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 ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. 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