Nesting:
Photographs by Judith McMillan

April 25 through July 6, 2008

Location: Fawick Gallery
Three years ago, the birds’ nests in the Museum’s ornithology collection caught the attention of photographer Judith McMillan.

“I was amazed at their architecture — they’re incredibly varied,” says McMillan, who is also a Museum trustee. “And it’s astounding to think that [the birds] built these with their beaks, that they could maneuver the material and do what they did with it.”

She also wondered what motivated the people who collected the thousands of nests and eggs. “Why would they want to amass these collections?” she asked herself.

She knew she was on to her next photographic project, which will be the subject of a new Museum exhibition that will be on display in Fawick Gallery from April 25 through July 6. Nesting: Photographs by Judith McMillan will feature18 of her nest-and-egg images.

The nests she photographed “sort of picked themselves,” she explains. They had to be different from each other, small enough to move and have eggs that were collected with them. The Museum’s collection, which is international in scope, yielded fantastic examples of the nests and eggs of species such as Chipping Sparrows and Wood Peewees, Painted Buntings and Blue Jays.

McMillan settled on an artistic approach almost immediately. She placed each nest on a piece of black velvet spread on the floor and photographed it in black and white using a 4x5 view camera. She shone a flashlight into the deeper nests to illuminate interior details and eggs.

When she had worked her way through everything in the Museum’s collections, Director of Science and Curator of Invertebrate Zoology Dr. Joe Keiper connected her with a colleague at The Field Museum, who allowed her to access that institution’s nest collection.

At home, McMillan scanned her negatives and used Photoshop to enhance some of the subtle details. The images, which are not life-size but are in scale with each other, were printed to the 17-by-24-inch size that will be on exhibit.

As she worked, McMillan thought about the nests’ collectors. Most of the specimens she photographed were collected from the turn of the last century until about 1940 by people pursuing what was considered a nice hobby at the time. But as the years went by, such collecting became socially unacceptable — and was eventually illegal after passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

“[The nests we have] hark back to another time and an old way of thinking,” McMillan says. And though we are no longer naive to the realities of species extinction, she hopes the photographs convey what it was about the nests and eggs that sparked such passion in their collectors. “The nests we have are treasures,” she says.

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History is generously funded by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.