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Volume 123A — Supplement. 2003

Why Museums Matter:

Avian Archives in an Age of Extinction
Edited by Nigel Collar, Clem Fisher & Chris Feare

3™¢ European Symposium of Bird Curators

Following the first two European conferences on bird collections, in Tring in 1999 and
in Bonn in 2001, the 3rd Conference will be held in the National Museum of Natural
History in Leiden, the Netherlands, from Friday 10 - Sunday 12 October 2003.

The scientific programme will be organised by the Bird Department of the National
Museum of Natural History, starting early 2003. Ideas and suggestions for the scien-
tific programme are welcome: Riese LESH these to Dr. René W.R.J. Dekker at
dekker @naturalis.nnm.nl

The logistics of the conference will be organised by the Leids Congres Bureau (LCB).
The LCB will be responsible for conference registration, hotel reservations, mailings,
etc., and will contact you by email early 2003.The conference will take place in the
Auditorium of the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden, which is only a 5
minutes walk from the Leiden central railway station. Your accommodation may be
able to be arranged within walking distance. Leiden can be reached by train from
Schiphol airport in only 15 minutes.

The conference fee, which includes registration, documentation, lunch (2), tea and
coffee (but not dinner and hotel reservations), will be approximately 175-200 Euro.

Programme: Friday 10 October 2003 - afternoon: arrival and registration; Saturday 11
and Sunday 12 October 2003 - lectures and panel discussions.

The NEW bird collection is open for study during the week, but NOT on Saturday and
Sunday during the conference.

If you would like to receive future mailings about the 3rd European Conference on
Bird Collections in October 2003 in Leiden, please send an email to
dekker @naturalis.nnm.nl

Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

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Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Bulletin of the
BRITISH ORNITHOLOGISTS’ CLUB

Vol. 123A

MAY 0 1 2003
LIBRARIES
Why Museums Matter:
Avian Archives in an
Age of Extinction

Papers from a conference of this title
held at Green Park, Aston Clinton, and
workshops at the Natural History Museum,
Tring, 12-15 November 1999

Edited by
Nigel J Collar, Clemency T Fisher
and Chris J Feare

2 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Phillip Alexander Clancey

The publication of these conference proceedings as a supplement to the Bulletin of
the British Ornithologists’ Club has been made possible by a generous legacy to the
Club by the late Dr Phillip Clancey. Dr Clancey contributed specimens to and used
museums extensively during his studies on the taxonomy of African birds (see his
Obituary — Bull. B.O.C. 121: 217-218 (2001)) and wished his legacy to be used to
support the Bulletin, in which he published many of his findings.

It seems fitting that Dr Clancey’s legacy should be used to highlight the continuing
importance of museums as archives for historic and current collections of
ornithological material and we are pleased to dedicate this volume to his memory.

Recommended citation:
Collar, N.J., Fisher, C.T. & Feare, C.J. (eds.) 2003. Why museums matter: avian archives in an age of
extinction. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. Supplement, 123A: 1-360.

3 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A
Editors’ commentary and acknowledgements

If publication of any set of symposium papers is delayed, it becomes increasingly
problematic to follow through the standard editing process of refereeing and
negotiation with authors over the final version of their contributions. The difficulty
largely derives from the fact that material left unpublished too long begins to date,
and it becomes uncertain whether it is better to leave the contributions as they were
at the time they were made, or to update them in the light of more recent publications.
Decisions either way can create a sense of loss of authenticity. Some authors in the
present proceedings declined to include new material relevant to their subject; others
chose to include some, opportunistically; still others provided a comprehensively
up-to-date version of their papers. However, the discrepancies are not striking, and
we strongly commend these proceedings as a relevant, comprehensive and topical
collective review of the values of museums in ornithology. We also note that,
meanwhile, other assertions of the value of museum collections of birds have been
no less insistent (e.g. Griffiths & Bates 2002, Oniki 2002).

These proceedings are the first of what we now expect to be a series documenting
meetings of bird curators held in Europe to discuss and promote cooperation between
museums. The meeting at the Natural History Museum’s Bird Department at Tring
in Hertfordshire in November 1999 engendered a second conference in Bonn in
November 2001. The Bonn proceedings are due to appear approximately at the same
time as those from Tring, in early 2003 (Rheinwald in press). A third conference is
scheduled to be held in Leiden in October 2003, and doubtless its proceedings will
appear in due course.

Profound apologies must be extended to the authors for the delay in editing their
contributions, but we must also thank them all warmly for their very positive response
to our requests for their rapid cooperation. We also thank those who in mid-year
2002 most generously undertook to referee the papers, at very short notice and with
very short turn-around times: P. Andrew, T. M. Brooks, L. Christidis, J. H. Cooper,
E. C. Dickinson, J. Fjeldsa, R. E. Green, H. Jakober, I. Newton, R. B. Payne, R. P.
Prys-Jones, C. S. Roselaar, D. W. Snow, W. Stauber, F. D. Steinheimer and R. Yosef.
We also thank the British Ornithologists’ Union and British Ornithologists’ Club,
particularly S. P. Dudley, C. J. Feare and T. W. Gladwin, for their strong
encouragement and support in bringing the editing of these proceedings to a
conclusion.

Griffiths, C. S. & Bates, J. M. 2002. Morphology, genetics and the value of voucher specimens: an
example with Cathartes vultures. J. Raptor Res. 36: 183-187.

Oniki, Y. 2002. Another value of specimens in museum collections. Ornitologia Neotropical 13: 323-
324.

Rheinwald, G., (ed.) In press. Conference Proceedings of the Second European Symposium ‘Bird
Collections in Europe: The Challenges of Mutual Cooperation’. Bonn. zool. Beitr. 51(3-4).

Editor’s commentary and acknowledgements 4 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Addresses: N. J. Collar, Conservation Biology Group, Department of Zoology, Downing Street,
Cambridge CB2 3EJ, U.K.; and BirdLife International, Wellbrook Court, Girton Road, Cambridge
CB4 ONA, U.K. C. T. Fisher, Department of Zoology, Liverpool Museum, William Brown Street,
Liverpool L3 8EN, U.K.

After the delays to which Nigel Collar and Clem Fisher have referred above, the
decision to publish these proceedings as a supplement to the Bulletin of the British
Ornithologists’ Club was made only in late 2002. By the time the texts began to fall
on to my desk in December 2002, the bulk of the editing had been completed and we
set the somewhat daunting target of publishing the supplement in March 2003. My
task was largely to convert the style to Bulletin format and to send the texts to the
authors for final approval, during which I did seek clarifications and revisions. I am
grateful to Nigel and Clem for the huge editorial job that they had already done, and
to the authors for responding so rapidly to my appeals for urgent attention to the
final details. This rapid publication also involved speedy processing by our typesetter,
Alcedo Publishing, and our printer, Crowes of Norwich, and I am grateful to them
for making it possible.

Chris Feare
Hon. Editor, Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club

3) Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Introduction

by Robert Prys-fones

My desire to plan the conference “Why Museums Matter: Avian Archives in an Age
of Extinction’ and its associated workshop “Increased Co-operation between Museum
Bird Collections, especially in Europe’ arose out of two interrelated facts which had
become apparent to me in my role as collection manager of one of the world’s largest
bird collections. First, in an era of ever-rising threats to ever more bird species
worldwide, it was increasingly important to improve cooperation between museums
in collating and making available information about the bird specimen resources
they look after. Second, such cooperation would most easily arise out of personal
contact, but at the time no forum existed, at least within Europe, to facilitate the
meeting and exchange of views among bird collection management staff.

The aim was therefore to organise a conference containing a suite of papers
focusing comprehensively on the content and value of bird collections and on research
arising directly out of them, but avoiding undue overlap with previously published
reviews (e.g. Miller 1985). Although open to all interested parties, the core target
audience would comprise representatives with hands-on collection management
responsibilities from as many European museums containing significant bird
collections as possible, but leavened with a cross-section of speakers from museums
elsewhere, and indeed from other relevant backgrounds, to provide wider
perspectives. This would be followed by a workshop, open only to museum personnel,
aimed at facilitating a structured general discussion of issues of common concern
and priorities for future cooperative action. The focus on European museum staff
seemed desirable both because the continent is a coherent entity which contains
numerous important bird collections, hitherto lacking any interaction of the type
achieved by their U.S. equivalents at, for example, American Ornithologists’ Union
meetings and through the electronic discussion forum AVECOL, and because funding
and logistical constraints precluded any comprehensive worldwide approach.

Given that the whole enterprise was undertaken on a shoestring budget, the
response and outcome were gratifying. Approximately 130 people from 25 countries
attended, including representatives from the great majority of larger, and some
smaller, European bird collections. The conference speakers, almost all of whom
attended at their own expense, must be congratulated for sticking to their briefs and
producing contributions of a high standard, as is fully evident from these published
proceedings (for reviews of the event, see Brooke 2000 and Cooper 2000). The
workshop discussions, summarised herein (see under Cooper & Steinheimer), were
lively and constructive, and have led directly to a number of initiatives, such as the
setting up of eBEAC (the electronic Bulletin for European Avian Curators), and a
strong stimulus towards the goal of a world avian type specimen list. Perhaps the
best indication that a real need was being addressed came through the general
agreement that the meeting should become the first of a biennial series, with staff of

Introduction 6 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

the Alexander Koenig Research Institute and Museum of Zoology, Bonn, Germany,
hosting a second European Bird Curators’ symposium in 2001, and with plans well
advanced now for a third in the National Museum of Natural History, Leiden, The
Netherlands in 2003.

In planning and carrying through this enterprise, I was fortunate in the variety of
assistance that became available from both individuals and organisations. The British
Ornithologists’ Union accepted the conference as one of its regular series, making
freely available its administrative and publicity machinery and the able organising
skills of its staff, Steve Dudley and Gwen Bonham. The British Ornithologists’ Club
provided funding to support attendance of the conference and workshop by museum
personnel who would otherwise have been precluded from coming, as well as
supporting the publication of these proceedings. The Natural History Museum
allowed its Bird Group staff to take time to plan and organise the conference and
workshop, and permitted use of the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum for the
conference reception. BirdLife International also lent its support to the enterprise,
signalling clearly its recognition of natural history museums as key players in
conservation science.

Scientific organisation of the entire event was shared between Drs Nigel Collar,
Clem Fisher, Kees Roselaar and myself. As well as his role in running the workshop,
Kees Roselaar has made a particularly noteworthy contribution in compiling the
European bird collections directory that is published in these proceedings and which
will hopefully soon be available on-line. Professor Sir Robert May, then U.K.
Government Chief Scientific Advisor, graciously agreed to give the opening address.
Mark Adams, Joanne Cooper, Steven Parry, Jorn Scharlemann, Don Smith, Frank
Steinheimer and Michael Walters of the NHM Bird Group played indispensable
roles in assisting with all the logistical requirements necessary to ensure the
programme ran smoothly. Dr Andrew Richford (Academic Press) kindly underwrote
the cost of refreshments for the conference reception.

The production of these proceedings has been delayed for reasons which fall
very largely at my door and for which I apologise to all contributors. Their appearance
now is due almost entirely to the efforts of Nigel Collar, who has played very much
the leading role in collating and editing the contents of this volume. The whole
enterprise has been a satisfying one to be associated with and hopefully will have a
legacy of lasting value.

References:

Brooke, M. de L. 2000. Why museums matter. Trends Ecol. Evol. 15: 136-137.

Cooper, J. 2000. Report on “Why museums matter”. bis 142: 347-348.

Miller, E. H. (ed.) 1985. Museum collections: their roles and future in biological research. Occasional
Papers of the British Columbia Provincial Museum 25.

Address: Robert Prys-Jones, Bird Group, Department of Zoology, The Natural History Museum, Akeman
Street, Tring, Herts HP23 6AP, UK.

Fiurgen Haffer 7 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Avian zoogeography, speciation
and the museum tradition

by Fiurgen Haffer

SUMMARY

Zoogeographical studies involving the identification of speciation patterns in birds have
been greatly facilitated by the preparation of distribution maps using published localities
and unpublished museum specimen records. Zoogeographical patterns in Amazonian birds
include six conspicuous areas of endemism and numerous sharply defined contact zones
between closely related geographically representative birds. Many contact zones cluster
along the Amazon and the lower portions of its tributaries, but others cross river courses
at rightangles. Parapatric contact zones generate many important riddles over the processes
whereby species remain intact (do the zones remain stationary or fluctuate, how is parapatry
maintained, why and when did it originate? etc.); parapatric patterns in New Guinea lowland
birds offer further opportunities to solve such questions. Studies based on museum
collections continue to contribute valuable data on the character geography of particular
species groups (in the case of migrant Arctic waders based on extensive quantification of
subtle character differences between populations), on geographical variation of sexual
dimorphism, and geographically variable polymorphism.

Introduction

Bird collections in natural history museums document the occurrence of common,
rare, threatened and extinct species obtained in accessible and inaccessible areas of
the world. Collections form the basis of systematic and zoogeographic studies, for
research on geographic variation, study of plumage colour patterns, ecomorphology,
biodiversity and many other topics. Early private and public collections were already
important during the period when ornithology originated as a separate branch of
zoology during the first half of the nineteenth century. Later, scientists and commercial
collectors travelled widely overseas contributing to the rapid growth of the regional
knowledge of the avifaunas of the world, and leading to a conspicuous boom in bird
collections during the second half the nineteenth century and into the twentieth
century (Stresemann 1975, Barrow 1998, Mearns & Mearns 1998, Haffer 2001,
Glaubrecht 2002).

