I first began to dry specimens for preservation carelessly perhaps at first, but before the season was over, I had collected between one and two hundred species.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I've been collecting rocks since I was 8 and have over 200 different specimens.
You know, of course, the specimens are not alive. We have to fix them in a fixing liquid formaldehyde and then we have to do a rinsing and then we have to coat them in a thin layer of gold.
We sometimes freeze the specimen with liquid nitrogen, which is extremely cold, you know. This is another technique we use now - but the specimens are not alive.
For years, I've felt an obligation to harvest an animal, since all my life I've so mindlessly consumed them. But that was from the safety of my desk.
I also have a lot of preserved foods, things that will keep for a long time like dried fish, seaweed or lotus seed.
Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.
My mother saved hundreds of animals in her life. Wherever she encountered and injured or needy or abandoned animal, she brought it home.
Shall I, that have destroyed my Preservers, return home?
I have long been active in and supportive of conservation and historical preservation causes.
When I was a young boy, I used to gaze through the microscope of my father at the insects in amber that he kept in the house. And they were remarkably well preserved, morphologically just phenomenal.
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