I once made an intervention to draw out creative interconnectivities between a male Satin Bowerbird (Ptilonorhyncus violaceus) and Homo sapiens. Adult male Satin Bowerbirds wear a wonderfully rich glossy blue-black plumage and stare with unsettling, vibrant violet eyes. Previous studies have examined the complex behaviour of male bowerbirds in building and decorating bowers, and artists have been fascinated by their concern/obsession for objects as aesthetic ‘treasures’.i

The 26 letters of the alphabet, cut from blue card, were scattered randomly in the garden of a painter, the late Arthur Boyd, which overlaid the territory of a male Satin Bowerbird. The ‘reading’ of the alphabet by the subject was recorded over a two week period. Each letter corresponded to a a miniature essai (subjects ranging from Consilience to Darwin to Quantum mechanics). This strategy enabled the investigator to display a range of human knowledge in an effort to recognise convergences between the fields of science, history, anthropology and literature, convergences revealed by play and research, poetry and the imagination. From this perspective, the experiment asks why human culture threatens the future of so many other species, including birds, in case the subject ever asks why?

At the end of my two week residency over half of the alphabet had been collected to decorate his bower. After I left, Maggie Henton, another Bundanon artist in residence, wrote, ‘You might like to hear about your Bowerbird.  During my last week at Bundanon he decided to move house, abandoning his bower and building another one just across the path.  At first I speculated that perhaps he had found the intellectual challenge of all those alphabet ideas too much, and was longing for a blue plastic toy life. However, over the next few days some of the letters were moved across to his new home, so maybe he was just being more selective in his intellectual interests.’
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In the summer of 2008, See short video https://youtu.be/pLVxFd62UNY