The intersection of natural oddity and human cupidity

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, natural products

I was thinking of using the title "Faddism" for this review, but there is more to it than that. In Strange Harvests: The Hidden Histories of Seven Natural Objects, author Edward Posnett leads us on a round-the-world tour of places where some very unusual, and typically very costly, products arise. Prior to reading the book I knew about only four of them. Names and places:

• Eiderdown – Iceland
• Edible Birds' Nests – Borneo (and other places in Asia)
• Civet Coffee – Borneo and Java
• Sea Silk – Sardinia
• Vicuña Fiber – Peru
• Tagua – Ecuador (and nearby countries)
• Guano – mainly Chincha Islands, off Peru

A lot of downy feather products are called eiderdown today, but the eider is a duck of the Arctic, and thus has down (fine, fluffy feathers borne mainly on the breast) with the greatest combination of lightness and thermal insulating capacity. The goose down you'll find in a down jacket or sleeping bag is about half as efficient, which is plenty good enough for most of us. Particularly because genuine eiderdown, when you can find it, costs more than twice as much. Or much more than that, for feathers gathered from used Eider nests and cleaned, rather than taken by killing and plucking the birds. 

The book is like a cumulative song; each chapter harks back to lessons learned in all the prior ones. After all his travels the author has the beginnings of a good Cabinet of Curiosities (although I hope he keeps any sample of guano in a very well sealed container!).

Two products are intended to be ingested…but not by me! Bird nest soup, costly as it is, isn't really built from bird saliva, as I had thought. It is a special kind of mucus. Yum!! White nests from one species of swiftlet can be scraped off a cave wall as a rather clean item, needing little processing. Black nests from another species are full of feathers and must be cleaned. Somehow, that raises the cachet, the difficulty of production, and the cost. The author reports that the soup doesn't taste like anything. I'm glad to know that; now I don't have to wonder.

Civet coffee is "harvested" from the dung of the odd animal that is not quite a cat, not quite a raccoon, and is in a classification all by itself. At least gathering dung is more humane than collecting the other civet product, the musk from glands near its anus. It takes three or four men to immobilize the animal so a small spoon can be used to drag the musk out of the gland. It is used in perfumery as a kind of base for "fixing" the scent. Most perfumes are chemically produced these days, so there is less need to drag musk out of civets and minks, and perform other disgusting activities. I was kind of anti-perfume already; now more so. If you have recently bathed with plain Ivory soap, your natural and clean scent is plenty good enough for me.

Sea Silk is fascinating. Many mollusks, mostly mussels, hold themselves to rocks using byssus, a strong, thready material. The large cousin of mussels called Pinna happens to have such a "beard" up to a foot long, because its substrate is not rock but sand, and the threads need to anchor over a larger area. As soon as I read about it, I went to the appropriate cabinet of the museum where I work, in the mollusk collection, to see what they had.

The shells in this drawer are more than two feet long. The museum has several drawers of this species, Pinna nobilis, but only one example of the byssus holdfast.

The closeup of the "beard" below shows how it has lots of sand and bits of shell in it. Picking the material clean, and other processing steps, make this a very costly material. Just holding this uncleaned piece I could tell it is very soft, like fine silk.

Though the strands are up to a foot long, this piece probably would weigh no more than a gram or two after cleaning. Carded, combed, and spun into thread, it would take perhaps 100 pieces like this to make one glove.

These shells are protected and it is presently illegal to harvest byssus. One woman the author visited a few times claimed she could harvest it without harming the animal, by taking only a portion of the "beard" from each animal. He isn't sure if that is true, or just a story she told to entertain people at her Museum.

I'll skip down to Tagua for a moment. One of my brothers is an artist and spent several months in Japan learning to carve netsuke (net-soo-keh; ornamental fobs) from ivory. He has also carved the "vegetable ivory", the nut of the Tagua palm. He told me he has a box of the nuts, but no time to carve recently. They are a little softer than ivory, being pure cellulose, but denser and harder than hard wood. This picture from an Ebay offering shows that such carvings do look like ivory, but neither elephant, walrus, nor boar was harmed to obtain the raw material.

Oddly, one of the major uses of Tagua nuts is making buttons. They have a definite cachet. They look and feel better than plastic. The big drawback is, because they are related to wood, when you wash the garment, you have to do it fast and dry it quickly. The buttons are biodegradable. I don't know if they are amenable to dry cleaning.

The Vicuña is related to the llama, guanaco, and alpaca. It has the finest wool known, with a fiber diameter of about 12 microns. A Vicuña coat can set you back nearly $30,000. 

At this point in the book, the author had shown each fascinating product and some details of its harvest and processing. Every product has a dark side, either unexpected consequences of the trade (even Tagua, while hard to "farm", displaces other species if one does so), or actual abuse of the animals involved. At present, Vicuña are rounded up and sheared, with little harm, though I wonder how it affects their psychology. They are not domestic animals like sheep or goats. I learned that the Incas had actually domesticated Vicuñas, and in the process turned them into Alpacas. Alpacas also have valuable wool, but not as fine. Domestication resulted in coarser wool, although they bear more of it per animal. It's still very comfortable as a textile, and much less costly.

The last chapter was a big turn, it seemed to me. You won't find guano as any kind of a fad product, not now, not ever in the past. But it made a few people rich in its day. The best bird poop comes from dry islands off the shore of Peru, and a few headlands nearby. Guano is the poop of many kinds of birds and bats. It seems flying animals have a metabolism that makes their feces into better fertilizer. A century or more ago, those islands had hundreds of feet of the stuff piled up. Millions of sea birds roost there. It was thought that it would last a thousand years. It didn't last fifty. There is still a yearly harvest, carried out in a more sustainable way. It's hard to see how guano has any market at all, since chemical fertilizers are now so cheap. Maybe there is a faddish cachet to "genuine guano" after all!

The author tells us not just of the animals and plants, but the people surrounding each product. Life isn't easy, even if your product is sold at a steep price. The saddest folks seem to be those who guard the guano islands. It's a lonely life, and a smelly one even in the driest weather.

A book like this presents a very satisfying sort of natural history. At an average forty-plus pages per species, to tell the story of every known species would fill 200,000 books this size. Bring it on: I love to read! Particularly a book this well written.