Notes

"We shot our guns aimlessly in the dark wherever the screaming birds or the beating of wings made us suspect their nests lay ahead. Bonpland at last managed to kill two guacharos dazzled by our torches. This is how I was able to sketch this bird, up to now completely unknown to naturalists" (Humboldt 106).

I chose this passage because I was taken aback by Humboldt's attitude toward killing, and it made me stop and think about what these explorers do. The description of thousands of birds dying earlier in the chapter had disturbed me, and seeing these lines just as I was recovering from that mental image "hammered in" the feeling. I wasn't put off by reading Darwin's text last week even though he also described killing animals because Darwin's attitude toward the animals felt much more wholesome and not impersonal. He described keeping his specimens alive by feeding them for months, and his killing was even motivated by empathy: "Pitying the wasp, after allowing it to struggle for more than an hour, I killed it and put it back into the web" (Darwin Ch. 2). Humboldt and Bonpland randomly shooting their guns in the dark without regard to what or how many organisms die feels very different from Darwin's excitement to see how organisms work both alive and dead, although I suppose the end result is the same. From this passage you don't get the sense that Humboldt valued the birds' lives at all; he is simply doing it "for science" without regard to morals. I guess in learning that Humboldt collected thousands of specimens I did not consider that in order to do so he had to actively seek out and kill each organism.