new museum a cyclorama of Laysan Island. … It was with the Laysan idea in view that room was reserved for this exhibit in the north end of ‘Bird Hall’ in the new museum, and marked ‘Laysan Room’ in the plans.” (Nutting; Iowa Alumnus, 1909)
“Laysan Island Cyclorama offers a 360-degree view of Laysan, an outpost of the Hawaiian atoll and a bird sanctuary, at its heyday, when it boasted 8 million birds of 22 different species in 1.5 square miles.”
“In 1902 Charles Nutting, director of the UI Museum of Natural History, first traveled to Laysan as a scientific advisor to a government expedition. He was so inspired by the multitudes of terns, albatrosses, finches, boobies, and other birds that he vowed to re-create the scene in Iowa City.”
“Nutting led the UI in a nine-year fundraising campaign. Laysan frequently made headlines in The Daily Iowan. In 1909, the football team even performed a skit at a lecture on Hawaii to raise funds for the trip.”
“In 1911, Nutting sent Homer Dill, who managed the museum’s bird and mammal collections, along with UI students Horace Young and Clarence Albrecht and muralist Charles Corwin back to Laysan to gather specimens for an exhibit.”
“The party found the island very different from the paradise Nutting had described almost a decade earlier. In addition to evidence of feather poaching, rabbits introduced by a guano miner in 1903 had overwhelmed the island, stripping it of its vegetation and decimating insect populations.”
“Lacking food and shelter, some seabirds took flight to other islands, but land birds were unable to fly the long distances to other islands.”
“Despite this, Dill returned to Iowa City with 36 large crates of specimens (total of 398 birds representing 23 species), including plants and sand. Museum studies students handcrafted thousands of wax leaves for the display, and Corwin painted a 138-foot-long backdrop.” (The mounting of the 106 birds and installation of the cyclorama foreground required nearly three years.)
“When it opened, the cyclorama was one of the first in the world to feature a natural theme and is one of a handful of cycloramas still existing today.”
“In 1912, UI sophomore Alfred Bailey returned to the island, but ran out of poison and ammunition, barely affecting the rabbit population.”
“In 1923 the Tanager Expedition killed the last of the rabbits on Laysan Island — too late for the Laysan rail, Laysan honeycreeper and Laysan millerbird, which went extinct due to the devastation. Two more species, the Laysan finch and the Laysan duck, remain endangered. All of these species are featured in the Cyclorama.”
“No major modifications have been made to the cyclorama, but renovations in the early 2000s included the addition of interpretive signs and a soundtrack of bird calls of all 22 living and extinct species that have inhabited the island. While museum staff have hand-cleaned parts of the background mural, no major conservation work has been done.” (U of Iowa)
Over 100-years later, Laysan Island Cyclorama, on the third Floor, West End of Hageboeck Hall of Birds in the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, is still open.
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