Strictly speaking, this isn’t a Field Note. It’s about the living world, but a piece enclosed in a plexiglass box. And it comes from the end of 2020—a time when we all ached with the question of how to be both living and enclosed.
In the natural world, how to persist—how, even, to improve—in the face of limits and uncertainty can be a punishing question. By the ninth month of pandemic life I am poised to admire any strategy that addresses it, having faced and mainly failed to answer it myself.
In late 2020 I’m spending mornings masked, working in a lab in the University of Montana Zoological Museum. The museum houses research collections of natural artifacts like skins and skeletons. But behind the scenes museum staff tend a single living collection: a colony of dermestid beetles, the meticulous scavengers that scour flesh from bones…