Below I demonstrate the constant and non-substitutable relevance of museum
collections to the topic of avian zoogeography, in particular the mapping of breeding
and wintering ranges of birds, the study of individual and geographic variation,
the analysis of contact zones between subspecies and species as well as of areas of
endemism. I show that bird collections stored in museums are essential tools for
such research. Conceptual contributions of systematists to biological science
through specimen-based research include the theory of geographical speciation,
the principle of population thinking, and the interpretation of the gradualness of
evolution.

Fiirgen Haffer 8 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Mapping of breeding and wintering ranges

Precise locality data and the dates of collecting are the basic information on specimen
labels needed for taxonomic and zoogeographic work. Such notes are often
supplemented by data on the colour of bill, feet, iris and skin around the eye, as well
as by information on moult and stomach contents. The field notebooks of the
collectors frequently provide information on the ecology and calls of particular birds.
Obviously, the correct labelling of museum specimens, as to where and when a bird
was taken, is of crucial importance, including information on the altitude of the
collecting locality, especially in mountains, and its position with respect to the left
or right bank of a broad river. Occasional misidentifications of birds can only be
clarified through reference to preserved specimens.

Locality data are utilised in taxonomic and faunistic publications as well as in
regional atlas projects like those which have been published for Palearctic and African
birds. In the Palearctic atlas (Stresemann, Portenko et al. 1960—2000) the limits of
the breeding ranges of selected species are mapped and the localities used to trace
these range limits are documented in the accompanying text of each map, which
also includes discussions of the ecology and taxonomy of these birds. The detailed
documentation of all localities as to their literature source permits their verification
in case of later need. So far 19 instalments of this atlas treat 210 species of birds in
62 genera which have been studied cooperatively by 16 scientists, mainly at the
Berlin and St. Petersburg Zoological Museums.

The atlases of African passerine (Hall & Moreau 1970) and non-passerine birds
(Snow 1978) map the distributions of more or less related and geographically
representative species onto a background vegetation map of Africa. Each locality
where a species has been collected is marked with a particular symbol (solid or open
circle, triangle, square, etc.). Such presentation permits at-a-glance appreciation of
the ecological occurrence of a species, its relative abundance (few or many locality
records) and the location of contact zones, 1.e. areas of geographic replacement,
between related representatives (with or without hybridisation). These aspects would
not be so obvious if the distribution of each member species of such superspecies or
species groups had been illustrated on a separate map. Numerous opportunities for
field studies become apparent simply by studying these African maps.

Although the use of point-locality mapping in these African atlases is extremely
valuable as a means of establishing baseline distributions, there are two drawbacks
(N. J. Collar pers. comm.): (1) the mapped locality records are not tagged with a
source, so that in cases of doubt they cannot be scrutinised; and (2) not all sources
have been used and certain information is missing. In a less detailed manner, Moreau
(1972) mapped and discussed the summer and winter distributions of all Palearctic
migratory birds.

South America has immense potential for mapping species distributions thanks
to the extraordinary programme of gazetteer production for every South American
country by R. A. Paynter (Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts) and

Fiurgen Haffer 9 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

M. A. Traylor (Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago). Each volume compiles
all geographic localities in the ornithological literature, together with hundreds of
unpublished localities represented in the world’s major ornithological collections.
Each entry lists the coordinates of the locality, elevation, habitat notes, and dates
visited by the respective ornithological collector(s); see, e.g., the gazetteers by Paynter
& Traylor (1991) for Brazil and by Paynter (1993, 1997) for Ecuador and Colombia.
In the future, these and other gazetteers will permit the precise mapping of all South
American species ranges for detailed biogeographical analyses, which so far have
been based on less comprehensive datasets. When the complete distribution maps
are available, it will be quite easy also to determine, for example, the coverage of
the neotropical lowlands by museum samples and which museum collection contains
the best representation of the bird fauna of a particular region in South America.

Zoogeographical aspects of the Amazonian bird fauna

I summarise below some results of my research based on studies of the birds preserved
in the collections of several North American and European museums.

Areas of endemism

The ranges of many bird species and well-differentiated subspecies cluster in fairly
restricted regions of the continents, characterising “areas of endemism’. Other authors
have designated such regions ‘centres of endemism’, ‘distribution centres’, “core
areas’ and ‘dispersal centres.’ Six main areas of endemism are developed in Amazonia
(Haffer 1969, 1974, 1978, Miiller 1973, Cracraft 1985). Each of these areas is
characterised by 10-50 species. By superimposing their ranges and contouring their
numbers, areas of maximal overlap of breeding ranges of each species group are
emphasised. These six areas of endemism are located in peripheral regions of
Amazonia (Napo, Inambari, Imeri, Rond6nia, Guiana and Belém). More widespread
species inhabit increasingly larger distribution areas comprising two or more areas
of endemism. Several groups of birds composed of geographically representative
species characterising the several areas of endemism form conspicuous mosaic
distribution patterns over all of Amazonia (e.g. Pionopsitta parrots, Selenidera
toucanets, Ramphastos toucans and Pipra manakins).

In their global survey of endemism in birds, Stattersfield et al. (1998) identified
only those areas of endemism (“endemic bird areas’ or EBAs) which are characterised
by at least two species with ranges of less than 50,000 km? each. They left unmapped
other areas of endemism where the most restricted species have slightly larger ranges.
This is the reason why in Amazonia only the Napo, Inambari and Imeri areas appear
on their map (under slightly different names), whereas the very conspicuous areas
of endemism of Guiana, Belém and Rondonia remained unidentified. This is not
meant as a criticism but to point out the problem when a practical criterion (i.e.
50,000 km?) within the framework of conservation biology is used as a cut-off for
biogeographic mapping in a huge lowland plain with no major barriers like Amazonia.

Firgen Haffer 10 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Contact zones between subspecies and species of birds

Many Amazonian birds meet and exclude each other geographically with or without
hybridisation along sharply defined contact zones. These areas of contact represent
major zones of biogeographic discontinuity in a continuous forest environment (Fig.
1, Table 1). Such pairs of taxa inhabit different levels of the forest; some prefer the
canopy, others the middle levels and still others the understorey. Contact zones may
or may not follow rivers at least for some distance.

As examples of conspicuous contact zones, I illustrate the distribution of three
manakin species of the genus Pipra which inhabit forests near lowland rivers and
are very common in many regions of Amazonia (Fig. 2). The males are mainly
black, bright red and yellow; the females are inconspicuously green and similar to
one another. Wire-tailed Manakin P. filicauda is slightly larger than the other two
species; its tail feathers are elongated and their shafts project as long wire-like
filaments (shorter in females). This species inhabits most of upper Amazonia (north
to the coast of Venezuela), whereas Crimson-hooded Manakin P. aureola is found in
the forests along the lower Amazon and Madeira Rivers as well as along the coastal
lowlands of the Guianas. Band-tailed Manakin P. fasciicauda (with a white basal
tail-band) occupies southern Amazonia and extended its range into north-eastern

of —— 0°

he a S$ £ 2.

Fig. 1. Contact zones between selected Amazonian forest birds whose locations are independent of or
variously displaced by river courses. For explanations of figures and letters see Table 1.

Fiirgen Haffer

11

TABLE 1

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Some species and subspecies of birds which form conspicuous contact zones in Amazonia

(numbers and letters refer to Fig. 1).

I. North of the Amazon River; western representatives named first.

] Ramphastidae Selenidera reinwardtit S. nattereri
D Formicartidae Gymnopithys leucaspis G. rufigula
3 Ramphastidae Ramphastos vitellinus culminatus R. y. vitellinus
Ramphastos tucanus cuvieri R. t. tucanus
Picidae Veniliornis affinis V. cassini
+ Psittacidae Pionopsitta barrabandi P. caica
Ramphastidae Pteroglossus pluricinctus P. aracari
Selenidera nattereri S. culik
Picidae Celeus grammicus C. undatus

If. South of the Amazon River; the southern representatives are named first.

a Cuculidae Neomorphus geoffroyi N. pucheranii

Pipridae Pipra fasciicauda P. filicauda
Pipra coronata exquisita group P. c. coronata group

Galbulidae Galbula tombacea G. cyanescens

Cc Psittacidae Pionopsitta barrabandi P. vulturina
Galbulidae Galbula rufoviridis G. galbula
Capitonidae Capito dayi C. brunneipectus
Ramphastidae Pteroglossus beauharnaesius P. aracari
Cotingidae Xipholena punicea X. lamellipennis

d Ramphastidae Ramphastos vitellinus pintoi R. v. ariel
Dendrocolaptidae Xiphorhynchus elegans X. spixii
Formicariidae Hylophylax poecilinota griseiventris H. p. nigrigula
Pipridae Pipra nattereri PUTS:
Troglodytidae Thryothorus genibarbis T. coraya

e Cotingidae Phoenicircus nigricollis P. carnifex

if Pipridae Pipra fasciicauda P. aureola

and central Brazil. Where these species meet they replace each other geographically
along sharply defined contact zones without (or very rarely) hybridising (parapatry).
The contact zone between P. aureola and P. fasciicauda crosses the southern
tributaries of the lower Amazon River at rightangles. The same is the case with the
contact zone between P. fasciicauda and P. filicauda in upper Amazonia which crosses
the Purts, Jurua and Ucayali Rivers at more or less rightangles. The situation along
the upper Rio Jurua (Fig. 3) demonstrates the sharp replacement of these species in
the uniformly distributed forests around the small village of Sobral where one male
and three females of filicauda and two males of fasciicauda have been collected.
Hybridisation does not seem to occur. To the south of Sobral, only P. fasciicauda is
encountered in the forests to Taumaturgo and the Rio Tejo, a distance of 50 km (20

Fiirgen Haffer 12 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Fig. 2. Distribution of manakins of the Pipra aureola superspecies (males illustrated; plumage colour is
yellow, red, orange and black). Locality records (symbols) refer to the following species: Crimson-
hooded Manakin (P. aureola, open circles and horizontal hatching), Band-tailed Manakin (P. fasciicauda,
solid circles and stippling), and Wire-tailed Manakin (P. filicauda, solid triangles and vertical dashes).

specimens in the Museu Paraense E. Goeldi, Belém, Para). North of Sobral
presumably only P. filicauda occurs. Details of the ecological relations between
these two species will have to be determined through fieldwork around the village
of Sobral.

Many contact zones cluster along the Amazon River and along the wide lower
portions of some of its tributaries (Haffer 1978). However, the most important
zoogeographical aspect of Amazonian contact zones is the fact that the locations of
many other such zones are independent of river courses, crossing even the largest
ones at rightangles, including the Amazon River itself. Examples of upper/lower
Amazonian taxa whose contact zones in central Amazonia cross the middle or lower
Amazon River from north to south are the following: Cobalt-winged Parakeet
Brotogeris cyanoptera/Golden-winged Parakeet B. chrysopterus, ‘Cuvier’s Toucan’

Firgen Haffer 3) Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

SN
‘ PaQ 3d 39,3-
30° \SLO BOCSO 20%
~ Td ORT 49
vic

Fig. 3. Parapatric contact between Wire-tailed Manakin (Pipra filicauda, above and triangles) and Band-
tailed Manakin (P. fasciicauda, below and circles) along the upper Rio Jurua in westernmost Brazil.
Sketches illustrate adult males. Collecting localities from north to south are Cruzeiro do Sul (CS), Sobral
(S; both species!), Porongaba (P), Igarapé Sao Luis (SL), Seringal Oriente (SO), Taumaturgo (T), and
Rio Tejo (RT). PW Porto Valter. Dashed line follows border between Brazil and Peru.

Furgen Haffer 14 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Ramphastos t. cuvieri/*Red-billed Toucan’ R. t. tucanus and Rufous-bellied Euphonia

Euphonia rufiventris / Golden-sided Euphonia E. cayennensis. The rich collections

in several museums facilitated a detailed analysis of some of these contact zones

(Haffer 1974, 1997).

I should clarify here the terminology I use. Geographically representative taxa
of birds which meet without a separating barrier in an ecologically rather uniform
area either hybridise more or less extensively along their contact zone or they exclude
each other geographically with no (or only very restricted) hybridisation. In the
former case these taxa represent subspecies of one biological species, whereas in
the latter case they are differentiated at the species level. Such geographically
representative species in contact are designated as ‘parapatric’ to distinguish them
from sympatric (co-occurring) and allopatric (widely separated) species. Among
the examples mentioned above, the representatives of Brotogeris and Euphonia are
parapatric species, whereas those of the Ramphastos toucans hybridise extensively
where they meet in central Amazonia. The intermediate populations are highly
variable and composed exclusively of hybrid individuals; parental phenotypes are
lacking. Under the biological species concept, Ramphastos t. cuvieri and R. t. tacanus
are subspecies of the White-breasted Toucan R. tucanus. As mentioned above, the
term “parapatric’ usually refers to species only, although some authors do speak of
‘parapatric subspecies’ in those cases where the connecting hybrid zone is very narrow
(which is not the case in the toucans).

