Close to the bone
Katrina van Grouw’s intricate drawings of domesticated animal skeletons reveal the never-ending story of selective breeding.
We visit an artist and author whose anatomical drawings illuminate the story of selective-breeding
“Oh, that’s Amy!” says Katrina van Grouw, beaming, as she shows me around. Amy is a duck or, rather, an exduck. A female mallard, to be precise. Her gleaming white, meticulously cleaned and reconstructed skeleton takes pride of place in Katrina’s front room. Amy’s bill is slightly open, as if about to quack, a witty touch typical of this genre-defying natural-history author and illustrator.
The modest terraced house Katrina shares with Hein – an ornithology curator at the Natural History Museum’s Hertfordshire outpost in Tring – is, without doubt, among the most extraordinary and wonderful I have visited. From outside, in a nondescript side street, there is no sign that you’re about to enter a veritable Aladdin’s Cave.
Rooms are crammed, floor to ceiling, with zoological artefacts: skulls, skeletons, stuffed birds, drawings, paintings. Many are of museum quality; indeed, as will become clear, the contents of this home represent one of the most significant private naturalhistory collections in the UK. Everywhere you look is a surprise. I spot a life-size cast of a dodo skull. On a shelf in the kitchen, next to the cumin and oregano, a preserved albino mole floats in a jar of alcohol.
Also sharing this crowded house are a hyperactive collie-poodle cross named Feather, and a striking-looking naked feline
known as Cat Boy – his mixed ancestry, Katrina explains, is “mainly Devon Rex with a bit of hairless Sphynx.” In the garden are aviaries with Hein’s rare-breed doves and pigeons, as well as a formerly four-legged mallard called Quad (what else?). “She hatched with four legs, but a vet we know kindly removed two,” Katrina says.
It turns out that Amy the mallard is, or was, no ordinary duck either. All of Katrina’s specimens have a story to tell, and she shares them with an enthusiasm and warmth you might use for talking about your best friends. “I articulated Amy at college back in 1987,” Katrina says. “She was my first specimen, so is very special.”
Putting the pieces together
Articulation is the painstaking process by which every last piece of a skeleton is put back together and then mounted. Before that can happen, of course, one needs to remove the feathers and skin, followed by the fat, muscle and sinew. It’s a messy, and smelly, operation. The van Grouws often use Dermestes beetles to “do the dirty work” of removing tissue, a standard practice in museums and among keen naturalists. Essentially, they leave you with a box of zoological Lego – a pile of bare bones.
Katrina taught herself how to prepare specimens while studying natural-history illustration, and it is this background, combined with her fine-art degree and scientific brain, that make her work unique. She shot to fame in 2012 with the publication of The Unfeathered Bird, a tour-de-force that married fabulously detailed drawings of avian anatomy with eye-popping insights into what makes birds tick. It’s a huge and handsome book, part coffee-table tome and part scientific reference, which reveals, bone by bone, how these ‘living dinosaurs’ are put together. Read it and you will never look at a robin, rook or avocet the same way.
Since The Unfeathered Bird came out, Katrina has appeared on the Springwatch Unsprung sofa and on BBC Radio 4’s
Katrina's specimens all have a story to tell, and she shares them with enthusiasm and warmth.
Midweek to discuss her anatomical drawings, and has made a name for herself at bird clubs and conferences as a brilliant speaker. I’m keen to talk about the recently published follow-up, Unnatural Selection. Another hefty, gorgeous, yet serious, book, it is even more ambitious, taking seven years to complete.
Making changes
“My idea, this time, was to explore selective breeding; a very powerful force,” Katrina says. “Selective breeding and domestication often get mixed up. With domestication, you’re taking a species of wild animal and turning it into a population of tame animals. But with selective breeding, you take those tame animals and actually change them. You tinker, mould and reshape them into animals that differ physically. It could be to make them more beautiful, in our eyes, or perhaps more useful.”
Everyone knows how different individual breeds of cat and dog can be, while still belonging to the species Felis catus and Canis familiaris. In looks and temperament, Katrina’s dog, Feather, bears little resemblance to my own, a black Labrador called Lola. Yet both are self-evidently dogs and, equally clearly, share many traits with the grey wolf, their original ancestor. It’s obvious really, yet we seldom pause to reflect on how the dramatic changes in selectively bred species – whether pets, working animals or agricultural livestock – have happened. “Are happening,” Katrina corrects me. “It’s a never-ending process.”
Another name for this process is evolution, and it is the thread running throughout Katrina's new book. But it is evolution mediated by humans, as opposed to evolution by natural selection. The similarities and contrasts between the two – artificial selection on the one hand, and natural selection in the wild on the other – is what fascinates Katrina.
