The Owl That Fell from the Sky (2 page)

Fully documented natural history specimens are called “voucher specimens”. Each provides a documentary record of biological occurrence and distribution that is superior to a mere literature record because the specimen is present and its identity can be checked and reconsidered in the future. As natural history collections grow they become massive directories of the animals and plants that have lived in different areas at different times, and may hold the key to how the characteristics and distributions of species have varied with place and changed with time.

Most researchers who visit collections of vertebrates—animals with backbones—aim to record standard measurements of a particular species. These are usually analysed for differences between the sexes, or between populations from different regions. Also looked at will be shape (of bones, for example), number (feathers, scales, et cetera) and colour or pattern (feathers, eggs, et cetera). Recently there has been a surge of interest in using spectrophotometers—devices that measure light intensity and absorption—to measure colour attributes of birds' plumage and eggshells for studies of ecology and evolution.

Increasingly, researchers request destructive sampling to pursue biomolecular studies. Curators often grant these requests, but with strict limits and controls. Such studies have looked at heavy-metal contamination—for example, the incidence of mercury in the feathers of oceanic seabirds—and have carbon-dated fossil bones and assessed stable isotopes for the light they cast on ecological attributes such as diet. However, most destructive sampling is for analysis of DNA, which gives insights into the taxonomic identity, relatedness and sex of individuals, and the genetic variability of populations.

New Zealand was originally home to about 400 species of birds. A bird has nearly 130 different bones in its body, so for any single unidentified bird bone in New Zealand there are around 50,000 possibilities. A comprehensive collection of bird bones is, therefore, essential for identification: no book or website can yet substitute effectively for the real things. A museum's bone collection, time-consuming and labour-intensive to acquire and prepare, stands ready to help police, customs, agricultural quarantine authorities and health agencies with enquiries relating to poaching, smuggling, food complaints and other forensic issues. Bone collections are also a major resource for research projects in zoology, palaeontology and archaeology.

Similar research and identification take place daily in the diverse collections of natural history museums. The stories in this book are about birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Other major biological groups covered by most large museum collections are higher plants, lower plants (for example, mosses, lichens, seaweeds), whales, fishes, crustaceans, insects, spiders, myriapods (centipedes and millepedes), molluscs, and polychaetes, a major group of worms.

Many other less well-known groups of organisms, including sponges, bryozoans (seaweed-like animals), coelenterates (for example, jellyfish), brachiopods (lamp-shells), echinoderms (for example, starfish) and tunicates (sea-squirts), are also represented, as are rocks, minerals and fossils.

 

 

Nature conservation requires a clear understanding of biodiversity. Properly documenting the world's biodiversity needs large museum collections of voucher specimens, yet some nature-lovers recoil from, in particular, museum bird collections, assuming they represent a shameful carnage of birds. In fact, animals killed for museums are usually a drop in the bucket compared to natural attrition. It is estimated that around the world more than a million birds die every day in collisions with cars, and another million are killed by household cats. In the United States alone as many as 100 million birds die each year by flying into windows. Such losses are usually easily made up by birds' prolific breeding. It has been calculated that the birds currently collected for all North American natural history museums combined are equivalent to the number that would be killed in the same period by just fifteen medium-sized bird-eating hawks. Increasingly, too, many museums get some or all of their new bird specimens by salvage from those killed accidentally.

When confronted by dozens of study-skins of a common bird on a tray, a person will often ask why so many specimens are needed. The answer lies in the variability of individuals with age, stage of growth, sex, colour-form, season, geographical location, decade, century, and also in random individual ways. A biologist cannot characterise a species by examination of just a few birds: to calculate average measurements and look for tendencies and trends they need representative series of specimens. In this way, natural history collections underpin biology, and support studies of evolution, speciation (the formation of species), biogeography (the distribution of organisms), morphology (the study of shape and form), and conservation.

Much collection-building by natural history curators is general, rather than directed towards any immediate need. As long as the collections are representative, the curators have faith that such specimens will prove indispensable to future users, often in ways we cannot now imagine. Curators a century ago had no idea how useful some of their specimens would be when later researchers subjected them to electron microscopy, X-rays, CT scans, and analyses of isotopes and DNA.

In the 1800s, as part of its general collecting, the British Museum seized all opportunities to acquire specimens of
Sphenodon punctatus
, a reptile found only in New Zealand. In 1842 a curator, John Edward Gray, used some of the earliest material to describe and name the animal, assuming from its appearance that it was a kind of lizard. A subsequent curator, Albert Günther, who joined the museum in 1857, re-examined the same specimens and made his most important scientific discovery—that the tuatara, as Māori called it, was not a lizard at all, but the lone survivor of an order of reptiles that had died out everywhere else in the world at least sixty million years ago.