The members of parapatric species pairs probably compete ecologically and would
extend their ranges across the contact zone but for the existence there of the competing
ally (Haffer 1992). These contact zones are located in uniform (but complex)
vegetation zones or in gradually changing habitat zones where, however, the
ecological gradients are not steep enough to explain the abrupt replacement of the
representatives. Each of them appears to be superior to the other in the respective
area occupied. In the Eastern Andes of Peru, approximately two-thirds of the
altitudinal distribution limits of bird species are due to ecological competition
(Terborgh 1985). Competitive exclusion is one of the most important factors
determining the composition of this rich bird fauna. The frequent occurrence of
geographical exclusion of species along contact zones in the Amazonian lowlands
as well as ecological exclusion of species within the rain forest through vertical
stratification (Terborgh 1980) supports a similar interpretation of the importance of
ecological competition for the determination of the regional composition of this
rich tropical lowland avifauna.

Still to be determined for most or all instances of parapatric contact zones between
bird species in Amazonia are:

(1) What is the situation regarding the local distribution of the representative species?
Do the contact zones remain stationary or do they fluctuate regionally or shift
gradually in a certain direction?

(2) In what manner is each zone of parapatry maintained, i.e. why do parapatric
species not penetrate rach other’s ranges? Do agonistic behavioural responses

Fiurgen Haffer 15 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

(interference competition) or resource preemption (exploitation competition) by
their respective representatives prevent parapatric species from overlapping their
ranges? Which mechanisms assure reproductive isolation of the species along
their zone of contact? Does reinforcement of pre-mating isolating mechanisms
and/or of ecological segregation between the species take place at the contact
zones (i.e. will the two taxa gradually become more different in behaviour, calls,
ecological preferences, etc.)?

(3) Why did parapatry originate in each case? Are the locations of contact zones the
results of historical causes or of current ecological conditions? In instances of
sympatry, these species might be expected to maintain interspecific territories or
to occupy mutually exclusive patchy areas of varying extent.

(4) When did the parapatric species originate and when did they establish contact?
As examples of detailed taxonomic and zoogeographical analyses of contact

zones with and without hybridisation of the taxa involved I cite the publications of

Meise (1928, 1975), Short (1965), Remington (1968), Haffer (1977), and Panov

(1989), all of which are based on extensive museum studies of bird collections.

Zoogeographical aspects of the avifauna of New Guinea

As in Amazonia, conspicuous areas of endemism and contact zones between birds
are found in the lowlands of New Guinea. The bird faunas of the forested northern
and southern lowlands are separated by the enormous ‘wall’ of the central mountain
range extending for 2,000 km from the Geelvink Bay in the north-west to the south-
eastern tip of the island. The following lowland regions are zoogeographically
significant as areas of endemism (Stresemann 1936, Pratt 1982, Beehler et al. 1986):
(1) the Vogelkop region at the north-western end of New Guinea; in northern New
Guinea the basins (2) of the rivers Mamberano—Idenburg and (3) of the rivers Sepik—
Ramu; (4) the lowlands of southern New Guinea. Examples of characteristic
distribution patterns of lowland New Guinea birds are summarised in Fig. 4 and
Table 2.

Many taxa of southern New Guinea extended their ranges westward beyond the
Geelvink Bay into the Vogelkop region of NW New Guinea (Fig. 4/1B). In other
cases the representatives of northern New Guinea reached the Vogelkop region first
(Fig. 4/1C) or an endemic form exists in the latter area and three geographical
representatives are in contact in the lowlands around the Geelvink Bay (Fig. 4/1A).
This is the case, e.g., in the brush-turkeys Talegalla (Fig. 4/2) and the crowned-
pigeons Goura (Fig. 4/3). The northern and southern taxa usually meet near the
south-eastern end of the central mountain range where the northern or the southern
form has surrounded the south-eastern tip of New Guinea or both meet there near
Milne Bay. In several other cases the representatives are separated by a distributional
gap.

The distributional ranges of the three Talegalla species inhabiting the Vogelkop
region (Red-billed Brush-turkey T. cuvieri), northern New Guinea (Brown-collared

Firgen Haffer 16 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Fig. 4. Distribution patterns of selected species and subspecies of birds inhabiting the rainforests of the
lowlands and lower montane levels in New Guinea, after Stresemann (1936) and Pratt (1982), with
additional data. (Legend on page 17)

Jurgen Haffer 17 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Brush-turkey T. jobiensis) and southern New Guinea (Black-billed Brush-turkey 7,
fuscirostris) are in contact in several areas but do not overlap. T. cuvieri and T.
fuscirostris are in contact at the western end of the Snow Mountains where the
former species inhabits the lower montane forests above the range of T. fuscirostris
(Jones et al. 1995:117). In eastern New Guinea, 7: jobiensis crossed low passes of
the central mountain range in a southern direction and here also occurs locally in the
lower montane forests above T. fuscirostris (Fig. 4/2). Obviously, the presence of T-
fuscirostris prevents the southward advance of the two northern species into the
lowland forests of southern New Guinea. The three Goura species replace one another
geographically in a similar manner (with restricted hybridisation in the areas where
they meet). In other birds where the geographical representatives are considered as
subspecies, these taxa hybridise extensively along the contact zones or are assumed
to do so.

Geographical variation

The individual and geographic variation of numerous bird species have been analysed
for over one hundred years with methods that have become increasingly sophisticated
in recent decades. These methods have been adequately reviewed by Selander (1971),
Gould & Johnston (1972) and Baker (1985). I emphasise that detailed descriptions
of local populations and artificial delimitation of subspecies cannot depict accurately
the complex patterns of geographical variation in many wide-ranging species on
continents. With sufficient specimen material available over a large area, computers
can analyse regional trends statistically, and can generate isolines, contour maps,
and trend-surface maps. In this way, regional patterns of character variation may be
documented and analysed quantitatively, without a priori reference to subspecies

Legend to Fig. 4

Solid — mountains over 1000 m elevation. 1A—C Areas of endemism (open double arrows) as distribution
centres of endemic species and subspecies (V Vogelkop, MI Mamberano-Idenburg region, SR Sepik—
Ramu region, SW south-western lowland region, SE south-eastern lowland region). 1A Contact south
of Geelvink Bay between endemic forms of the Vogelkop, the northern and southern lowlands; 1B
Vogelkop and southern lowlands are inhabited by the same form (or group of subspecies) which
established contact with the northern form at Geelvink Bay; 1C Vogelkop and northern lowlands are
inhabited by the same form (or group of subspecies) which established contact with the southern form
also at Geelvink Bay. Either the northern or the southern form extended its range around the south-
eastern tip of New Guinea or both established contact near the tip itself (Milne Bay), e.g. map no. 3.

Symbols: A — geographical exclusion without hybridisation; H — hybridisation along the contact zone;
stippled area — endemic form of the Vogelkop; dashed and hatched vertically — forms of the southern
lowlands and, in some cases, of the Vogelkop; dashed horizontally — forms of the northern lowlands
and, in some cases, of the Vogelkop.

Examples shown are: 2 Talegalla; note the occurrence of T: cuvieri on the southern slope of the Snow
Mountains (two open circles) and of T. jobiensis on the southern slopes of the Central Mountains (x), 3
Goura, 4 Lorius, 5 Psittaculirostris, 6 Micropsitta, g M. geelvinkiana, m M. meeki, 7 Geoffroyus, 8
Cicinnurus, 9 Paradisaea, r P. rubra, d P. decora. For further details see text and Table 2.

Sirgen Haffer 18 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

TABLE 2
Characteristic species and subspecies of birds inhabiting the rainforests of the tropical lowlands and
lower montane levels in New Guinea. Arrows indicate range extension. Numbers refer to the
corresponding distribution maps in Figure 4.

South North-west North
(Fly River Platform) (Vogelkop) Mamberano— Sepik—Ramu
Idenburg
Megapodiidae (2) Talegalla fuscirostris —ea—T. cuvieri + 4a— _ T_ jobiensis
Columbidae Ptilinopus p. pulchellus ———————* a—— P. p. decorus

Diculap. pion $a Op oviersis
(3) Goura scheepmakeri——-# G. cristata +4 G. victoria
Psittacidae Chalcopsitta scintillata —+4 C. atra —*————___ C. duivenbodei
(4) Lorius 1. lory-group ———————___+-4———_ LL. I. jobiensis—group
(5) Psittaculirostris desmarestii!: ———————*® = -#-P. salvadorii——a— P. edwardsii
(Q)WLOD OSLO LQ OSID>. <<< SE
Probosciger a. aterrimus—group ————*-t—————_ P a. stenolophus
(7) G g. aruensis—group Geoffroyus geoffroyi pucherani—group
Acanthizidae Gerygone p. palpebrosa—group —————_*#—————_ G. p. wahnesi
Myiagridae Arses t. telescophthalmus—group ————+—___A.. t. insularis
Paradisaeidae (8) Cicinnurus r. regius—group ——————#——C. Fr. coccineifrons—group

(9) Paradisaea apoda +
P. raggiana*&————— Paradisaea minor

Meliphagidae Philemon n. novaeguineae ————#4————— P. n. jobiensis
Dicaeidae Melanocharis n. nigra—group ————-##—————_ Mn. unicolor
Campephagidae L. leucomela ——————+-4t—————Y Lalage atrovirens

Orthonychidae E. c. nigricrissus ———\———— Eupetes c. caeruleus—group

' This species is composed of 2 subspecies on the west Papuan islands and 4 subspecies in western
and southern New Guinea (in Fig. 4/5 stippled desmaresti + intermedia, hatched vertically godmani,
dashed vertically cervicalis).

Fiirgen Haffer 19 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

names (Haffer & Fitzpatrick 1985). Additional museum and field studies of
intraspecific variation in birds are needed in order to document regional character
changes along clines, across contact zones, and across various ecological gradients
within the tropics.

The subspecies concept is most useful where applied to discrete, differentiated
populations that are separated by distributional gaps like those found on islands.
Within continuous populations inhabiting continental areas subspecies should be
distinguished in only two situations: (1) at the ends of steep clines, if the two terminal
populations show uniformity over a substantial portion of their ranges, and (2) where
two or more wide-ranging populations show different, but in each case fairly uniform,
character expression (“plateaus’ on contour maps) connected by relatively narrow
zones of character change.

Many examples of geographic variation in birds have been discussed by Mayr
(1942, 1963), Zink & Remsen (1986) and, with particular reference to Palearctic
birds, Voous (1947, 1949, 1950, 1953a,b) and Vaurie (1953-1964).

Arctic migrants

A recent example of an extensive quantitative study of the geographical variation of
northern waders is the work of Engelmoer & Roselaar (1998) undertaken in the
context of conservation work. Many wader species migrate in huge flocks along the
East Atlantic flyway. For conservation purposes, it is important to determine
approximately the composition of these flocks in relation to the different geographical
origin of the breeding birds. Most of them congregate after breeding over widely
dispersed areas in remote boreal and arctic regions as far apart as Greenland and the
tundra of eastern Siberia where it is difficult to obtain population estimates. As long
as morphometric and colour differences among breeding populations of the various
species exist, quantitative estimates of the composition of migrating and wintering
flocks are now possible based on a computer program (‘Poscon’) which determines
the posterior probabilities and confidence intervals for a particular bird to belong to
one of the differing breeding populations of its species. Based on their study of
nearly 5,000 specimens in many museums, the authors analysed on a very thorough
Statistical basis the geographic variation of the breeding populations of 15 wader
species of the Northern Hemisphere to provide a sound database for the continuing
conservation effort with migrating and wintering wader populations in western
Europe and in other parts of the world. Geographical variation is studied on the
basis of standard measurements (lengths of wing, culmen, tarsus, tail, selected primary
feathers, etc.) and scoring of the geographically variable colour of certain portions
of the plumage like uppertail-coverts and axillaries in some species. The birds include
such common migrants as Ringed Plover Charadrius hiaticula, Red Knot Calidris
canutus, Sanderling C. alba, Dunlin C. alpina, Whimbrel Numenius phaeopus,
Curlew N. arquata, Redshank Tringa totanus and Ruddy Turnstone Arenaria
interpres.

Fiirgen Haffer 20 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Character geography within species groups

Comparative studies of the species and subspecies of a large genus or of a family
permit historical and ecological analyses of various character states such as colour
patterns, size, relative tail length and shape of tail, bill size and shape, voice, nests,
nesting habits and their functional adaptations. Examples of such comparative
evolutionary studies (of which many more are required) are those of Mayr &
Moynihan (1946) on the flycatching Rufous Fantail Rhipidura rufifrons group in
the Malay Archipelago and the Papuan region, and of Mayr & Amadon (1947) on
the species of flowerpeckers, Dicaeidae, in these same regions. A similar analysis of
the 20 species of drongo, Dicruridae, distributed in South-East Asia and the Malay
Archipelago revealed that the characters of the more specialised species, such as
large size, frontal crests, long tails, and modifications of the outermost tail feathers,
have arisen independently in different branches of the family. Every character varies
geographically and is correlated with such features of the environment as temperature
and humidity. Double invasions of the same parental stock have led either to the
existence of two sympatric species or to the formation of hybrid flocks (Mayr &
Vaurie 1948:264-265). Snow (1954) published a similar treatment of trends in
geographical variation in Palearctic members of the tits Parus. Other evolutionary
trends among related allopatric species of the Neotropical Region are the increasing
length of the central tail feathers in Chiroxiphia and of the uppertail-coverts in
Pharomachrus.

