Horace Young, Clarence Albrecht, Homer Dill, and Charles Corwin spent five weeks on Laysan Island in 1911. This year, in honor of the UI's sesquicentennial, approvals have been received for a major redesign of Bird Hall. Visitors to the museum can expect to see the results by the end of 1997.

As the albatross flies, Laysan Island lies nearly 5,000 miles from Iowa City, 800 miles west of Honolulu. Remote, difficult to reach, little more than a speck of sand and coral in the vast Pacific, Laysan is even harder to set foot upon due to its protected status as a national wildlife refuge.

Nonetheless, countless University of Iowa students have looked out over Laysan's low dunes and salty lagoon. They've marveled at its seemingly endless rookery of albatrosses, its man-o'-war birds with their fierce beaks and puffed red breasts, and the clouds of sooty-backed terns swirling above its sands.

The journey to Iowa's own Laysan requires a trip no more arduous than an elevator ride to the third floor of Macbride Hall and a short walk up a sloping ramp through a hallway of Honduran mahogany. Under the low ceiling stands the exhibit that's fascinated museum visitors for the past 82 years: the Laysan Island Cyclorama.

The cyclorama opened following class day exercises on June 15, 1914, and it remains a favorite among the 60,000 people who visit Macbride Hall each year. The cyclorama has aged remarkably well, save for a curled wax leaf or two, but its history and significance grow dimmer in the public memory with each passing year. The generations of alumni who knew Professor Homer R. Dill (1878-1964) still refer to "Dill's Gooneybirds" with amused pride and affection, but far more visitors today speak vaguely of "that bird room upstairs."

George Schrimper, who has directed Iowa's Museum of Natural History since 1971, is quick to set the record straight. "It's impossible to overestimate the magnitude of [curator] Charles Nutting and [taxidermist] Homer Dill's achievement in the Laysan Island Cyclorama," he says. "It was a leading-edge exhibition that helped popularize natural history museums across the United States and changed the style of exhibit design. I still marvel that Nutting and Dill were bold enough to undertake this project and capable enough to realize it so brilliantly."

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were heady days for Iowa's natural history museum. Expeditions were the rage in scientific circles, and Iowa sent faculty and student naturalists to remote corners of the hemisphere, from the Canadian Arctic to collect musk oxen to the Bahamas to study marine invertebrates. Charles C. Nutting, the museum's curator, was himself a widely traveled, well-respected scientist. Nutting published frequently in the most scholarly of journals, yet he was also an entertaining public speaker whose travel slide lectures captivated Iowa City audiences.

In 1902, Nutting sailed to Laysan aboard the aptly named USS Albatross as part of an expedition to the new Hawaiian territories. Although earlier ornithologists had reported the phenomenal numbers of birds on Laysan, Nutting was still unprepared for the sight of literally millions of birds on and above its three and one-half square miles. Later, he wrote that as ". . . day after day the wonder oft it grew and deepened, the writer found constantly recurring and intensifying the great desire to have it reproduced as a masterpiece of art for the benefit of the State University. . . ."

The Laysan rail is one of the most interesting birds found on the island. Notwithstanding its inability to fly, it has no trouble in evading its pursuers. It runs and dodges from one grass tussock to another, down a petrel hole and out again before one can locate it. One of the most laughable things imaginable is a man pursuing one of these bits of bird life, net in hand, continually dropping waist-deep down among the burrowing petrels. —Homer Dill

On his return to Iowa, Nutting immediately began drumming up support for a lifelike exhibit of specimens from Laysan. At the same time he was actively campaigning for a new natural science building. Once the cornerstone of the Natural Science Building (renamed Macbride Hall in 1934) was laid in 1904, Nutting focused his energies wholeheartedly on raising money and interest for the Laysan exhibit, which he hoped would establish the museum as an institution of national stature.

The cyclorama Nutting proposed was nearly without precedent. The "curatorial" exhibit style—with specimens mounted on polished wooden plaques—still predominated in natural history displays. Realistic dioramas were a fairly new art form, and cycloramas were virtually unknown, save for two large murals-in-the-round depicting the battles of Gettysburg and Atlanta. Nutting was convinced, however, that Laysan, as a small island with a dense bird population, was the perfect subject for cyclorama treatment.

Fund-raising for the exhibit began with the class gifts of 1907, '08, and '09, and in January 1909 Nutting presented his "Laysan Island Scheme" in the Iowa Alumnus [the name of the alumni magazine from 1904 to 1927], concluding with an appeal for funds.

Private donations rolled in. On March 10, 1909, Professor William Bryan, of Honolulu, visited Iowa City to present a talk entitled "Fire Fountains: a Visit to the famous Volcano Kilauea." He donated the gate to the Laysan scheme. That same evening the football team drew a huge crowd when it presented its farce, "A Fake Play for a Touchdown." They, too, turned the night's proceeds over to the Laysan project.

By 1910, Nutting had raised enough money for a Laysan expedition. He took a leave of absence to make the arrangements for the joint venture between the University of Iowa, the Field Museum of Chicago, and the U.S. Biological Survey. Passage for the expedition was arranged on the revenue cutter Thetis, which regularly patrolled the Leeward Islands. In return, the party would furnish study skins to the Biological Survey. The Field Museum allowed its best painter, Charles Corwin, to join the expedition in return for its own set of Laysan bird skins.

But Nutting had no intention of sharing his idea for the cyclorama. He made officials from both the Biological Survey and the Field Museum promise not to build Laysan exhibits of their own. This might be a joint expedition, but Iowa would have the only Laysan Island Cyclorama.

