Here's more about Katrina's book - in her own words...
After hours: Katrina and Hein and ‘The Unfeathered Bird’.
Six o’ clock on a Tuesday evening; and newly-married Katrina van Grouw is returning from work. Husband Hein is in the kitchen, bent over the sink, while a pan bubbles away on the stove behind him. Domestic bliss! “Mmm. Oystercatcher.” Katrina smiles as she peers into the pan. Hein puts down the partially cooked magpie he’s picking at, and kisses his wife. Katrina takes a skull from the dining room cupboard and retires upstairs to draw it.
“What an interesting job you two have” said a dinner guest in well-disguised alarm. We diligently explained that although our job also happens to be with dead birds, as bird curators at the Natural History Museum’s collections at Tring, this is in fact an entirely unconnected venture for a completely different purpose. “Katrina’s an artist”, pointed out Hein, as though that rationalised any strange behaviour. “And I’m just helping her.”
Being an artist is actually my profession. It’s the museum that’s the ‘day job’, and I’ve been self-employed, as an artist, since graduating in Natural History Illustration from The Royal College of Art nearly 20 years ago. College years were spent on endless bird dissection: skinning, mounting specimens, cleaning and articulating skeletons. And drawing; always drawing. There were several pet projects: For example, there was a certain Mallard that I found dead on the beach, and I spent several months lovingly stripping her down layer by layer, drawing every step of the way in just the same way as Stubbs did his horses, then cleaning and re-assembling the bones. If you’re going to spend several months with a dead duck, it’s got to have a name, so I christened her Amy. Amy is now quite famous, by duck standards. After Amy came a pelican that I prepared during an expedition to Senegal then imported back to the UK.
It was about that time that I decided that I wanted to produce a book of anatomical drawings for bird artists. That ambition has stayed with me ever since then, through countless letters of rejection: from art publishers who said that my proposal was too birdy, and bird publishers who said my proposal was too arty. Only recently, 20 years on, a free-thinking bird-art publisher, Ian Langford of Langford Press, saw my drawings and said “I want you to do a book about that”!
I didn’t marry taxidermist and ornithologist Hein van Grouw so that he’d prepare skeletons for my book. Or use his extensive contacts in the European avicultural world to obtain specimens for me. But it certainly helped. As soon as we were back from our honeymoon the boiling began. Pans of stuff you wouldn’t want to look at too closely began to appear on the stove and boxes and more boxes of bones appeared in various stages of cleaning, bleaching and articulation. Gradually the bones began to turn into birds: strutting rooks, displaying lapwings and a fantastic array of pigeon varieties of seemingly impossible proportions.
The book now has a title, ‘The Unfeathered Bird’, and the drawings are piling up nicely. It’s expected to be on the shelves by August next year. It won’t make me rich, and it’s mostly a labour of love. But it’ll be worth every moment to see my dream finally come true. No two days are the same in the life of a natural history curator, but after the day’s work is finished at the museum is where the fun really begins.