The Owl That Fell from the Sky (3 page)

Surely one of the most intrepid museum ornithologists was Tom Harrisson, curator of the Sarawak Museum from 1947, and a keen ethnologist and archaeologist. Towards the end of the Second World War, Harrisson was parachuted into Borneo as part of a reconnaissance unit. There he helped rescue downed British airmen. He also organised local dayak tribes against the occupying Japanese—and again in the early 1960s against communist insurgents in the Brunei Revolt.
In 2011, collecting data from skins of long-tailed cuckoos in The Natural History Museum's collection in Britain, I handled a cuckoo that Harrisson had collected in Vanuatu in 1934.

War service interrupted the directorship of Auckland Museum by Gilbert Archey (1890–1974). Archey had already served in France during the First World War, but he joined the fray again as a lieutenant colonel in the British Military Administration in Malaya until 1947. Archey amassed much of Auckland Museum's large moa-bone collection and published a major study of moa in 1941, for which he was awarded a science doctorate by the University of New Zealand.

 

 

I sometimes need to consult a particular set of old books. Their dull brown spines and shabby appearance are deceptive: at the end of each volume there are exquisite hand-coloured lithographs of birds, and the current monetary value of the set is in the six figures. This twenty-seven-volume
Catalogue of the Birds in the British Museum
was produced between 1874 and 1898 and is still in use for bird nomenclature. A major contributor was Richard Bowdler Sharpe (1847–1909), who was for thirty-seven years curator of birds at the British Museum (Natural History). Sharpe had ten daughters and several worked for publishers, adding colours by hand to lithographs, perhaps to some of those that illustrated their father's prestigious books. The New Zealand fernbirds, small brown swampland songbirds, are in the genus
Bowdleria
named in honour of Sharpe. Elsewhere in the South Pacific he is remembered in the name of the Samoan triller
Lalage sharpei
.

 

 

Among the personality traits of the successful curator is the passion to collect. The desire to extend collections, fill in gaps and make holdings bigger, better and more complete is an underlying requirement of the job. But such collecting can get out of hand. Martin Hinton (1883–1961), a mammalogist at the British Museum (Natural History), was described by contemporaries as having the innate habits of a squirrel. He smoked an ounce of tobacco a day from the age of seventeen and never threw away a tobacco tin. After he died, more than 10,000 tobacco tins were removed from his rooms, as was more than a tonne of paper, including receipts, chequebook stubs, used envelopes and notices, all mixed up and some going back over sixty years.

Squirrel-like habits in a mammalogist show the danger curators run of becoming like the things they study. Dave Simmons, former ethnologist at Auckland Museum, once told me that as he grew older and his face more lined, his wife accused him of looking more and more like a Māori carving. Could it be that I myself sometimes chatter too quickly and move too jerkily, like a bird? If so, I hope a friend will tell me.

Improving and developing collections for the long haul requires tenacity, but determination was perhaps a little misdirected in George Albert Boulenger (1858–1937), an expert on reptiles and amphibians at the British Museum (Natural History). Boulenger was so angered and saddened by the German invasion of his native Belgium that he refused to read any German publications issued after 1914.

This famed herpetologist published a nine-volume catalogue of the amphibians and reptiles in the museum's collection of nearly 8,500 species. He holds the record for having described more currently recognised species of reptiles than anyone else—some 570. He described and named at least three New Zealand skinks that still bear his original names; among them is the endangered chevron skink
Oligosoma homalonotum
.

Peter Whitehead (1930–1992), an ichthyologist at the British Museum (Natural History), had interests beyond his immediate collection of fishes. His career coincided with an era when administrative tasks previously done by senior scientists were increasingly taken over by a new breed of museum managers. For many years Whitehead worked on the draft of a satirical novel about events behind the scenes in the running of the museum. He is said to have abandoned the novel when actual events at the museum became more ludicrous than those he had invented.

 

 

Chronic underfunding has been an enduring problem for many natural history collections. In recent decades financial crises have seen closures of some collecting institutions, particularly small ones such as university museums. Bigger museums have also suffered. In the early 1990s about a sixth of the scientific staff at the Natural History Museum in London was axed. Such disruptions, combined with the ageing workforce of taxonomists and the failure of universities and museums to train and employ enough new ones, mean we may never accomplish the fundamental cataloguing needed for a proper understanding of the world's biodiversity.

Yet natural history museums, and natural history galleries within general museums, remain enormously alluring to the public. Sharks, dinosaurs, giant squids, spiders and other venomous creatures, fossils and mounted birds and mammals seem of perennial interest. No large general museum in New Zealand would be complete without displays of moa and kiwi. Similarly, most other countries have popular and emblematic animals that their museums must display.

Today there are about 500,000 bird specimens (study-skins and all other categories) in Australian and New Zealand museums, and at least four million bird study-skins in the museums of Europe. Linked together—in principle, if not physically—collections of different museums form a major collective asset for biological research. Rapid progress is being made in digitising the collecting details and images of natural history specimens around the world, with the ultimate aim of making all this material accessible on the worldwide web.

Already hundreds of research projects have used the bird specimens in New Zealand museums. Most significantly, the collections were studied by researchers to record measurements and write plumage descriptions for the
Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds
, researched over twenty years and published in seven volumes from 1990 to 2006. This joint venture of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists' Union and Oxford University Press summarises all that is known about the birds of the region. It is our most important bird book in a hundred years.

The bigger a museum's natural history collections and the more numerous its scientific experts, the greater are its opportunities to serve humanity. This point is illustrated by two examples from the Natural History Museum, London. The first involves poisonous snakes. Doctors in north-east Nigeria used to treat people bitten by carpet vipers with a serum produced using local snakes. When this supply ceased, they changed to antitoxin from Iranian carpet vipers but many snake-bite victims died. Scientists were able to turn to the museum's collection to examine hundreds of specimens of carpet vipers collected from Africa to Sri Lanka over one hundred years. They quickly (and cheaply) showed that Iranian and Nigerian carpet vipers were different species. The museum collections provided a rational explanation for the failure of the serum, and the basis from which to seek a solution.

The second example concerns an entomology curator, Martin Hall. Hall, who had specialised knowledge of flies with flesh-eating maggots, worked among the roughly twenty-eight million insect specimens held at the museum. In Libya in the late 1980s, he discovered and identified an accidentally established population of the New World screwworm fly. Realising this damaging insect could spread across Africa and destroy cattle and wildlife, Hall raised maggots in his hotel room to help convince local officials to take action. The infestation was eventually eradicated in an expensive United Nations programme that involved the release of millions of sterile male flies reared in a laboratory. The museum had been instrumental in helping save Africa from a potential plague.

 

 

Museum bones have recently solved the mystery of New Zealand's large extinct flightless birds, the giant moa. For decades it was thought there were three species, large, medium-sized and small, all present in both North and South Islands. They were told apart not by unique characters, such as different bone shapes, but by average size. This was always a concern, for how could you identify a bone that fell in the region of overlap?

To help sort out the taxonomy of moa, scientists turned to DNA. They developed ever better techniques to recover ancient DNA fragments from old moa bones, mostly those in the collections of the four main New Zealand museums that had been collecting moa bones for over a century. The DNA results, published in 2003 in the British science journal
Nature
, showed there were two species of giant moa, not three, and instead of overlapping in distribution they occupied mutually exclusive areas—one in the North Island and one in the South. The DNA also permitted sexing of the giant moa bones. It transpired that the larger bones were from females, and the size differences were extreme, with females two to three times bigger than males. Scientists had been misinterpreting giant moa bones for 150 years.