President Theodore Roosevelt had declared Laysan and the other Leeward Islands of the Hawaiian chain a national wildlife refuge in 1909. In that same year, the crew of the Thetis had interrupted a gruesome slaughter of the island's bird life and apprehended 23 Japanese feather hunters. Nutting requested an escort of Marines to defend Laysan and the expedition party against the poachers' return. The survey responded by deputizing the entire party as temporary wardens at a salary of $1 per month, and by furnishing an American flag to be flown over the island as a deterrent. The survey also requested a scientific report be made by the party with recommendations for the island's future management.

Nutting entrusted the expedition to Professor Homer Dill, a rising star in exhibit design and taxidermy. Dill had grown up in Maine and studied in New York under the famous William Temple Hornaday (a native Iowan who donated much of his extensive taxidermy collection to the UI). Accompanying Dill and Charles Corwin on the expedition were two SUI students, Horace Young and C.J. Albrecht. Professor Bryan, of "Fire Fountains" fame, was to join the group in Honolulu.

On April 5, 1911, the party left San Francisco on a U.S. army transport bound for Hawaii. More than a fortnight later, the expedition arrived at Laysan island.

Dill, Corwin, Young, Albrecht, and Bryan found Laysan much changed from the near-pristine seabird nursery Nutting had seen nine years earlier. The feather hunters had cut the wings off thousands of albatrosses, leaving bones and carcasses in their wake. Countless uncured wings drew immense clouds of flies to a shed where they lay rotting. Fortunately, the devastation wrought by the poachers extended only a few hundred yards around the buildings. Elsewhere, bird life flourished.

The party also saw thousands of rabbits, descendents of a few introduced by Max Sclemmer, who had lived with his family on Laysan for 15 years while he managed guano mining operations. Schlemmer left the island in 1905, but his rabbits multiplied at will and began eating every last scrap of greenery on the island.

Amid the piles of albatross wings and the buzzing of flies, the party set to work collecting specimens, painting sketches of the island environment, making molds, photographing the scene, and taking meticulous notes. The Schlemmer house had been left in shambles by the feather hunters, so the expedition settled into one of the outbuildings.

With bird life on the island already decimated, Dill was concerned that he do no more damage than was absolutely necessary, so he collected birds found dead of natural causes in the rookeries if he could. While tasty rails and teal lived on the island, Dill insisted the crew eat only the birds they planned to mount—mostly terns and albatrosses. The unenviable job of preparing them for the table fell to expedition cook Young.

Perhaps the hardships of life on the island exacerbated tensions between Dill and Bryan. The two feuded, and Bryan left the island after a week when the Thetis stopped by to pick up the party's mail. The reasons for their quarrel are lost to us today.

All told, Dill and his group spent five weeks on the island, collecting 398 birds to be divided among the Field Museum, the Biological Survey, and the university.

Then began the three-year task of recreating Laysan Island on the third floor of Iowa's Natural Science Building.

"Sometimes I think Dill must have been almost overwhelmed by the task Nutting had set for him," Schrimper says. "There was no precedent anywhere for this type of exhibit and he designed it all by himself." Today, such ambitious projects are often subcontracted to diorama specialists working in a long-established field. But Dill had no model to go by. He virtually invented a style of exhibit with only his students to help him.

Dill and his students cast 50,000 wax leaves for the cyclorama. They used 16 barrels of plaster of Paris to create the island's rocky shoreline. They poured glycerine to make a lifelike pool of water, working hard to integrate the foreground with Corwin's beautifully realistic background oils. Finally, they filled the space with 106 mounted birds.

George Schrimper points out that while crowding among the birds on the island is natural, Dill was extremely careful to get the proximities between mounted birds exactly as he'd noted them on Laysan. Even by today's diorama standards, the Laysan Island Cyclorama remains an exceptionally realistic display.

When the cyclorama opened in 1914, the long-anticipated results of Dill's painstaking research and artistry won raves. Museums across the country took note of Iowa's cyclorama and planned habitat dioramas of their own.

The Laysan Island Cyclorama has changed very little since the day it opened. "Every five or ten years we have to go in and make a little repair here or there," says Schrimper. "We step very carefully when we do."

Schrimper did replace the glycerine pool—which attracted water and dirt—with polyester resin, and the original incandescent lights have been changed to filtered fluorescents. In 1973, a taped narration featuring bird sounds from the island and the voice of zoology professor Richard Bovbjerg added a dimension of sound to the exhibit. In 1994, the Honduran mahogany woodwork was refinished and the small case of photos from the expedition was refurbished.

That work now completed, the cyclorama stands poised to delight and educate visitors over the next 82 years and beyond. In fact, a close look at the exhibit reveals a cautionary tale for future visitors. Amid the nesting albatrosses and flying terns, the careful viewer will see five smaller species: the Laysan rail, Laysan teal, Laysan honeycreeper, Laysan finch, and Laysan millerbird. Three are extinct today.

In his report to the Biological Survey, Dill warned that Laysan's rabbits must be eradicated before they defoliated the island. Following Dill's recommendations, expeditions (armed with poison and .22 rifles) went to the island in 1912 and 1923. Although the rabbits were eventually exterminated, the damage had already been done; they had destroyed the habitat of five birds unique to the island. Miraculously, the Laysan teal and finch recovered as plants returned to the island, but it was too late for the millerbird, the honeycreeper, and the Laysan rail.

We live in an era of increasingly rapid extinctions, many of them the result of our own heavy tread on the planet. The Laysan Island Cyclorama stands as a reminder of the vulnerability of wild places. Charles Nutting may have envisioned a cutting-edge exhibit for his museum, but perhaps not even he could have imagined that the cyclorama would prove even more timely 82 years after it opened than it did on that graduation day in 1914.

Photos courtesy of UI Museum of Natural History