Studies of the relations between wing and tail length in several groups of closely
related species revealed certain trends whose functional interpretation is still open.
In the series Brambling Fringilla montifringilla—European Chaffinch F. c. coelebs
group—Chaffinch of NW Africa F. c. spodiogenys group—Canary Island Chaffinch F.
c. canariensis [= tintillon] group, tail length increases as the wing becomes shorter
and more rounded (Eck 1975). Tail length is only 70% of wing length in the Brambling
and increases to 83% in the F- c. canariensis group. The underlying selection pressures
may be linked to long-distance migration and ‘island effect’ (Grant 1979). With
respect to size, the Blue Chaffinch F: teydea of pine forests in the mountains of
Tenerife and Gran Canaria is an isometrically enlarged European Chaffinch. Wing
and tail length decrease in the subspecies of the Sombre Tit Parus lugubris from the
Balkan Peninusula east to northern Iran. Because small Pere David’s Tit P. davidi of
south-western China, with bright cinnamon underparts, continues this trend of
decrease in size, Eck (1980, 1988) considered this geographically isolated species
as a representative and close relative of the western P. /ugubris, pointing out that the
plumage colour in P. (l.) hyrcanus of northern Iran (underparts tinged rusty) is
somewhat intermediate. The Great Tits of the Parus major complex have a wing
length of approximately 65—80 mm; the tail is relatively longer and more graduated
in the bokharensis group of Middle Asia than in the other subspecies groups (Eck
1977).

Sirgen Haffer 21 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Geographical variation in sexual dimorphism

In several species of birds females show stronger geographical variation than males
(‘heterogynism’: Hellmayr 1929). This has been observed in South American antbirds,
Thamnophilidae, in which the males have a non-variable black plumage while the
colouration of the females is geographically variable shades of brown. Other examples
of heterogynism are White-shouldered Fairywren Malurus alboscapulatus (Mayr &
Rand 1935) and Sulawesi Cuckooshrike Malurus alboscapulatus (Mayr & Rand
1935) and Moluccan Greybird Coracina morio (Stresemann 1939). It remains
unknown how widespread heterogynism is among birds.

A related topic is the geographically varying degree of sexual dimorphism. On
small oceanic islands, some birds show reduced conspicuousness and sexual
dimorphism compared with their mainland relatives, probably because there are
fewer species on the islands and the problems of species recognition are reduced,
resulting in a reduction of sexual dimorphism. A latitudinal gradient of sexual
dimorphism involves the New World warblers, Parulidae, and New World orioles,
Icteridae. Tropical species tend to be sexually monomorphic and conspicuous,
whereas north temperate species tend to be sexually dimorphic (Hamilton 1961).
Nesting habits also influence the degree of sexual dimorphism. The females of hole-
nesting birds, such as rollers, kingfishers and parrots, are frequently as colourful as
their males, because they need no protection through adaptive (camouflage)
colouration while sitting on the nest.

Three particularly conspicuous examples of geographical variation in sexual
dimorphism are the highly polytypic Golden Whistler Pachycephala pectoralis of
the Malay Archipelago, Papuan and Australian regions (Mayr 1932, Galbraith 1956),
Scarlet Robin Petroica multicolor of the islands in the south-western Pacific Ocean
(Mayr 1942:48) and the Pomarea ‘flycatchers’ of the Marquesas Islands (Murphy
1938). A genetic drift hypothesis may account for the origin of geographic variation
in sexual dimorphism in birds (Peterson 1996).

Geographical variation in polymorphism

In most polymorphic species with discontinuous colour phases there is no evidence
for selective mating or any other advantage of the morphs (Mayr 1942:75). In some
instances polymorphism varies geographically, the percentages of morphs in the
populations changing over large distances, e.g. in the Pacific Reef-heron Egretta
sacra, Grey Goshawk Accipiter novaehollandiae and Papuan Lorikeet Charmosyna
papou (reviewed by Huxley 1955). In some cases, geographical gradients in
polymorphism may be linked to hybridisation along secondary contact zones of
previously separated (monomorphic) populations. Subsequent regional introgression
may have led to the development of polymorphism, e.g. in the Black Bulbul
Hypsipetes leucocephalus (Mayr 1941, 1942:83) and in two pairs of wheatear species,
Black-eared Wheatear Oenanthe hispanica/Pied Wheatear O. pleschanka (Haffer
1977) and Variable Wheatear O. picata/O. opistholeuca (Panov 1992). Huxley’s

Firgen Haffer 22 Bull. B-O:€ 2003 A 23%

conclusion is still valid: ‘The time seems ripe for a detailed survey of the incidence
of colour- and pattern-morphism in birds’.

Conceptual contributions of systematists

Conceptual contributions of systematists to the biological sciences through their
museum studies of animal collections include the theory of geographical speciation,
the principle of population thinking and the interpretation of the gradualness of
evolution (Mayr 1973, 1980). These topics will be briefly discussed below.

Geographical speciation

Beginning with Leopold von Buch, Charles Darwin and Alfred R. Wallace during
the first half of the nineteenth century a steadily growing number of systematists
advocated the theory of geographical speciation from small isolated populations.
This theory combines two seemingly incompatible aspects, namely (1) gradual
evolutionary differentiation of a separated population and (2) the existence of
bridgeless gaps between coexisting species after the completion of isolating
mechanisms (Mayr 1942, 1963). The zoogeographical phenomena discussed above,
like areas of endemism and the occurrence of contact zones in Amazonia and in
other regions of the world, may be interpreted 1n terms of the theory of geographical
speciation. Repeated climatic—vegetational fluctuations during the last several million
years probably led to the fragmentation and differentiation of the vegetation zones
and their contained faunas, leading to the development of areas of endemism. As
climatic conditions changed, the more or less separated faunas were rejoined, leading
to the overlap and sympatry of ecologically fully compatible species and to the
formation of the contact zones between representative taxa which had reached various
intermediate stages of the speciation process during their geographical separation
(Mayr 1942, 1963, Haffer 1974, 1997, Haffer & Prance 2001).

Population thinking

Ornithologists of the mid-nineteenth century discovered, when collecting ‘series’
(population samples) of specimens of one species from certain localities and from
different regions, that no two specimens were ever completely alike. These are the
phenomena of individual and geographical variation, respectively. For example, H.
Schlegel in the Netherlands and J. H. Blasius in Germany, as well as the ornithologists
around S. F. Baird of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., made great
efforts to assemble, from the 1850s to the 1880s, series of specimens of each species
to determine the range of variation, publishing detailed lists of all birds examined
with information on sex, locality, measurements and colour characters. These workers
emphasised the occurrence of individual variation of local populations and of
geographically representative forms (subspecies) delineating polytypic species. Many
of these and other ornithologists studied variation even though they held typological
(essentialistic) views, assuming that an internal type or essence maintains the integrity

Fiirgen Haffer DS Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

of each constant species and that variation is no more than an imperfect manifestation
of its eternal type.

However, the studies of the ornithologists mentioned above prepared the ground
for the development of ‘population thinking’ (Mayr 1959, 1982:46). Under this
evolutionary principle individual and geographical variation are real and represent
important phenomena of the natural world. Geographical variation of isolated
populations may transcend species limits and lead to the origin of new species.
Species possess no eternal integrity, and types in the sense of essentialism are
abstractions. Basic concepts like natural selection acting on populations composed
of varying individuals are meaningless for typologists. The replacement of typological
thinking by population thinking through the research of museum workers is perhaps
the greatest conceptual revolution that has taken place in biology. From systematics
it was brought into genetics by researchers who had either been trained as systematists
or had worked closely with systematists (Mayr 1963:5, 1973).

Gradualness of evolution

During the early twentieth century, museum systematists endeavoured to demonstrate,
through detailed analyses of geographic variation of numerous species, that evolution
proceeds gradually, as Darwin had postulated, rather than through ‘saltations’ jumps),
as the Mendelists assumed during that time. Rensch (1929) showed that all species
characters vary geographically and that extreme geographical subspecies may differ
morphologically more from one another than many good sympatric species. This
observation made the interpretation of gradual evolution much more probable than
a Saltational course of microevolution.

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Address: Jirgen Haffer, Tommesweg 60, D-45149 Essen, Germany

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

Storrs L. Olson 26 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Development and uses of avian
skeleton collections

by Storrs L. Olson

SUMMARY

The importance of skeletal material in systematic studies of birds was recognised by only
a few nineteenth-century workers yet osteology has been pivotal in the development of
phylogenies and classifications of birds and often provides critical clues in problematic
cases. In morphometric studies, skeletal material yields far more, and more accurate,
measurements and ratios than obtainable from study skins. Skeletons are essential for the
identification of fossils, bones from archaeological sites and food items taken by predatory
animals, as well as being useful in physiological and histological studies. Although world
skeletal inventories have greatly aided researchers, they also reveal serious deficiencies
in museum holdings. The need for more material of avian skeletons is undiminished.

Introduction

Systematic studies in the various branches of vertebrate zoology differ fundamentally
according to differences in traditional methods of specimen preparation. In cold-
blooded vertebrates (fish, amphibians and reptiles) the entire organism is preserved
intact in fluid, ultimately usually alcohol, in which colours often change. Thus, in
differentiating lower-level taxa there is a heavy emphasis on meristic characters
such as number and distribution of spines, fin rays, and especially scales. In birds
and mammals the fundamental systematic unit has traditionally been the museum
study skin in which the stuffed, dried integument is preserved, with colouration
often playing a greater role in systematic decisions than is the case for poikilotherms.

In the preparation of a traditional mammal study skin, only some of the bones of
the foot are left in the skin, so that the skinned carcass contains the virtually complete
skeleton. Despite this, mammalogists have in the past been scandalously remiss in
preserving skeletal material, apart from the skull and mandible, which are saved as
part of the skin specimen and which receive equal or greater consideration in
systematics. Consequently there is a heavy emphasis on cranial characters,
particularly dentition, in mammalogy.

Modern birds, of course, have no dentition, and in the traditional museum study
skin most of the skull and bones of the wings, legs and tail are left in the skin. The
resulting skinned carcass therefore contains only the bones of most of the vertebral
column, pectoral girdle, pelvis and femora, along with all of the viscera, tongue and
trachea. After the sex has been determined, this body or trunk carcass is usually
discarded. Therefore the process of specimen preparation in ornithology has
sometimes been described as peeling off the wrapper and throwing the bird away.
Diagnoses of new species and subspecies of birds have been heavily dependent
upon plumage colouration and pattern, wing formulae, and the shape and proportions
of the wing and tail, so that the ornithologist is far more dependent on feathers than
the mammalogist is upon fur.

Storrs L. Olson Di, Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

For a while, the sternum of birds, because it could be easily extracted from the
skinned carcass, had a certain vogue as an object of study. Early skeletal collections
often contained a high proportion of these sterna, usually with the coracoids and
scapulae still attached, and sometimes one may encounter an old skin in collections
that still has the sternum tied to the legs or label. Comparative morphology of the
sternum occupied the attention of several French ornithologists, and probably reached
its zenith with L Herminier’s (1827) classification of birds based on the morphology
of the sternum.

Nevertheless, this osteological diversion did little to further the development of
avian Skeletal collections. The description of new species and subspecies was the
principal activity of museum ornithologists during all of the nineteenth and most of
the twentieth centuries, and the study skin was the coin of the realm. As traditionally
practised, preparation of a complete skeleton meant sacrificing the skin, and field
collectors were extremely reluctant to bring back other than well-made study skins,
a reluctance that continued through at least to the 1950s. As an example, in his long
and distinguished career at the Smithsonian, Alexander Wetmore collected over
27,500. specimens, nearly 14,500 in Panama alone. Despite the fact that Wetmore
was active in avian palaeontology, regularly used the Smithsonian skeleton collection,
and was instrumental in the Institution’s purchase of large and important collections
of skeletons, virtually all of the specimens he collected himself were prepared as
skins only. The two decades when he was most active in the field marked the period
of slowest growth in the Smithsonian skeleton collection in the twentieth century
(C. Ludwig, Smithsonian computer files).

History

Serious examination of the avian skeleton can be traced back to the sixteenth century
with Belon’s (1555) classic comparison of the skeleton of a raven (Fig. 1) with that
of Homo sapiens. Centuries would pass before the study was taken up again.

Bird skeletons and fluid-preserved specimens were of particular interest to the
British ornithologists William Jardine and Thomas Eyton. The correspondence of
the celebrated John Gould (Sauer 1998-2001) contains numerous exchanges between
these three gentlemen regarding the acquisition of such specimens, and Gould himself
took care to obtain anatomical specimens of birds for his colleagues during his own
explorations of Australia. Eyton’s researches are epitomised by his Osteologia Avium
(1867-1875).

