The Lost Pages of Ornithurae
Imagine you find these papers a few thousand years from now. How would you interpret their meaning? Perhaps you are an archeologist and you lift each brittle page from a ruin in a region once called Glacier National Park. For years, you might collaborate with other experts to work out a theory:
The Pages of Ornithurae date to the early Pyrocene and depict a quasi-religious movement that ritually worshiped ornithurines in the last century before they went extinct. These pages indicate the reverence for ornithurines neared its height as the animals became increasingly rare.
Strict structures guided Ornithology rituals. Only at holy sites, on certain dates, at specific times, would practitioners hang nets between trees to catch ornithurines as they flew through the forest.
Individuals were caught, ceremoniously held in a kind of prayer ritual, and adorned with a unique identifying metallic ring before being released again. While captured, they were lovingly examined, measured, and recorded. Efforts were made to document as much life history as possible. The highest reverence belonged to the ornithurines that practitioners caught and held multiple times.
These images were created by a digital camera between 2021 and 2024. They are generally unstaged, meaning the subjects were not posing for photographs, but were simply holding the animals as part of a prescribed process. All of the animals were handled in accordance with official regulations and permits.
The papers themselves are about 30 by 50 centimeters of pressed cotton. To create the images, the paper was coated with a mixture of ferric ammonium oxalate and potassium ferricyanide and then exposed to 365-nanometer ultraviolet radiation for several minutes. Several stages of washing removed excess chemicals. A final wash in melted ice from Gem Glacier mixed with hydrogen peroxide deepened the image contrast.