Le Musée de la Chasse et la Nature

Pa Swope and Colleen have been in town this past week, so we've been mostly busy hanging out with them. They have gamely accompanied us on several walking and eating adventures, to be continued tomorrow at the Bastille outdoor market. We haven't done a full post on the market yet, but someday we will. For now I will simply mention, probably for the tenth time, that it is amazing, full of products that are difficult, impossible, or illegal to obtain in the States, and packed with people.

Anyway, despite the joy of our face to face presence, today my father delicately noted that we have not updated our blog recently, hinting that our readership might be disappointed. Unfortunately we haven't taken many pictures this week, so I don't have anything very recent to offer. But digging into the photo archives, I did turn up some pictures from a post we intended to write and forgot, on the Museum of the Hunt and Nature.

This is probably one of our favorite museums in Paris right now. Most of it is organized around the animals involved in the hunt, both the targets (like wild boar, wolves, deer) and the helpers (falcons, dogs). For each one, there's a little cabinet with tons of little drawers. You pull them out and find paw prints, a scat model, a fable from La Fontaine involving that animal, drawings, poems and cartoons. Looking into an eyepiece, you get a 3-D image of the animal's habitat. Around these smaller displays, you'll find stuffed specimens of the animal, the weapons used to hunt them, and sculptures or paintings of them both from centuries ago and from the modern day. We found the presentation to be incredibly fun and engaging.

Lia checks out the wolf cabinet.

Baby boar

Highly decorated falcon

The owl room kinda freaks me out, honestly

There are also rooms full of very wicked-looking hunting weapons: crossbows, spears, guns, swords, daggers, everything. If it can kill an animal, it's probably there.

There's taxidermy throughout the building, including a giant hall covered with the mounted heads of all kinds of hoofed creatures, boars, lions, tigers, and bears, and surrounding many smaller beasts. And sometimes it turns up in unexpected places.

 Fox taking a permanent nap

And here we are in the room with the giant polar bear.