At the same time in France, Alphonse Milne-Edwards produced his monumental
work on the fossil birds of France (1867-1871) in which there are many comparisons
with (and illustrations of) the comparative osteology of modern birds. Likewise,
skeletal anatomy received considerable attention in his classic work, with Grandidier,
on the avifauna of Madagascar, in which the skeletons of many different taxa were
illustrated (Milne-Edwards & Grandidier 1876-1881). At least some of Milne-
Edwards’s collection still exists at the Paris Museum, although I am told that this
material was discovered being stored in an alleyway.

Storrs L. Olson

German researchers
also investigated the
relationships of birds
through studies of anatomy,
including osteology, which
culminated in the
exhaustive treatise of Max
Fiirbringer (1888), whose
results were adopted by
Hans Gadow (and later
Alexander Wetmore) to
produce the flawed and
derivative—but extremely
familiar—system of
classification of the orders
of birds that dominated
ornithological literature
throughout the twentieth
century.

Comparative anatomy
had, of course, long been an
important zoological tool
and was the subject of
intensive research by Baron
Cuvier in Paris and later by
Richard Owen in England.
ne imelicl received a
tremendous boost after
1859, when Charles
Darwin’s evolutionary
theories provided a
rationale for similarities
ancl ClinteremMees jul
anatomical structures. The
discipline of comparative
anatomy was formalised in
some museums by the
creation of separate
departments. The avian

28 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

GEs OFYSEAVYR, PAR PB. BELON ar
Lacompa ggon ce olde pewsraich dicoe hurresn: ecole come
han celluy ey quiet diva opfesuen of pooctain.

Ponraké deroedela view.

hr
4
& 4 #
E =| iJ * ee
ete Oy
' mh Pe Mh | % hh
i Z {r eats , 4 x,
ee oe 7 a F ae = t s— i
a t 3 | * ae "
tj oe . 1
» i. | ee
sll cr At om
“on =u Fy:
< Fi a
¥y =", &
! qi
f i : a= = g
‘ 4
vs = f j
& A

; Ae - - ; : 5 = = i
ofa Sitetesy eoetden ey fi, gage Ei fis pelle .ueieramersSe cr las pe

Ete Ine ise tot es far pied a me (Y- dves fi ase As Wervkeo de dn pee dre,
‘a TeCaer as ioe om qoerire re pecnar F Lirdaasci daiwackn Jorien, coda’ a
suas! ye Pyemact alsa bt ern a Liu of setles >
oH Daeiy haleeien caer i Teast’ hb, re ring & imatic: aes
1 i . cy a ereT
4 f Him mews dy fear ae Peed | DO eee ole ae ee Secor [race
idiom ger geese ect , Aogry apes qi aor bowie, ;
k Dargy hrvkvearcel, 2 Grande.
| is

Fig. 1. Skeleton of aCommon Raven Corvus corax, by Belon (1555).
Set next to that of a human skeleton, this was the first detailed
illustration of an avian skeleton. © The Natural History Museum,
London.

skeletal collections in several museums, such as the Smithsonian Institution, Field
Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and the Natural History Museum in the
U.K., have as their nuclei the specimens inherited from now-defunct departments of
comparative anatomy, or from medical museums such as the former museum of the

Storrs L. Olson 29 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Royal College of Surgeons in Britain and the U.S. Army Medical Museum in
Washington.

Uses

Osteology played a pivotal role in the development of phylogenies and classifications
of birds, and may still provide critical clues for determining the true relationships of
taxa that have long been misplaced. For example, skeletal characters were of
paramount importance in showing that the Australian Plainswanderer Pedionomus
torquatus belongs in the Charadriiformes and not near the Turnicidae in the
Gruiformes (Olson & Steadman 1981). Osteological characters were among the many
lines of evidence adduced to place flamingos with the Charadriiformes rather than
with storks or ducks (Olson & Feduccia 1980). Even single osteological characters,
such as fusion of the phalanges of the inner toe in certain genera of Accipitridae
(Olson 1982), can provide very suggestive clues as to relationships within a particular
group.

Osteology has figured importantly in recent revisionary studies of birds, by using
character analyses that supposedly conform with the principles of ‘phylogenetic
systematics’ (e.g. Livezey 1996, 1998), although the results may be viewed as mixed
(e.g. Sorensen et al. 1999). Prior to this, the rise of phenetics, or numerical taxonomy,
in systematics led to a flurry of activity in avian skeletal collections (e.g. Schnell
1970). Although this school waned and phenetics is no longer “politically correct’ in
the world of systematics, its temporary ascendancy did result in increased growth of
avian skeletal collections and in the emergence of several institutions as major
resources of skeletal material. These may not have achieved their present importance
had they not had the initial boost provided by the former interest in phenetics.

In the traditional bird study skin, relatively few useful standard measurements
can be taken. Furthermore, these measurements can be very difficult to replicate, in
part because they may be affected by the state of moult and degree of wear of feathers,
or even of wear of the ramphotheca. On the other hand, for morphometric studies
the avian skeleton provides many more possible measurements and ratios, which
are also much more easily and accurately replicated. Phenetics and morphometrics
were certainly factors in the phenomenal growth of the avian skeletal collection at
the Royal Ontario Museum, which grew from 1,100 specimens in 1965 to some
48,000 at present (J. Barlow pers. comm.). Large series of skeletons provide a sound
basis for assessing geographic size variation within a species. A classic example of
this 1s the study by Rising (1987) of sexual dimorphism in skeletons of Savannah
Sparrow Passerculus sandwichensis, in which 24 different measurements were taken
from 1,791 individuals from 51 populations. For similar studies to be possible,
however, much more collecting of specimens would be necessary.

In the investigations mentioned above, the skeletons themselves are the objects
of study and the scientific results obtained are taken directly from museum skeletal
collections. However, in the most intensive modern use of skeletal collections of

Storrs L. Olson 30 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

birds, the skeletons, although of critical importance, are secondary and the objects
of study are unidentified bird bones that must be compared with skeletons of known
identity.

Although it may not be widely appreciated, there are in fact numerous sources of
unidentified bird bones. Fossils of all ages are of primary importance for their
evolutionary information. In numbers, these would be followed by material from
archaeological sites. Skeleton collections are likewise essential for studies of the
food remains of predatory birds and mammals; skeletons have been used as indices
of body size, and in physiological or histological studies such as those charting
changes in bone structure (the Haversian system), or where attempts have been made
to age birds using cross sections of long bones.

Other uses of skeletal collections include exhibitions, teaching scientific
illustration, other projects which fall into the category of ‘art’, and various commercial
ventures such as use in advertisements. Avian skeletal collections also play an
important role in teaching zoology, and, as would be expected, collections associated
with universities tend to have had an intensive and consistent use for teaching,
whereas other collections tend to have been little used for such purposes. Skeletons
are also used to identify birds involved in airplane strikes (although most such
identifications are based on feathers), as well as in various forensic applications,
such as the identification of carcasses of illegally taken birds or, in rare cases, bird
bones that have been taken as evidence in other crimes.

Fossils

In the past quarter century, there has been tremendous growth in the study of fossil
birds from all time periods—witness the number of papers, and broad range of
subjects, treated in the volumes which emanated from the first four meetings of the
Society of Avian Paleontology and Evolution (Mourer-Chauviré 1987, Campbell
1992, Peters 1995, Olson 1999) and two earlier festschrifts (Olson 1976, Campbell
1980). The diagnosis and description of new species is still one of the main activities
of avian palaeontologists, and in their work the skeleton has primacy over the study
skin. The need for adequate comparative material for identifying fossils has been
one of the prime factors in driving the growth of avian skeleton collections. Notable
among these are the collection of Pierce Brodkorb (now incorporated in the Florida
Museum of Natural History) and those assembled mainly by Evegeny Kurochkin
and at the Palaeontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow,
and by Zygmunt Bochenski at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow.

A good example of how palaeontological studies have spurred the growth of
skeletal collections comes from the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. Alexander
Wetmore collected extensively in Puerto Rico and wrote the definitive studies of its
avifauna (Wetmore 1916, 1917). Consequently, the Smithsonian collections of Puerto
Rican birds were once, for skins, probably the largest and most important in the
world. However, when I returned from Puerto Rico in 1976 with tens of thousands
of fossil bird bones from cave deposits on the island, I could find only four skeletons,

Storrs L. Olson 31 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

from three species of bird from Puerto Rico, in the Smithsonian collections. Because
this was utterly insufficient for researching the fossil avifaunas, a new campaign of
collecting modern comparative material had to be initiated on Puerto Rico and
elsewhere in the Antilles. The Smithsonian collections now hold nearly 4,000
skeletons from throughout the West Indies. Well over 90% of these have been
collected since 1975, and almost entirely because of their need in palaeontological
studies.

The development of modern collections

Although by far the majority of skeletal specimens consist of dry bones in varying
degrees of disarticulation, a small number are prepared as cleared and stained
Specimens in which the soft tissues are rendered more or less translucent and the
bones and cartilage are dyed different colours. This essentially involves converting
an intact fluid-preserved specimen into a skeletal specimen, although the skeleton is
still maintained thereafter in fluid. Cleared and stained specimens have been important
in studies of growth and development (Olson 1973, Burke & Feduccia 1997) and in
as yet unpublished studies of the systematics of hummingbirds (R. L. Zusi in prep.).

Moreover, it must not be forgotten that, because study skins still contain many of
the more diagnostic bones of the avian skeleton, skin collections may become a
major source of skeletal material. This is especially useful for extinct species for
which no skeletons were ever saved. Methods have been developed where the skull
and limb bones can be carefully removed from skins with little or no loss of the
scientific value of the study skin itself, yet allowing great gains in knowledge of
osteology and even myology (Olson et al. 1987). Without such bones extracted from
skin collections, the study of the fossil avifauna of the Hawaiian Islands, for example,
would have been significantly impeded (James & Olson 1991, Olson & James 1991).
Perhaps the best example of the use of this method was the extraction of the skull
from the unique holotype of the Lanai Hookbill Dysmorodrepanis munroi, after
which this was once again classed as a valid genus and species rather than as an
aberrant individual of another species (James et al. 1989).

Another source of skeletal data from skin specimens is from x-rays, which have
been used for determining age in songbirds (Rasmussen 1998) as well as for trying
to determine the origins of particular specimens such those of as rare Hawaiian
specimens (Olson 1996) or those with fraudulent data (Rasmussen & Collar 1999,
Rasmussen & Prys-Jones 2003, this volume).

Although specific research projects have added significantly to world holdings
of avian skeletons, the growth of skeletal collections has mainly resulted from general
collecting in which some of the specimens acquired are chosen for preservation as
skeletons. There is now a generally prevalent modern outlook, or ethic, of specimen
preparation in museums, that dictates that not all specimens should be made up as
study skins and that some balance must be struck between the need for skins, skeletons
and fluid-preserved specimens. Concurrent with this shift has been the emergence
of an ethic of attempting to obtain maximal information, at least from specimens of

Storrs L. Olson 32 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

scarcer species. This in turn has given rise to creative new methods of specimen
preparation that allow for preservation of skin, skeleton and soft parts in different
states of completeness, along with tissue samples for biochemical studies.

Another very positive development has been the appearance of world skeletal
inventories (Wood et al. 1982, Wood & Schnell 1986), which have provided a great
stimulant to the enhancement of skeletal collections. These inventories have provided
a rather shocking picture of just how deficient the museum collections of the world
are in species represented by non-skin preparations. Field collectors have been able
to consult these inventories prior to or during expeditions to determine where gaps
in holdings could be filled. Knowing in the field that no osteological material exists
for a given species has more than once provided the incentive for preparing a specimen
as a Skeleton rather than a skin.

Nevertheless, I have detected a few hints of a slight backlash regarding skeletal
preparation among those I solicited for information. One collections manager
considered that the strong reputation of the skeleton collection at his institution had
caused specimens to be prepared as skeletons that should have been made as skins
or alcoholics. At another museum, concern was expressed that far less use was being
made of the skeleton collection, compared with tissues or skins, which called into
question the value of expending so much effort on skeletal preparation. Nevertheless,
it is clear that a much healthier balance now exists in most major museums 1n regard
to manner of specimen preparation.

Recognition must be made of the fact that, in North America, increased emphasis
on skeletal preparations and the importance of skeletal specimens is in great measure
due to the influence of the staff of four museums associated with large universities:
Michigan, Kansas, Florida and California (Berkeley). Each of these museums houses
large and important collections of bird skeletons and each has a long history of
active involvement in avian palaeontology and systematics. There are few
ornithologists in North America who regularly use skeletal specimens in their
research, or who are now directly responsible for the curation of skeletal collections,
who did not receive training at or were not in some other way directly influenced by
these four research institutions.

The extent to which individual scientists or collectors have influenced the growth
of skeletal collections varies from institution to institution. Some important
collections have been formed almost single-handedly, whereas others are the
cumulative result of generations of effort by staff, students and associates. Conversely,
individual influence has at times slowed collection growth, as when a curator has no
interest in studies involving osteology and neither acquires nor prepares skeletal
specimens. Archaeological departments in museums and universities, particularly
in Europe, have been responsible for developing numerous smaller collections of
avian skeletons for use in identifying bone remains from archaeological sites.

