The Owl That Fell from the Sky

 

 

The owl
that fell
from
the sky

Stories of
a museum
curator

brian gill

 

 

Boy, that museum was full of glass

cases. There were even more upstairs,

with deer inside them drinking at water

holes, and birds flying south for the

winter. ... The best thing, though, in that

museum was that everything always

stayed right where it was.

 

J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye

 

 

 

Introduction

Rock pools at the end of St Clair Beach in the southern city of Dunedin are fixed in my childhood memories. During a weekend family stroll, I was fossicking among the pools when a small fish leapt out of the water and stranded on the rocks at my feet. It was shaped a bit like a tropical angelfish but with a long tubular mouth. I took it home and my father, with a vague idea of what to do with the now dead fish, put it into methylated spirits in a red Elastoplast tin.

After school one day he took me—and the fish—to Otago Museum. I already knew the museum galleries from family visits but this occasion was different. We were shown through doors at the back into a large dim office lined with old books and dotted with specimen jars. I sat on the edge of a chair while a curator, who seemed very old but was probably not yet forty, closely examined the fish. Finally, he declared that it was a very interesting find, and I think he asked to have it for the collection.

Most natural history curators periodically meet children and their parents to examine an unidentified object and suggest what it might be. The curator's office, workroom and kind words can make a big impression on young minds. I hope that, in my turn, I have repaid the experience I was graciously given by the curator at Otago Museum in the early 1960s. I have surely had a small impact on children visiting Auckland Museum, if only on the day I emerged from a back door into the Bird Hall wearing a white lab coat and pushing a trolleyload of stuffed birds. A small boy gasped and tugged at his mother's skirt. “Look, Mum,” he said, “it's a scientist!”

 

 

You find a strangely shaped bone in your takeaway meal and have unsettling thoughts. What exactly have you been eating? You take the bone to your local health authorities and they refer it to the local natural history museum for a definitive answer. The expert staff who handle the museum's reference collections of real bones quickly and accurately determine the nature of the bone.

This is a small example of why natural history museums are assets to the cities that have them. In such museums, collections of natural history specimens gradually build into a vast and immensely useful resource. Certain key specimens, perfectly preserved or beautifully set up, are exhibited in public galleries to educate and inspire visitors. Most, though, serve a more mundane role. Stored in backroom “libraries”, they are, by arrangement, accessible to people who are pursuing research projects, or seeking specialised identification of unknown material.

A great strength of the collections in natural history museums is that they help us understand life on Earth in all its exuberant diversity—and understanding nature is a crucial step towards protecting it. These museums are part of a worldwide project, begun more than two centuries ago, to fully identify, describe, name and catalogue the biodiversity of our wonderful planet. So far, just under two million plants and animals have been described and named. The problem is there may be another six to fifteen million species—estimates vary wildly—waiting to be recognised and described.

The specialists, or taxonomists, trained to do this work—many employed in natural history museums—number only about five thousand around the world. Although the task is overwhelming, financial support has steadily declined in the last thirty to forty years as the science of taxonomy has suffered the stigma of being thought old-fashioned and unimaginative.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ernest Rutherford, engaging in a touch of hyperbole, once dismissed all sciences other than physics as stamp-collecting. The truth is entirely different. Specimens in a natural history museum may be superficially arranged like a stamp collection, but as the British palaeontologist Richard Fortey has said, “The catalogue [generated by taxonomists] happens to be the description of what four billion years of life's history has achieved, and its contents are a measure of the health of the planet. Isn't that enough?”

It is in the strategic interest of every country to know what plants and animals inhabit its territory. The local flora and fauna may be a rich source of naturally occurring compounds and materials of pharmaceutical and other economic interest. A revolutionary new drug can come from as common a substance as tree bark or a marine sponge. Scientists can recognise and tackle a new pest affecting agriculture, horticulture, forestry or aquaculture only if they know what organisms are already present. On top of this, high-profile species and their local habitats can attract tourists and boost the local economy.

This week I read a science news story about a protein under study in the three-toed skink
Saiphos equalis
, an Australian lizard. The protein promotes the growth of blood vessels, which help form a placenta-like structure to nourish the lizard's growing embryos and enable the retention of eggs and birth of live young. Somewhat surprisingly, this has implications for cancer in humans. Malignant tumours grow by disrupting molecular machinery for the growth of blood vessels. There is a theory that this machinery originally evolved to allow pregnancy as egg-layers evolved into live-bearers. Cancer may have been absent in our egg-laying ancestors, and the mechanics of the simple form of pregnancy in the skink is of medical interest.

It is essential for researchers in the project to know what species of lizard they are studying, and hence how it relates taxonomically to other animals. They must be confident that their study animals are not a confusing mix of similar species that could differ slightly in their proteins and blur the results. This is the underlying and enduring relevance of taxonomy in biology, and part of the vital importance of natural history collections in the modern world.

