The Owl That Fell from the Sky Read online

  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 swin
g, 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.

  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 th
e 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.