Despite these advances, it is a depressing fact that active field collecting of birds
is on the wane, being greatly hampered by misplaced sentimentalities and bureaucratic
impediments. This comes at a time when there still exist many critical deficiencies

Storrs L. Olson 33 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

in world museum holdings and when habitats, along with their birds, are being
destroyed.

Acknowledgements

For information on the skeletal collections at their institutions I am very grateful to: Jon Barlow (Royal
Ontario Museum, Toronto), Jon Fjeldsa (Zoological Museum, University of Copenhagen, Denmark),
Ned K. Johnson and Carla Cicero (Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley),
Mary LeCroy (American Museum of Natural History, New York), Craig Ludwig (National Museum of
Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), Robert Prys-Jones and Don Smith (Natural
History Museum, Tring), Mark Robbins (University of Kansas Museum of Natural History, Lawrence),
Sievert Rohwer (Burke Museum, University of Washington, Seattle), David W. Steadman (Florida
Museum of Natural History, Gainesville), Van Remsen (Museum of Zoology, Louisiana State University,
Baton Rouge), and David Willard, (Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago).

Author’s note: This essay was developed as a preliminary draft that was intended to be circulated rather
widely for comments from curators and users of skeletal collections so that other perspectives might be
incorporated. It was first submitted for remarks on format and suggestions that might enable better
conformity with other papers in the symposium; but as no more was heard on the subject I did nothing
further with it. When it resurfaced three years later, I was asked to allow it to be included, which I have
done reluctantly, making only very minor changes. I take no responsibility for the fact that the result is
neither current nor particularly well balanced.

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Campbell, K. E., Jr. (ed.) 1980. Papers in avian paleontology honoring Hildegarde Howard. Contrib.
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© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

Bradley C. Livezey 35 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Avian spirit collections:
attitudes, importance and prospects

by Bradley C. Livezey

SUMMARY

Spirit (fluid-preserved) specimens of birds play a special role in anatomical and systematic
studies. A literature review and survey of natural history museums reveals that spirit
collections of birds have undergone a modest, steady increase to compose roughly 2—3%
of specimens worldwide. However, many problems of representation indicated by the
Global inventory (Wood et al. 1982a) persist, and current users of spirit specimens often
encounter additional problems over preservation, provenance and associated data.
Consensus exists that spirit specimens are informative for phylogenetic investigations
and are the key source of data regarding functional morphology, that the primary motivation
for preserving specimens in spirit is to retain maximal information for future investigators,
and that expertise deriving from the study of anatomical specimens is at greatest risk in
specimen-based ornithology. Nevertheless, bias persists for the preparation of bird
Specimens as study skins, evidently in response to demand by visitors (including artists)
to collections, to a high threshold of perceived sufficiency in skin series, and to a parochial
perspective on the availability of taxa as study skins. Curatorial concerns over preparation,
storage and study of spirit specimens are evident but generally exert little influence over
allocational priorities. Recommendations and justifications regarding the preservation of
bird specimens in spirit are given.

Introduction: spirit specimens in ornithological research

Systematic ornithologists work within a subdiscipline dominated increasingly by
molecular methods (Avise 1996), despite the absence of an empirical justification
for such a change in analytical priorities (Hillis 1987, Crowe 1988, Swofford 1991,
Eernisse & Kluge 1993, Novacek 1994, Wiens & Hillis 1996, Lee 1997, Wheeler
1997). Nonetheless, preserved specimens of birds remain an important resource for
many types of study, including those based on DNA (McKitrick 1981, Olson 1981,
Finley 1987, Houde & Braun 1988; contra Ricklefs 1980, Ricklefs & Gill 1980).
Given the enduring importance of morphological characters in modern systematics
regardless of taxon (Sanderson et al. 1993), the relevance of museum collections of
birds is not unexpected, and the view of natural history collections as invaluable
archives has become increasingly appreciated (Cotterill 1997, Murariu 1997).
Spirit specimens of birds—also referred to as wet anatomical or fluid-preserved
specimens—play a special role in a diversity of anatomical and systematic studies
(Quay 1974, Raikow 1985). Essentially, any ornithological investigation that is based
in part on aspects of the anatomy of birds exclusive of the integument or skeleton
(i.e. soft internal tissues) requires samples of fluid-preserved specimens (these can
involve whole birds, parts, stomachs and contents, tongues, chicks and even unhatched
embryos, which are hard to preserve any other way), and moreover many osteological
features are interpretable only through study of the overlying musculature and

Bradley C. Livezey 36 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

ligaments or the internal organs, including the digestive apparatus and stomach
contents (Baumel ef al. 1993). Recent works incorporating information based on
dissections of birds include descriptions of the musculature (e.g. Schreiweis 1982,
Zusi & Bentz 1984, Homberger 1986, Raikow 1993, Weber 1996, Miiller & Weber
1998), functional analyses (e.g. Zusi 1962, Livezey 1990, 1992a,b), studies related
to pathology (e.g. Cooper et al. 1998), phylogenetic reconstructions based on
morphological characters (e.g. Raikow 1978, 1987, Prum 1990, 1992, McKitrick
1991a,b, Livezey 1997, 1998), feeding ecology (e.g. Arizmendi & Ornelas 1990)
and even shapes of birds (e.g. Hayman 1986).

However, despite the unique utility of spirit specimens for many aspects of
ornithological research (for example moult, locomotion, feeding, display and
systematics), such material remains comparatively rare in museum collections (Peters
1933, Wood et al. 1982a,b, Zusi et al. 1982, Wood & Schnell 1986, Raikow 1985).
A number of surveys of ornithological collections have documented that spirit
specimens are less abundant than skeletons and much less abundant than traditional
skin specimens (Banks et al. 1973, Clench et al. 1976). Raikow (1985: 119) noted
that the survey by Banks et al. (1973) revealed that museums in North America hold
*...over 4 million avian study skins, but only 142,150 skeletons, and a bare 52,025
spirit specimens’. This observation indicates that the ratio of the three major classes
of specimen in the survey by Banks ef al. (1973) approximated 77 skins: 3 skeletons:
| spirit specimen.

A fortuitous outcome of the rarity of anatomical specimens is the publication of
inventories of spirit and (to a lesser degree) skeletal specimens in a number of
museums (Ames & Stickney 1968, Blandamer & Burton 1979, Gillette & Bartle
1982), an exercise evidently prompted as much by the tractability of holdings as by
the priority accorded the specimens themselves. The importance of the manageably
small numbers of spirit specimens to the compilation of inventories is reflected by
the fact that a global inventory of avian skin specimens remains years away (largely
because many skin collections remain uncomputerised), whereas such inventories
for skeletal and spirit specimens were completed roughly 15 years ago (Wood et al.
1982a,b, Wood & Schnell 1986). A review of such inventories or a personal visit to
a natural history collection substantiates a commonly held perception among museum
ornithologists: whereas skin specimens generally are available in substantial series
in many collections, skeletons and (especially) spirit specimens are much rarer for a
given taxon, if available at all (Raikow 1985).

Moreover, investigators often discover that those spirit specimens that are
available are often damaged or derive from captive populations or are accompanied
by limited or no associated data. Conventional wisdom holds that the disparate
proportions and diverse quality of study skins, skeletons and spirit specimens result
from a widespread curatorial tradition of allocating wild-taken specimens having
detailed associated data to collections of study skins, whereas damaged specimens
of captive origin and/or with poor documentation are allocated for preparation as
skeletons or spirit specimens (Raikow 1985).

Bradley C. Livezey 3y/ Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

An unfortunate reality of curation is that collections of vertebrates are
comparatively costly to acquire and maintain (Blackmore et al. 1997). Moreover,
the relegation of spirit specimens to a lower priority than that accorded traditional
skin specimens or prepared skeletons is to some degree understandable, given several
curatorial and investigational characteristics of spirit specimens. First, spirit
specimens typically entail the use of formalin for fixation and ethanol for storage;
the former is a toxic, unpleasant substance with which to work, and the latter is
often legally controlled, can be contaminated by trace amounts of toxic substances
(e.g. methanol) and may be combustible under certain circumstances. Second, spirit
(fluid-preserved) specimens are often comparatively massive, and their storage can
pose special challenges for older museums not designed to meet the associated weight-
bearing requirements. Third, fluid-preserved specimens are typically stored in glass
containers subject to breakage and, regardless of the quality or nature of the containers
used, ethanol is virtually certain to leak from the storage containers over time; such
collections therefore require constant monitoring to prevent infection by mould or
desiccation of specimens. Fourth, many anatomists consider fluid-preserved
specimens to be aesthetically unattractive and difficult to study; moreover, those
investigators who are willing to handle spirit specimens must overcome the curatorial
hurdles that accompany (reasonably enough) the typically destructive impact of
empirical methods usually employed with spirit specimens, a condition exacerbated
by the rarity of many taxa in spirit collections. Other concerns about spirit collections
include fire risks, sheer cost of glass jars, handling weights, availability of expertise
with respect to the use of labels and inks and the sealing of jars, and sheer curation
time (confirming, tracking and maintaining data on spirit specimens is, owing to
problems with labelling, significantly more complex and time-consuming than
equivalent work with skeletons, eggs, mounts or skins).

Consequently, ornithologists seeking spirit specimens for study are faced by
considerable limitations in number, substandard quality in much of the scarce material
available, and comparatively stringent conditions on access, which in combination
often result in a given taxon not being represented, worldwide, by a single suitable
fluid-preserved specimen. What is the severity of this problem for modern
systematists—is the scarcity of spirit specimens at the outset of the twenty-first
century as serious as indicated by the landmark surveys of Peters (1933), Banks et
al. (1973), Wood et al. (1982a,b), Wood & Schnell (1986), and Rogers (1986)?
Moreover, what are the priorities of curatorial professionals with respect to the method
of preparation and preservation of birds specimens? Finally, what are the likely
impacts of current curatorial attitudes on the quality and diversity of avian spirit
specimens that will be available for future study?

The objectives of this study were several: (1) to review selected, prevalent
opinions bearing on spirit (anatomical) specimens of birds; (2) to summarise historical
trends in collections of spirit specimens based on published inventories and a new
survey based on questionnaires; (3) to summarise curatorial attitudes regarding spirit
specimens based on this same survey; and (4) to discuss the likely impacts of these

Bradley C. Livezey 38 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

perspectives, trends and attitudes on avian spirit specimens and the investigations
that require them.

Methods

Questionnaire

In the second quarter of 1999, I mailed questionnaires comprising 27 questions (see
Appendix), with covering letters, to 50 North American and European institutions
having significant ornithological collections. Addresses and curators of these
collections were taken from the lists of institutions provided by Wood et al. (1982a,b)
and Wood & Schnell (1986), as updated by the mailing list used in the unpublished
survey conducted by Rogers (1986). By the deadline specified, responses were
received from 29 institutions, to which I added my own completed questionnaire for
the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Most of the returned questionnaires were
fully completed (all questions answered as instructed); a minority included one or
more unanswered questions, but no more than four questions were returned without
a response.

Acronyms used for major institutions were as follows: American Museum of
Natural History, New York (AMNH), Carnegie Museum of Natural History,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (CMNH), U.S. National Museum of Natural History,
Washington, D.C. (USNM), Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of
California (MVZ), and the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor (UMMZ).

Protocols for summarising responses

Most of the questions included in the survey consisted of multiple (3—10) alternative
responses; typically, the respondents were asked to rank the responses from most
appropriate (to be assigned a ‘1’) to least appropriate (to be assigned the largest
integer required), and indicating ‘ties’ by assigning the same integer rank to the
responses deemed of equal relevance. As is conventional in such exercises, tied
alternatives were all weighted by the median value of the ranks included in the ties.
A minority of questions simply asked respondents to indicate without ranking which,
if any, of the alternatives listed were applicable in their experience. Finally, a few
questions asked for tallies of selected variables for each collection surveyed (e.g.
current numbers of specimens by class of preparation).

In the oral presentation of this paper, most of the responses were displayed in
summary pie-charts or histograms. Pie-charts were used to display overall preferences
indicated for questions requiring ranking of alternative responses; in order to associate
the responses receiving highest preference with the largest portion of the pie-chart,
the total scores for each alternative were transformed into the inverse proportion of
the grand total for the question. Simple counts (unranked) were presented as
histograms or tables. In this written account, with considerations of space at a
premium, I tabulate the mean scores for questions incorporating information on

Bradley C. Livezey 39 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

ranks (highlighting the most favoured alternative in boldface). Simple tallies, as in
the oral presentation, are compiled as such. This simplistic approach to summarising
the data emphasises only the clearest findings suggested by the comparatively meagre
sample of museums, and avoids the over-interpretation of minor differences which
cannot be considered robust in what must be regarded as only a preliminary study.

Results
Growth of collections

A summary of tallies of skin, skeletal and spirit specimens of bird based on published
surveys (Peters 1933, Banks et al. 1973, Wood et al. 1982a,b, Wood & Schnell
1986), an unpublished survey by Rogers (1986), and the present survey (questions
19-21) revealed that, despite an enduring, significant predominance of skin specimens
in ornithological collections, the proportions of skeletal and spirit specimens have
undergone a modest but steady increase (Table 1). Thus the approximate proportions
of skin, skeletal and spirit specimens, respectively, changed from 192:2:1 in 1933 to
70:3:1 in 1973 to 34:2:1 in 1986 and to 36:2:1 in 1999. In other words, during 1933-—
1999, the proportions of the three types of specimen changed as follows: skins
declined from > 99% to ~ 93%; skeletons increased from ~1% to ~5%; and spirit
specimens increased modestly from <1% to ~ 2%.