 

 

The natural history museum has its origins in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, where “cabinets of curiosities” were accumulated by aristocrats and rich merchants. Many of the treasured specimens were brought by sailors and seafarers returning from their travels to newly acquired trading posts and colonial territories. In England, one of the earliest notable cabinets was the Musaeum Tradescantianum, or Tradescant's Ark, belonging to John Tradescant the Elder, in whose honour the plant
Tradescantia
is named. Musaeum Tradescantianum opened to the public in Lambeth, South London, in 1626, with such wonders as a mermaid's hand, a piece of the True Cross, and blood that had rained down on the Isle of Wight. It was an instant success.

Visitors to private collections such as this were enchanted. In 1772 the Reverend William Sheffield, after he had visited Joseph Banks' house in London, wrote to a friend: “His house is a perfect museum; every room contains an inestimable treasure. I passed almost a whole day here in the utmost astonishment, could scarce credit my senses. ... [The third apartment] contains an almost numberless collection of animals; quadrupeds, birds, fish, amphibia, reptiles, insects and vermes, preserved in spirits…”

A member of the landed gentry, Ashton Lever, established a private museum at Alkrington Hall, his home near Manchester. The collection grew so large he opened second premises in London and charged admission. By 1784 his collection contained 28,000 items, including specimens from Captain James Cook's voyages of discovery. However, the private museums that shared their splendours with the public seldom prioritised what is today called “client-focus”. When his museum was in full swing, Lever inserted a notice in the newspapers: “This is to inform the Publick that being tired out with the insolence of the common People, who I have hitherto indulged with a sight of my museum (at Alkrington) I am now come to the resolution of refusing admittance to the lower class except they come provided with a ticket from some Gentleman or Lady of my acquaintance.”

Uncertainty always hung over the long-term survival of these private museums: a change in circumstances could all too easily threaten the continuity of the collections. In due course Lever, then Sir Ashton, found himself short of money. He held a lottery with 36,000 tickets at a guinea each, the prize being his entire museum. At the draw, only 8,000 tickets had sold but the winning one was among them. Soon after the lottery Sir Ashton was too successful drowning his sorrows and died at the Bull's Head Inn.

It was a great innovation when a wealthy physician, Sir Hans Sloane, bequeathed his large private collection—including natural history items—to the British public in return for a payment to his heirs. The necessary funds were raised by a lottery, and one of the world's first major publicly owned museums—the British Museum—was established in 1753, comprising both a collection and a building, Montagu House in Bloomsbury, to house it. In 1793 France's first republican government created another great national museum when it opened the Palais du Louvre, one-time residence of Louis XIV, the Sun King, to ordinary citizens, who could view the collections of confiscated church and royal property. The Paris natural history museum, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, was formed as a public institution in the same year.

Like hospitals, postage stamps, fire brigades and sliced bread, public museums were such a good idea they caught on everywhere. It is estimated there are now some 30,000 collecting institutions in the United States alone; together they hold around 4,800 million individual collection items. The total number of biological specimens in museums around the world has been put at between 2,500 million and 3,000 million. There are about seventy million specimens, including a million birds' eggs, just in London's Natural History Museum.

 

 

Collections lie at the heart of the natural history museum. These collections are like libraries, but instead of books there are animal and plant specimens “prepared”—preserved—for long-term storage. Different sorts of plants and animals can be prepared in multiple ways, and for each species a museum needs examples of all of them.

The form of preservation of birds that everyone understands from museum displays is the stuffed specimen, or “mount”, which a taxidermist has set in a realistic pose—wires inserted in the wings and legs allow for exact positioning—and with glass eyes. More important for research are the study-skins. These require the same skilled taxidermy but for easy storage and examination they are set out straight, like a human body laid in a coffin. No glass eyes or positioning wires are needed, and for support and ease of handling there is often a central wooden rod, which emerges from the underside at the base of the tail.

Sets of loose bones are essential for identification work, and bones of an individual joined together as an articulated skeleton are useful for exhibitions. Birds preserved whole in alcohol are needed for some purposes, and this is the standard way of preserving reptiles and amphibians. Birds' nests are also collected, as are birds' eggs with their contents blown out through a single hole in the side. And there may be spread wings, which are of special interest to bird artists and illustrators, and feather-sheets to aid in identifying individual feathers.

While a small proportion of a museum's natural history specimens appear in exhibitions, most remain in storage as reference material, to help with identification of unknown samples and to be examined, measured and recorded by students and scholars, who will use the data in all kinds of biological research studies. Like books on a library shelf, the specimens are arranged by species, like with like, and in a known and predictable taxonomic order, for easy retrieval. There is usually a catalogue or index, often electronic, from which to find specimens of a particular kind or from a particular place or region. Every bird must be marked with a registration number, which links to a record of where, when and by whom it was collected. For the specimens to retain their scientific and historic worth these numbers and background details must be preserved decade after decade.