Chapin's Peacock

In 1913, while he was poking about in the Ituri forest of the Belgian Congo, young Ornithologist James P. Chapin came upon a grinning black native proudly wearing in his headdress a brown and black feather. Dr. Chapin promptly appropriated it, for it resembled the feather of a pheasant, or peacock, and those birds, both Asiatic, had no business in Africa.

Last year Dr. Chapin, 48, now associate curator of Manhattan's Museum of Natural History--a lean man with snapping eyes, unruly grey hair and a sandy mustache--was in the Congo Museum in Tervueren, Belgium, finishing research for a book he was writing. Deciding he had need of the museum director, who was studying shells on the fourth floor, he trotted up the stairs, idled along a quiet corridor. Suddenly on top of a dusty exhibit case, he saw a pair of unfamiliar birds. He grabbed them, lugged them to the director, demanded an explanation. They had been sitting there for 22 years because nobody had quite got around to throwing them away. He was told they were probably some kind of domestic peacock. Dr. Chapin knew better. The moth-eaten wing-feathers matched the one he had been saving for 23 years. He wrote his museum for permission to go to Africa for two months for the purpose of confirming his long standing suspicion that there was a relative of the peacock living in Africa.

A few weeks later with two dogs and a native hunter Dr. Chapin walked out of a little Congo mining camp into the jungle. The dogs flushed a pair of birds, the native fired, the male of the pair dropped to the ground. It was Dr. Chapin's long-sought bird. Of the pheasant family, it was feathered in metallic blacks, blues, greens, reds, had a long pink neck, small head, a curious, strawlike tuft protruding from its forehead. He named it "Congo Peacock,'' soon learned it was fairly common, traveled in pairs, but lived only in virgin jungle. Last week Dr. Chapin arrived back at his Manhattan office, and with satisfaction seasoned by 24 years of anticipation spread out on a table the first six Congo Peacocks ever to be identified and stuffed.

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