These general patterns, however, obscure differences among major museums
(Table 2). Although most major collections underwent a primary period of growth
during 1933-1973, the proportions of the three major classes of specimen showed
different trajectories (Table 2): AMNH showed virtually no growth in collections
other than skins until the last decade or so, and this increase emphasised skeletal
holdings; ornithological collections at UMMZ, MVZ and CMNH manifested an
early plateau in numbers of study skins, with steady increases in skeletal and spirit
specimens; and USNM showed essentially uniform increases in all three classes of
specimens, although the rate of increase of skin specimens was distinctly, uniformly
higher.

TABLE 1
Numbers (%) of avian specimens in major collections by class of specimen and year of survey,
based on Peters (1933), Banks et al. (1975), Wood & Schnell (1986) plus
Rogers (1986), and the present study

Year of survey (number of institutions sampled)

Class of specimen 1933 (16) 1973 (29) 1986 (32) 1999 (30)
Skin 1,757,625 (98.7%) 3,363,350 (94.9%) 3,411,786 (91.1%) 4,633,495 (91.7%)
Skeleton 14,654 (0.8%) 132,855 (3.7%) 232,786 (6.2%) 289,903 (5.7%)
Spirit 9,175 (0.5%) 47,785 (1.3%) 101,071 (2.7%) 1285/82 (257)

TOTAL 1,781,454 3,543,990 3,745,021 5,052,130

Bradley C. Livezey 40 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

TABLE 2
Numbers of specimens of bird preserved as skins, skeletons and spirit specimens in five major North
American collections in four different twentieth-century surveys, based on Peters (1933), Banks et al.
(1975), Wood & Schnell (1986) plus Rogers (1986), and the present study

Class of Year of survey
Collection specimen 1933 1973 1986 1999
American Museum of Natural History Skin 685,000 900,000 900,000 900,000
Skeleton — 7,000 12,000 24,000
Spirit = 5,000 8,000 10,000
U. S. National Museum of Natural History Skin 252,000 400,000 480,000 550,000
Skeleton 12,654 25,000 30,000 51,248
Spirit 8,875 18,000 20,000 26,784
Carnegie Museum of Natural History Skin 100,000 150,000 160,000 155,379
Skeleton 0 2,000 10,500 ibaa JA)
Spirit 0 2,500 5,000 6,756
Univ. California, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology Skin 59,200 150,000 169,500 160,000
Skeleton 0 9,000 10,704 20,000
Spirit 0 1,700 2,497 3,200
University of Michigan, Museum of Zoology Skin 33,000 200,000 150,000 170,690
Skeleton _— 11,100 20,000 23,200
Spirit — 300 1,300 3,393

Priorities of allocation

The majority of questions put to respondents concerned their perceptions of the use,
potential informativeness and curatorial relevance of the various classes of
preparations of avian specimens in museum collections. The primary objective of
these questions was to gain insight into the motivation behind the critical decisions
over the form of preparation or preservation to be allocated to new and important
specimens. Limited redundancy of questions was intentional, as a means of
confirming any patterns in attitudes that might emerge, and of limiting errors of
interpretation stemming from single opportunities to reveal opinions.

Below, I summarise the responses to questions pertaining to the criteria and
considerations that relate to allocation of new specimens to skin, skeletal or spirit
preparations (Table 3). See the Appendix for full text of questions and alternative
responses as provided to respondents.

Question 1.—New, valuable specimens made available for accession as scientific
specimens were roughly twice as likely to be prepared as study skins as either skeletal
or spirit specimens, the latter two options being approximately equal in preference.

Question 2.—Roughly half of the respondents consult both Global inventories
(Wood et al. 1982a,b, Wood & Schnell 1986) when allocating specimens. Almost as
many consult neither, and a small number refer only to the skeletal inventory on a
regular basis for allocation of new specimens.

Bradley C. Livezey 4] Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Question 3.—Of the alternative reasons for allocating a specimen for preparation
as a study skin, the popularity of skin specimens with visitors was the most favoured
response. Of the other seven justifications offered, none won a clear designation as
second-most preferred.

Question 4.—Of the alternative reasons for allocating a specimen for preparation
as a Skeleton, the condition of the specimen was ranked the most important
consideration. Comments by respondents and informal discussions with colleagues
indicate that the criterion of ‘condition’ in this context typically implies that specimens
in poor condition (freezer-damaged, spoiled before freezing, poor condition of
plumage or incomplete associated data) were more likely to be relegated to the
skeleton collection than were specimens in good condition. Of the other seven
justifications offered, none won a clear designation as second-most preferred.

TABLE 3
Summary of scores of responses to questionnaire (Appendix); responses to questions in which
alternatives were assigned ranks are summarised by the mean ranks reported (entries indicating
strongest support are in boldface), whereas responses to questions asking that one or more
alternatives be checked if appropriate (marked by *) are summarised as the total number of positive
responses received (30 respondents, although some individuals declined to answer one or more
questions); numbers of questions not amenable to numerical scores are enclosed by square brackets.

Summary score by response

Question a b c d e f g h 1 j

1. 1.3 2.1 2.6 — — — — ~ — aa
oR 13 0 + 2 12 — — — — —_
3. 4.6 3.5 Sl 2.0 3a) 4.3 4.0 6.9 — —
4. 39 5, Jal 3a) 2.5 4.9 J.J) 71 — ~_
3. 1.5 3.8 >3 ol 3) 525 39 7.0 — =
6. 6.1 3.6 2.2 4.2 4.7 Soll 2.1 — — —
ae. 9 5 14 It — — — — —
8. 5.4 3.6 4.0 Doll 2.4 6.2 8.3 6.6 6.0 6.7
oF 7 3 16 11 3 22 19 — — —
10 Des 2.9 2.0 3.1 3.8 — — a == =
11 Wes 169) 1.2 — — — — — — —
12 2.2 2.4 3.0 2.4 — — — — — =
13 3.5) 2.8 M3 1.3 — — — — = ==
14 US) IL) 1.2 — — — — — — —
le 20 18 15 14 14 — — — — —
16*. 3 7 8 7 4 — _ — — —
Ih, 1 4 6 5 0 == = 2 =
18. 2.3 De) 43 4.3 2.4 5.0 = = = =
[19-21]. — — — — — — — — _ —
DO | 17 I) — — — — — — =
Doi 9 18 2 — —_— — — — — —

[24-27]. erage eee, Se ree reer (tess teat Pe ce eS A Ae

Bradley C. Livezey 42 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Question 5.—Of the alternative reasons for allocating a specimen for preparation
as a spirit specimen, the preservation of maximal information was ranked as the
most important consideration. As in the corresponding questions for skin and skeletal
specimens, none of the other seven justifications offered emerged as the second-
most preferred.

Question 6.—Of the reasons perceived to account for the comparative rarity of
Spirit specimens in ornithological collections, curatorial traditions and low demand
for study were ranked as the most plausible (Table 3).

Question 7.—Of the four cited classes of curatorial staff, or combinations thereof,
the ranked responses indicated that the staff member most frequently responsible
for allocation of new specimens is the collection manager. It should be noted in this
context that budgetary limitations in some museums have shifted most or all curatorial
duties from curators (if any) to support staff, notably collection managers, and that
the importance of collection managers in this critical decision may reflect, in part,
the dictates of logistics instead of genuine, administrative preference. Insights into
such staffing issues largely derived from responses to questions 24—27 of the survey.

Question 8.—Of the ten alternative justifications for a hypothetical increase in
holdings of spirit specimens in the coming years, respondents ranked the preservation
of the entire specimen for posterity as the most persuasive. Ranks given other options
were very close, forming a virtual continuum of scores, and precluded further
designation of relative preferences.

Question 9.—Of possible preparations to be applied to an exceptionally rare and
valuable specimen, respondents favoured the preservation of the specimens as a
study skin with partial skeleton; conservation as a skull-less skin (‘schmoo’) and
partial skeleton, or as an entire skin specimen, emerged as second and third
preferences, respectively. However, 19 of 22 respondents also indicated an intention
to retain, in addition to the various preparations of skins and skeletons, organs in
spirit or frozen tissues. Allocations of the hypothetical ‘voucher’ specimen either as
a full skeleton or complete spirit specimen were the least favoured of the alternatives
presented.

Question 10.—The primary reason underlying current allocations of new
specimens at the institutions of the respondents was the availability of the taxon in
their own collections (i.e. ‘local’ representation). This preference was comparatively
weakly indicated, however, as the other four alternatives listed received moderately
strong support.

Question 22.—Increasingly, combination-preparations of specimens are being
used to preserve more and diverse data from valuable specimens of birds. This
question revealed that a majority of respondents oversee the preparation of study
skins and partial skeletons at least infrequently, although most categorised these
efforts as occurring ‘rarely’ as opposed to ‘routinely.’ Only a single respondent
indicated that such dual preparations were never performed.

Question 23.—In parallel with the preceding question, respondents were polled
as to the preparation of a second variation of dual preparation—study skin with

Bradley C. Livezey 43 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

partial spirit specimen. In this case, the majority ‘rarely’ supervised such
combinations, with almost one-third indicating that such preparations ‘never’
occurred; only two respondents characterised such preparations as ‘routine’.

Importance of specimens

Several questions were intended to assess the perceptions of respondents concerning
the relative importance of study skins, skeletons and spirit specimens for
ornithological research. It was hoped that these questions would transcend current
practices and patterns of use, and provide insights into underlying motivations, the
potential informativeness of specimens and the impact of curatorial trends and current
holdings on selected areas of expertise and future research.

Question 11.—Of three areas of anatomical expertise—those pertaining to the
externum, skeleton or soft (internal) anatomy—internal anatomy was ranked most
heavily as the subdiscipline undergoing a decline in recent decades (Table 3); the
other two options received substantially less support. Although the majority of
respondents implicitly agreed with the presumption that declines in expertise were
evident across anatomical systems, the unintended bias reflected in the question
may have distorted the responses. It is noted, however, that two respondents opposed
this pessimistic assessment, and commented that they perceived increases in expertise
in all three anatomical areas.

Question 12.—Respondents were asked to rank four sources of data—study skins,
skeletons, spirit specimens and genetic material—based on their view of the role
these have played in our present understanding of avian phylogeny. Responses
indicated essentially a four-way tie in this assessment, with a slight preference
indicated for the contribution of study skins (Table 3). The most valuable service of
this ambiguous outcome is the provision of a benchmark against which responses to
the following, predictive counterpart (question 13) could be viewed.

Question 13.—With respect to the four sources of information listed above,
respondents considered genetic material to hold the greatest promise for future
insights into avian phylogeny; the other three options divided the remaining support
approximately equally (Table 3).

Question 14.—Respondents considered spirit specimens to be approximately
twice as important as either study skins or skeletons for an understanding of the
functional anatomy of birds (Table 3).

Curatorial concerns

Four questions concerned comparatively practical aspects of the curation and use of
Spirit specimens. These were included to assess the potential for such concerns to
deter curatorial staff members from allocating new specimens to fluid-preserved
collections.

Question 15.—Several frequently cited issues attending spirit specimens—
including toxicity of formalin, combustibility of ethanol, breakage of glass containers,

Bradley C. Livezey 44 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

excessive weight of collections—were accorded equal weight by respondents (Table
3). Under ‘other’, several respondents listed failure of seals on containers and the
likelihood that ethanol would escape and permit desiccation of the specimens.

Question 16.—Of the various accidents that can occur in the preparation or study
of spirit specimens, eight respondents listed lacerations with dissection or injection
equipment, seven listed excessive exposure to ethanol or formalin (by inhalation
and/or spillage), five reported cuts on broken glass, and four indicated other mishaps
(Table 3).

Question 17.—Although the combustibility of ethanol in collections of spirit
specimens has not been confirmed as a significant problem, there is a widespread
perception that this risk exists. Accordingly, local fire codes in many regions impose
special conditions for the storage of such specimens. This question indicated that
roughly half of the respondents considered that their material was held in full
compliance with fire codes, whereas the remaining respondents were approximately
equally divided among the other three options (partial compliance, non-compliance
or no information).

Question 18.—Access to specimens and the information these contain is of
considerable scientific and ethical concern (Hoagland 1997). Given the destructive
nature of most forms of study of spirit specimens (notably dissection), curators have
increasingly been compelled to devise conditions or criteria for the approval of access
or loans to investigators. Of the six alternatives provided, three choices (taxa involved,
method of study, and experience of investigator) received slightly greater support
than the other options (Table 3).

