Abstract

A talking bird at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia, presents yet another iteration of avian speech. From his confines inside a habitat diorama, a taxidermy snowy owl addresses museum visitors through a handwritten inscription.

What—who—is this creature, anthropomorphized and immortalized, now speaking from the grave? For whom or what does the Owl speak? Which parts of his speech are fiction and which parts count as fact, and does it matter? What about his snowy-owl-ness makes him worth listening to? And how should one go about understanding what he has to say? The sections that follow present a postmortem biography that retraces the Owl’s travels and fills in the missing pieces of its story, both to demonstrate the insight afforded by an owl’s-eye view and to tell a tale about something bigger than the Owl itself. In this way, the essay documents the unexpected meaningfulness of an obscure, even ridiculous taxidermy display, discovered by chance one day in a museum in Halifax, and makes a case for paying attention to and taking seriously the most prosaic of things. What follows is also a study of media, of an entire cohort of snowy owl texts, images, objects, and apparatuses, all of which operate as agents of communication and makers of meaning in their own time and in the present day—a legion of Ukpigjuat that ultimately refuse to be merely talking birds.