And where would you go to see poor Inca now?Nobody knows. The zoo lost it.What is both most intriguing and puzzling about the story above is that Peale was a lover of birds,and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so.It is a truly astounding fact that for the longest time the people who were most intensely interested in the world's living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them.No one represented this position on a larger scale (in every sense) than Lionel Walter Rothschild, the second Baron Rothschild.Scion of the great banking family, Rothschild was a strange and reclusive fellow.He lived his entire life in the nursery wing of his home at Tring, in Buckinghamshire, using the furniture of his childhoodeven sleeping in his childhood bed, though eventually he weighed three hundred pounds.His passion was natural history and he became a devoted accumulator of objects.He sent hordes of trained men―as many as four hundred at a time―to every quarter of the globe to clamber over mountainsand hack their way through jungles in the pursuit of new specimens―particularly things that flew.These were crated or boxed up and sent back to Rothschild's estate at Tring,where he and a battalion of assistants exhaustively logged and analyzed everything that came before them,producing a constant stream of books, papers, and monographs―some twelve hundred in all.
