Harry Thurston (L) and Thaddeus Holownia at the Owens Art Gallery

Two Tantramar artists — a poet and a photographer — celebrated a long-time collaboration Friday as they launched, of a feather, their third book about birds.

“Harry and I are going to pretend that we’re just at the studio having a Scotch and talking about life, which we excel at,” photographer Thaddeus Holownia told a packed room Friday at the Owens Art Gallery as members of the audience laughed.

He added that he first met poet and science writer Harry Thurston at the gallery 35 years ago during events marking Mount Allison University’s 150th anniversary.

Thaddeus had organized an exhibit on “The History of Photography at Mount Allison” while Harry gave a reading featuring his poem JUNE BUGS, which describes the armoured insects’  erratic nighttime flight battering the clapboards before they crash like “kamikazes”.

The audience at Friday’s book launch laughed, then applauded as Thurston read the poem which ends:

“In the morning/ their wrecked fuselages/ litter the verandah/like unpleasant lozenges/that had been spit out

“But let’s be honest/It is not their manner/that bothers us most./It is the message they bear/as they burst from their earth crypts/into summer air:/This is June/long awaited/short lived.”

“How can you not fall in love with someone who looks at nature that way and describes it in such a magical way?” Holownia asked after the applause died down.

And then, in an emotional moment, he paid tribute to “the extraordinary dedication” of the late Gay Hansen, his life’s partner who taught in the Mt. A. biology department for 39 years, sharing her love of nature, and especially of birds, with generations of students.

Holownia’s current exhibition of photos at the Owens and his new book are both named “of a feather” and both are dedicated to the memory of Hansen who died in 2021 at age 67.

For his part, Thurston remembered first meeting Gay when they both were studying biology at Acadia University in Wolfville.

Then, he read words she wrote about “her great passion” ornithology, the study of birds:

I think that it is essential to educate people about birds — they are extremely important in ecological, environmental, cultural and recreational realms. Ornithology is one of the few fields of biology where citizen science makes significant contributions.

This screen projection of Gay Hansen was shown at Friday’s book launch

The 21 photos in Holownia and Thurston’s new book are of bird feathers that Hansen preserved through her skills in taxidermy and that are used as study mounts in what is now named the Gay Hansen Ornithology Lab.

Her extensive collection of birds’ eggs inspired Ova Aves, Thurston and Holownia’s first book in this series. They created their second volume, Icarus, Falling of Birds, after Hansen was called upon as an expert to help identify migratory song birds that were killed by the thousands in 2013 at Saint John’s Canaport Liquefied Natural Gas plant.

Plumage of the common raven (Photo: Thaddeus Holownia)

The last of the 21 photos in of a feather shows the plumage of Corvus corax, the common raven, taken from a bird that Hansen preserved as one of her study mounts.

Holownia described how he and Gay gathered two ravens’ nests from collapsed hay barns on the Tantramar marshes.

“They’re large scale, like this big,” he said spreading his arms to show that ravens’ nests can measure several feet across.

“And there’s this incredible organic weaving of sticks and baler twine of different colours,” he added.

Harry Thurston said one of the large nests served as part of the inspiration for his poem that accompanies the photo in the book.

“I wish I could see
Into the black box
of your mind,”

Thurston read, his poem going on to describe the raven as a weaver of sticks, grasses “and the blond hairs of a mare’s tail” bound in the nest by baler twine.

I wish I could see
Into the black box
of your mind—

even the glass eye,
the curious cock of the head
in this mounted specimen

is wise.

Thaddeus Holownia’s of a feather exhibition, which also features work by Sackville artist Karen Stentaford, runs until May 15 at the Owens Art Gallery.

Thurston and Holownia’s of a feather can be ordered through Tidewater Books.

To read my report on Peter Sanger’s book about the life and photography of Thaddeus Holownia, click here.

Harry Thurston (L) and Thaddeus Holownia at their book launch on Friday