Using other specimens, one of which is now at Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, the ornithologist Walter Buller in 1877 described the distinctive tuatara from North Brother Island in Cook Strait as a new species and named it
S. guntheri
in Günther's honour. In the 1980s the London specimens contributed to a study of the musculature of primitive reptiles, and helped an investigation that reconfirmed there are indeed two species of tuatara. In 2000, Richard Jakob-Hoff, a veterinarian at Auckland Zoo, familiarised himself with tuatara jawbones in Auckland Museum's collection before operating on a captive tuatara with a jaw abscess. These examples show how taxpayers, ratepayers and donors who made possible the acquisition and storage of tuatara specimens in London, Christchurch and Auckland over many decades were supporting science for present and future generations.

 

 

As important as collections are, their usefulness would be severely limited without staff with the specialised knowledge and experience to understand and interpret the specimens. Continuity in curatorial care is important, so that when a curator leaves the knowledge about his or her collection can be readily taken up by a successor. There are few museum circumstances more tragic than a once active collection no longer having a curator.

Curators have three main roles. First, we develop, record, maintain and manage the collections, directly or indirectly. Second, we make the collections and associated documentation accessible to the public by putting forward objects and information for exhibitions and displays, helping visiting researchers, answering public enquiries, and participating in the museum's educational and outreach programmes.

Third, we conduct our own research. Most educational activities—including secondary schooling, undergraduate tertiary teaching, non-fiction book publishing, broadcasting of television documentaries, and the mounting of museum displays—largely involve the communication and recycling of existing knowledge. Museums, through the research of their curators and visiting scholars, are in that select group of scholarly institutions that generate new knowledge.

This important principle was touched on in the will of the British philanthropist James Smithson, whose bequest to found an establishment at Washington, D.C. led to the formation of the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian was intended to not just communicate information, but generate new insights through research on its collections and by its curators. In the words of Smithson's will, it was to be an establishment “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men”.

Curators often serve long periods with the same collection as they delve deeper into its delights and mysteries. At Auckland Museum, Thomas Cheeseman, the director and botanist, served forty-nine years and his successor Gilbert Archey, director, zoologist and ethnologist, forty. In my time, at least four curatorial colleagues have left after serving twenty to thirty years. The legacies of these long careers are the curators' numerous publications, the exhibitions to which they have contributed, the public talks and media interviews they have given, and the arrangement, growth and recording of the museum collections themselves.

Ron Scarlett (1911–2002) spent some fifty years at Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, continuing in a voluntary capacity after his retirement until he was ninety. However, his long academic career had a shaky start. An opportunity to attend university presented itself when Ron was twenty-six. He cycled from his home on the West Coast across the Southern Alps to Christchurch to enrol for a Bachelor of Arts, only to have his studies interrupted by the Second World War. He was unsuccessful in volunteering for ambulance duty and was interned at Hautu Detention Camp for conscientious objectors. In 1952 he got work at Canterbury Museum, where he became the osteologist, an anatomist skilled in the structure and function of bones. His work identifying bird bones over many decades greatly helped archaeologists whose digs were uncovering new details of Māori settlement of New Zealand.

Perhaps New Zealand's best-known bird curator, and the leading ornithologist of his generation, was Robert Alexander Falla (1901–79). As a young man, Falla secured a position as assistant zoologist on Douglas Mawson's British, Australian, New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition during the summers of 1929 to 1930 and 1930 to 1931. He was then appointed ornithologist at Auckland Museum, one of that institution's first specialist curators. In 1937 he became director at Canterbury Museum, and in 1947 moved to Wellington to take up the directorship of the Dominion Museum. Falla popularised ornithology through frequent public lectures and radio broadcasts, and was a firm advocate for conservation. He was also renowned for his puns, quipping after a field trip that had failed to find spotless crakes at a likely location that at least they had seen some beautiful crakeless spots.

The bird collections of the National Museum of New Zealand were greatly enhanced and professionalised by the skill and dedication of Fred Kinsky (1911–99), who joined the museum as a clerk in 1955 and retired as curator of birds in 1976. Kinsky was a Czech aristocrat who became a political refugee and immigrated to New Zealand after the communist takeover of his country in 1948. He was by habit a night person, frequently working at the museum or at home into the early hours of the morning. He seldom arrived at work before ten in the morning, which he referred to as dawn. For a time, a new director attempted to get him to start work at eight-thirty but the results were unproductive and he was allowed to revert to his natural rhythm.

One of the world's great bird curators was Ernst Mayr (1904–2005). A German with a passion for natural history, Mayr started his museum career in 1926 as an assistant at the natural history museum in Berlin. Success with field work in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands led to his appointment as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1931, and later at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His work with birds collected from islands across the Pacific by the Whitney South Sea Expedition led to new insights into birds' evolution: he was at the forefront of the twentieth-century reinterpretation and refinement of Darwin's original ideas.