Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 83, number 3, spring, 2000

              Flights of Fancy:
Birds and People in the Old Northwest
By Michael Edmonds
ON THF evening of April 7, 1823, an Ojibwa boy practicing his hunting skills downriver from Sault Ste. Marie heard a strange cry in the brush. Moving sound¬ lessly, he discovered a flock of small gray- and-yellow birds unlike any he had ever seen before. He quickly shot one with his bow and arrow and ran to his family's maple-sugaring camp, where he learned it was called paushkundamo, meaning "berry- breaker." Knowing that the U.S. Indian agent at the Sault was interested in natural history, the Ojibwa family brought the dead paushkundamo to the white man's fort.
Taking the bird in hand, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft immediately reccjgnized that it was a new species, unknown to John James Audubon, Alexander Wilson, and the other ornithologists whose works he had studied. Schoolcraft therefore dressed the bird and sent the skin to William Cooper at the New York Lyceum of Natural History. Cooper, too, saw that it was the first example of an un¬ named species, so conferred upon it the of¬ ficial Latin h\r\orr\\?i\ fringilla vespertina ("twi¬ light finch," from its crepuscular habits) and gave it the colloquial English name evening grosbeak, which it bears to this day. ^
' William Cooper, "De.scription of a New Species cif Gro.sbeak, inhabiting the Northwestern Territory of the United States," in the Annals of the Lyceum of
When the Ojibwa boy handed the paush¬ kundamo to the white Indian agent, he held out more than a gray-and-yellow finch. As the dead bird changed hands, two quite dif¬ ferent ways of experiencing i\merican bird life intersected for a brief moment. The Ojibwa at the head of Lake Michigan knew the paushkundamo as an occasional visitor from the north who lingered into the slowly arriving spring. Dashing among shrubs af¬ ter berries, it was a neighbor, a fellow suf¬ ferer at the hands of the northern winter, one who fell victim to the Indians' need to train their children in how to hunt. To Schoolcraft and Cooper on the other hand, the bird was an artifact, a specimen to be analyzed, preserved, labeled, and correctly fitted into the scientific order that white men imposed on nature. There was only one bird, but there were two radically dif¬ ferent ways of experiencing it.
Nature triggers an endless cascade of physical sensations, memories, feelings, and other mental events that rain down upon us. Standing on a bluff overlooking the Missis¬ sippi, we assume that we see "nature." But if
Natural History of New York (11 vols. New York, 1825), vol. 1, part 2:219-222; Michael J. Mos.sman, "H. R. Schoolcraft and Natural History on the Western Fron¬ tier Part 4: Indian Agency Years with Thomas McKen¬ ney," in I'he Pas.senger Pigeon, .5.5: 156 (1993),
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