“The thing that separates these forms of selection,” she says, “is that with one a deliberate choice has been made. Someone decides to modify a species by planning ahead. A dog breeder, farmer or whoever selects the individuals whose traits they want to pass on, and breeds from those so, over the generations, the traits get more and more pronounced and, in some cases, quite extreme.” Accelerated evolution, in other words? “Sort of, yes.”
Marvellous mutations
At the heart of Unnatural Selection is the fact that the mechanism driving changes in animals is the same, with or without human involvement. “It’s all about mutations,” says Katrina. What a breeder is doing, she explains, is effectively searching a population for mutations that they like the look of, and then ensuring that these not only get passed on and survive through generations but are enhanced, too.
Identical mutations arise in nature of their own accord, due to glitches in DNA, but they don’t always flourish. Lack of fur is not useful to a cat in the wild, for instance, so does not take hold in a population. Yet if enough people consider it to be attractive, it is a heritable trait that, thanks to our intervention, can and will endure – and Cat Boy is the living, purring proof of this.
It’s no coincidence that Charles Darwin, godfather of the theory of evolution, was also a pigeon fancier. Like Katrina, he was intrigued by the parallels between artificial and natural selection, and made much of it in his writing. Darwin is one of Katrina’s heroes, and features prominently in Unnatural Selection. I mention the famous words “survival of the fittest”. She rolls her eyes and groans. “Let’s get rid of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ right now!”
When I ask why, Katrina points out that the idea confuses people, because it’s nothing to do with physical fitness. What Darwin meant was how well an animal fits into its environment. Unnatural Selection shows us that it doesn’t matter whether the environment is natural or domestic – the same underlying principles apply.
Creatures great and small
The book is stuffed with Katrina’s exquisitely observed pencil drawings of, frankly bizarre, domesticated pigeons (Darwin would no doubt approve). Some are shown fully feathered, others as mounted skeletons. There is the tiny
figurita, sporting a flounce of backward-pointing feathers on its breast. And the frillback, which appears “almost frothy” due to the mass of curly feathers enveloping its back, belly and legs. The scandaroon (one of Darwin’s favourites) has a down-curved bill reminiscent of a flamingo. Then there is the English pouter, which stands bolt upright and boasts a huge crop so outlandish that, when an excited male bird begins courting, it resembles an inflated balloon.
As well as pigeons, there are chickens galore, ducks, geese, canaries, budgies, rabbits, cats, dogs, sheep, pigs and cattle – all portrayed with scientific accuracy and an artist’s eye for a pleasing composition.
Katrina is clear about what she is not. “I’m self-taught, so can’t call myself a biologist. And I’m not an anatomist either. Or an artist.” Not an artist? I’m surprised – Katrina has won awards for her highly collectible work. But she reminds me that she stepped back from the “picture-making art world” a long time ago. Nowadays, her illustrations are “a means to an end”. She wants to be seen foremost as an author and thinker – the big ideas are what excite her.
And there are plenty of those in the book. We meet a dizzying variety of biological concepts, such as disproportionate dwarfism, branching phylogeny, particulate inheritance, genetic drift and logarithmic spiralling.
Katrina also shares some nuggets of information from her years of research. For example, she observes that “cats with extra toes are especially common around sea ports on either side of the North Atlantic. Anything that unusual would have been a good omen to superstitious sailors!” Isolated from inland populations of ‘normal’ cats, the mutation proliferated in the ports.
It’s all in the genes
Many biologists and wildlife lovers are snobbish about domesticated animals that, like the sailors’ cats, have been selectively bred. They look down on them as inferior to wild creatures. Katrina, however, is fascinated by all animals. This has led her to assemble, with her husband Hein, an enormous collection of domesticated animal specimens that may well be unrivalled.
Natural-history museums don’t bother to collect and preserve skeletons of, say, English bulldogs or King Charles spaniels – when resources are limited, why would they? As a result, there is no official record of how these canine breeds are physically changing over time. Since most domesticated dogs are much-loved family members, they tend to be buried with a certain amount of reverence, not offered to science. True, there are photographs and videos, but any anatomist will tell you that these aren’t the same as actual skeletons.
Obtaining the raw material for Unnatural Selection was therefore a monumental task. Katrina contacted pet owners and breeders all over the country and overseas, gently persuading them to take part in her project. The end result is a remarkable portrayal of the wonder of artificial selection – an ancient process that’s still going on today.
BEN HOARE is Features Editor of BBC Wildlife and writes our Wild Month section (p6–10).
FIND OUT MORE Unnatural Selection (Princeton University Press, £35) by Katrina van Grouw is out now: unfeatheredbird.com.