With the spring migration winding down, some folks might be more
interested in learning about birds by searching the websites of natural
history museums. Some institutions offer photos of specimens, and of
course data about dates, place of collection, etc.
        Local birders in Columbus did most of the basic data entry for the OSU
Museum collections of tetrapods, including birds. After vetting, these
data have been made public on the Web at the idigbio site. To have a
look at the birds, I recommend
https://www.idigbio.org/portal/recordsets/3b9ecf1e-3c04-4d8b-84cd-9ae48e70e13a
  . You can search and scroll down through data on 26,079 OSUM bird
specimens. Other collections we helped to catalog include those for
amphibians, reptiles, and mammals; data for insects and fish were
assembled earlier by others and are listed in the catalog.
        The Cincinnati Museum Center bird collection is available on this site
at
https://www.idigbio.org/portal/recordsets/65c412fe-1f9f-4f10-aa75-9845b66ef235
. I can't find listings for any from the Cleveland Museum of Natural
History. I hope this collection will be available eventually, as it,
like Cincinnati's, is larger than OSU's.
        If some readers consider this merely nerdy, I offer this anecdote. It
is quite possible to find rare birds in these lists of specimens. I, in
fact, found two new North American species in the OSU collection; an
article about them with photos will appear in Birding magazine soon. I
know there are treasures in the Cincinnati and Cleveland museums: the
Cinci collections include, for example, specimens from Audubon himself
(he worked in the Museum for a while), and a lot of curious old things.
Happy birding in these resources!
Bill Whan
Columbus

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