I've been helping finish an on-line database of the bird specimens at
the Ohio State University Museum conducted by volunteers of the Ohio
Ornithological Society. This collection, jointly owned by the Ohio
Historical Society, has fewer than 18,000 bird skins, making it only the
third largest in the state I believe, after collections in Cleveland and
Cincinnati, but it probably has the largest number of specimens of
historical interest. When these collections finish their electronic
catalogs, we'll be able to see Ohio's ornithological history much more
clearly. Here, work on OSU's bird egg collection will come next; I am
told it ranks among the 20 largest in the country.
        I had a thrill yesterday when Marcia Brehmer and I catalogued some
study skins: my only contribution to the Museum. Back in 1998, I was
helping lead a fall trip to Lake Erie for the Columbus Avid Birders
group. Back in those days, the Lorain Harbor impoundment was a hot spot
for shorebirds, gulls, and terns during migration. Later filled with
dredge spoil, it's become a hot spot for Phragmites and smartweed.
Anyway, as we walked in the impoundment I came across a not-so-fresh
corpse of a juvenile parasitic jaeger. It was easy to ID in the hand: we
could clearly see the bill structure and the markings on the folded
primaries. I stuffed it in a plastic bag, Gina Buckey schlepped it home
in her cooler, and Dave Horn took it over to the Museum. Almost a decade
later I found it, transformed into a beautiful stuffed study skin from
preparator Brad Falkinburg.
        If you want to learn about jaegers, looking at them in the hand is a
big help. We also added a pomarine jaeger to the collection; this was
another juvenile found dead on a downtown street in Youngstown about the
same time, a reminder that many southbound jaegers take an overland
route through Ohio. All told, we added more than thirty Falkinburg
specimens to the collection, all of them stunners.
        We all learn about birds through specimens, even if only because they
are essential to illustrators of field guides. It is possible to
short-cut this route to experience by visiting a local museum. You
generally can't just walk in, but you can make an appointment if you
have a research need, or visit during public events. If you volunteer
your help you'll see a lot more. At Bowling Green State University any
visitor can look at thousands of mounted birds in glass cases on every
floor of the biology building, an impressive display reminiscent of
bygone days.
        The dribble of money for biology in university settings increasingly
goes to lab-based molecular studies. Students don't spend as much time
as they once did out in the field, or in the trays at a museum. I
imagine you could earn a PhD nowadays based on studies of a bird species
you couldn't even recognize in the field. You can go to biology symposia
whose dozens of high-powered presentations don't mention organisms at all.
        Increased interest among us non-academic types has helped preserve some
of ornithology's established (though outmoded) methods. Few
professionals are interested in ornithological history, taxidermy, or
certain field techniques, for example. So it's especially encouraging
that some museum curators have been getting amateurs involved in
preparing specimens. Officials at the Cincinnati Museum Center, the
Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and now the Ohio State University
Museum of Biological Diversity have programs to teach interested
amateurs the art of preparing bird specimens. If you're interested, get
in touch.
        One recent practical example is the ivory-billed woodpecker
controversy. See recent posts to ID Frontiers at
http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/FRID.html#1180711564 . These days
there's naturally a lot of interest in what ivory-bills look like in
life. Audubon's descriptions and paintings, for example, are helpful,
but we also possess over 400 museum specimens of real ivory-billed
woodpeckers. There we can see that pileateds and ivory-bills are pretty
much the same size overall--despite all the journalistic twaddle we hear
about the astonishing size of the latter. What about their wingspans?
Very few specimens are preserved with spread wings, so recently some
have been relaxed by curators, and it seems the wingspans are not much
different either; wing shape may be a more important difference.  This
kind of first-hand information is available only from specimens, and it
has a lot of relevance in evaluating claimed sightings of ivory-billed
woodpeckers.
Enough, or perhaps more than enough, for now,
Bill Whan





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