Discussion

Overview of responses

Data from several published surveys, an unpublished work by Rogers (1986), and
the present survey indicate a steady but siow increase in the relative numbers of
spirit specimens during the twentieth century (Table 1). Despite this trend, spirit
specimens currently comprise only 2—3% of specimens held in ornithological
collections surveyed. This situation appears unlikely to be reversed in the near future,
as responses to the survey revealed that those responsible for allocation and
preparation remain predisposed to prepare prime specimens as study skins. A
substantial number of respondents prefer to preserve a critical specimen as a study
skin and in various other forms (most frequently as a partial skeleton and frozen
tissue).

The continuing preference for study skins stems primarily from the frequency
with which the current, varied users of collections (including artists and other non-
technical users) refer to these specimens. Also important to allocation decisions is a
persistent, somewhat antiquated concern regarding the representation of the taxon
in question as a skin specimen in the /ocal collection, as opposed to basing decisions
on global needs across all major types of specimen (e.g. as given by the Global

Bradley C. Livezey 45 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

inventories). Other concerns pertaining to collections of bird specimens in spirit—
excessive weight, dangers of desiccation, and risks related to fire, toxic substances,
or ‘sharps’ (sharp-edged or -pointed instruments )—appear to be comparatively minor
impediments to the growth of spirit collections.

Contradictory attitudes and practices

Perhaps most remarkable was the contrast in motivations for preparing a specimen
as a Study skin, skeleton or spirit specimen, and associated estimates of the potential
value of the three classes of preparation. Study skins were favoured because this
form of preparation was in the highest demand among current users. Skeletons were
favoured where condition of the specimen was a concern. Spirit specimens were
chosen most frequently when the intention was to conserve the maximal amount of
information for future study.

All three major types of avian specimen were credited with approximately equal
impact on our present understanding of avian phylogeny as genetic material, but the
last was accorded a significantly greater role than all three traditional preparations
in furnishing insights into avian phylogenetics in the coming years. Nonetheless,
spirit specimens were valued at least as much as the more abundant skeletal collections
held by museums, and spirit specimens were valued significantly more than all other
sources of information for studies of functional anatomy.

When viewed as a form of ‘avian archive’, there appears to be a conflict between
the perceived value of spirit specimens and the propensity of curators to allocate
new specimens for preservation in fluid. Generally, spirit specimens are
acknowledged to preserve the maximal amount of anatomical information, and
collections of spirit specimens are considered critical resources for phylogenetics
and unsurpassed sources of information on functional anatomy. Furthermore, there
was a general consensus that the anatomical expertise at highest risk in ornithology
is that most dependent on the availability and study of spirit specimens. However,
when faced with the opportunity to add to this valuable resource, curatorial personnel
persist in a long-standing tradition of filling deficiencies in local skin collections,
and turning to skeletal or (least frequently) to spirit collections only when this primary
concern is appeased or the condition of the specimen renders it undesirable for this

purpose.

Recommendations for the twenty-first century

Availability and quality of specimens in ornithological collections to a substantial
degree dictate the course of specimen-based research to be undertaken by future
investigators. Extensive new collections to serve an individual investigator are
becoming increasingly difficult to justify or accomplish, and most specimen-based
Studies are designed in part based on the current availability of requisite material in
the museums of the world. Unfortunately, this global perspective on holdings often
is not shared by those who determine the fates of new specimens in ornithological

Bradley C. Livezey 46 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

collections, where parochial and seemingly insatiable preferences for skin specimens

persist in a significant number of (especially smaller) museums. Spirit specimens

are uniquely informative for a number of critical aspects of ornithology (e.g.

phylogenetics, functional morphology and ontogeny), a need intensified by the fact

that study of spirit specimens often entails various degrees of destruction (i.e. spirit
specimens, like frozen tissues, are consumable).
Accordingly, I recommend that those who are empowered to allocate incoming

Specimens to various preparations do so as to:

(1) minimise what is discarded during the preparation of specimens by storing
specimens material in multiple ways (see, e.g., Eames et al. 2002);

(2) serve future investigators at least as much as current users;

(3) preserve maximal information, perhaps best achieved through preservation of a
spirit specimen, frozen tissue samples and digital photographs of the fresh
specimen;

(4) complement global as opposed to local deficiencies in holdings (cosmopolitan
perspectives being appropriate for a future in which museums will be increasingly
connected by electronic media); and

(5) create uniquely valuable collections not attainable by other means, e.g.
ontogenetic series in spirit, and special preparations to facilitate the study of
challenging organ systems or tissues.

Acknowledgements

I thank R. P. Prys-Jones for the invitation to speak on the importance and status of spirit specimens for
ornithology, and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) for funding my attendance at the
symposium. I also benefited from many discussions with R. L. Zusi (USNM) concerning spirit specimens
and their unique importance to the study of functional anatomy and systematics of birds, and for a
number of informative exchanges with F. D. Steinheimer (BMNH) regarding the methods and challenges
of upgrading the storage of historically important spirit specimens in his care (and also for helpful
referee’s comments on the manuscript). I also am grateful for the able assistance and sharing of
unpublished data by several of my colleagues at CMNH: S. Rogers, R. Panza, and M. A. Schmidt.
Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude for the provision of completed questionnaires from the following
individuals and institutions (listed by alphabetical order of [first] surname), without which this paper
would not have been possible: K. A. Arnold (Texas Cooperative Wildlife Collections, Texas A & M
University, College Station), G. F. Barrowclough (American Museum of Natural History, New York), Z.
Bochenski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Krakow), W. Boles (Australian Museum, Sydney), T. Cassidy
and A. Kemp (Natural History [Transvaal] Museum, Pretoria, Republic of South Africa), P. W. Collins
(Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, Santa Barbara, California), D. Drikrow (South African
Museum, Cape Town), C. T. Fisher (Merseyside County Museums, Liverpool), K. L. Garrett (Natural
History Museum of Los Angeles County, California), B. J. Gill (Auckland Museum and Museum,
Auckland, New Zealand), M. Gosselin (Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa, Ontario), G. R. Graves
(National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), J. C. Hafner (Moore
Laboratory of Zoology, Occidental College, Los Angeles, California), G K. Hess (Delaware Museum of
Natural History, Greenville), J. Hudon (Provincial Museum of Alberta, Edmonton), N. K. Johnson and
C. Cicero (Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley), L. Joseph (Academy of
Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), C. Lefevre and E. Pasquet (Museum National d’ Histoire
Naturelle, Paris), G Lenglet (Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles de Belgique, Brussels), M. Louette
(Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium), G. Mayr (Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg,

Bradley C. Livezey 47 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Frankfurt, Germany), R. O’Brien (Museum of Victoria, Abbotsford, Australia), R. B. Payne (Museum
of Zoology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), M. Penck (South Australian Museum, Adelaide), R. P.
Prys-Jones and F. D. Steinheimer (Natural History Museum, Tring, United Kingdom), J. Rainbird and
B. Smith (Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, Tasmania), J. V. Remsen (Museum of
Natural Science, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge), S. Rohwer (Burke Museum, University of
Washington, Seattle), D. E. Willard and J. M. Bates (Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois),
and the staff of the Museum of Natural History, Oxford University.

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Address: B. C. Livezey, Section of Birds, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, 4400 Forbes Avenue,
Pittsburgh, PA 15213, U.S.A. email livezeyb@carnegiemuseums.org

Appendix
Questionnaire regarding avian spirit collections

Instructions regarding ranking.—If possible, use the integer ranking recommended parenthetically in
each question in your responses. In the event that you feel that two or more options merit the same rank,
then assign them the same integer value; e.g. for four alternatives in which two options are considered to
have equal, intermediate ranks, then the integers assigned would be 1, 2, 2, 3. If you consider any option
to be completely irrelevant to a particular issue, assign it a rank of zero.

1. Please indicate the normal priority assigned to the three classes of preparation in your institution for
a single, newly acquired and valuable specimen of bird (e.g. new distributional record, representative
of endangered species) (1 = highest; 2 = intermediate; 3 = lowest): (a) skin; (b) skeleton; (c) spirit.

2. Do you or your staff consult the World inventory of avian spirit specimens (Wood et al. 1982) or the
Revised world inventory of avian skeletal specimens (Wood & Schnell 1986) in allocating specimens
for preparation? (a) yes, I consult both inventories; (b) yes, but I only consult the spirit inventory;
(c) yes, but I only consult the skeleton inventory; (d) no, I do not consult either inventory.

3. Please rank the following rationales to the extent that you are in agreement with them as justifications
for allocation a critical specimen to be prepared as a study skin. (Please rank as ‘1’ the rationale
with which you are in strongest agreement, ‘2’ for next-most important reason listed, etc., with ‘8’
being used for the reason you find least compelling): (a) preparation preserves the maximal amount
of anatomical information; (b) preparation is easiest to prepare; (c) preparation is easiest to curate;
(d) preparation is sought most frequently by ornithologists using collection; (e) preparation is most
appropriate given the condition of the specimen; (f) preparation conforms to the primary form
curated at the facility; (g) preparation is of greatest interest or utility to the individual making the

Bradley C. Livezey 50 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

10.

Ut

allocation or to his/her colleague(s); (h) preparation is a condition of acceptance imposed by collector
or donor.

Please rank the following rationales to the extent that you are in agreement with them as justifications
for allocation a critical specimen to be prepared as a skeletal specimen. Same instructions and
options as in Question 3.

Please rank the following rationales to the extent that you are in agreement with them as justifications
for allocation a critical specimen to be prepared as a spirit specimen. Same instructions and options
as in Question 3.

Please rank the following possible explanations for the relative rarity of spirit specimens in global
ornithological collections (1 = most plausible, etc.): (a) spirit specimens retain the least amount of
readily usable information; (b) spirit specimens are comparatively difficult, unpleasant or expensive
to prepare and curate; (c) spirit specimens are only infrequently sought by ornithologists; (d) spirit
specimens are messy to examine; (€) spirit specimens require very technical training to study properly;
(f) spirit specimens suffer damage if dissected, and therefore curators are comparatively restrictive
regarding access; (g) study skins were strongly favoured as specimens during much of the twentieth
century in most museums.

In your facility, what is (are) the position(s) of the individual(s) who allocate incoming specimens
as to form of preparation? (If this process varies, please indicate the most frequent option as “1” and
the next most frequent as “2”, etc.): (a) curator in charge; (b) curators as group; (c) collection
manager; (d) preparator or technician; (e) other (specify).

Please rank the following motivations for an increase in spirit specimens of birds in your collection
during the next decade (1 = most plausible, ..., 10 = least plausible): (a) receipt of numerous specimens
for which there was low interest in alternative preparations; (b) arrival of new staff member or
nearby colleague with interest in study of spirit specimens; (c) increase in importance of spirit
specimens in your own research programme; (d) receipt of numerous specimens that were not
considered suitable for alternative preparations; (e) professional concern for preservation of entire
specimens for posterity; (f) increased familiarity with procedures for preparation and care of spirit
specimens; (g) mandate from higher administration; (h) provenance of specimen (i.e. wild-taken or
captive); (i) completeness of data associated with specimens; (j) indications of disease in the
specimens.

If your collection was given a fresh specimen of a previously unknown species of bird that is of
sufficient rarity that it could be assumed that no more specimens would be collected in the future
(1.e., your specimen is assumed to represent the unique voucher for the species), which of the
following preparations would you recommend (check [tick] more than one if a combination of
preparations would be used): (a) study skin; (b) full skeleton; (c) study skin and partial skeleton; (d)
study skin with skull removed (“schmoo”) and partial skeleton; (e) entire spirit specimen; (f) frozen
tissue specimen(s); (g) internal organs in spirit.

Please rank the following justifications for method of preparation for a newly acquired specimen to
be added to your collection (1 = most important consideration, ..., 5 = least important): (a) availability/
abundance of the taxon as a skin, skeleton or spirit specimen in the museums of the world; (b)
availability/abundance of the taxon as a skin, skeleton or spirit specimen in the museums of your
country or continent; (c) availability/abundance of the taxon as a skin, skeleton or spirit specimen
in your collection; (d) utility of the preparation of the taxon to your own research; (e) preparatory
skills of you or your staff.

Please rank the following skills by decline in expertise (regardless of reason) during the last 20
years in ornithological institutions worldwide (1 = greatest decline,..., 3 = least decline): (a)
illustration/technical description of external appearance of birds; (b) identification/classification of
skeletal elements; (c) description/illustration/comparative study of soft tissues (e.g., musculature,
internal organs).

Bradley C. Livezey Silt Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

We

14.

Ld),

16.

Ws

18.

19.

20.

DN

Die

23:

24.

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26.

le

Please rank the following four classes of avian specimen by your perception of their importance to
our present understanding of avian phylogeny (1 = probably most important, etc.): (a) skin specimens;
(b) skeletons; (c) spirit specimens; (d) genetic material extracted from museum specimens.

. Please rank the following four classes of avian specimen by your perception of their importance to

our future understanding of avian phylogeny (1 = probably most important, etc.): (a) skin specimens;
(b) skeletons; (c) spirit specimens; (d) genetic material extracted from museum specimens.

Please rank the following three classes of avian specimen by your perception of their importance to
our understanding of functional anatomy (1 = probably most important, etc.): (a) skin specimens;
(b) skeletons; (c) spirit specimens.

Please indicate which (if any) of the following concerns are held by you or your staff have regarding
the preparation and storage of fluid-preserved specimens: (a) toxicity of formalin; (b) combustibility
of ethanol; (c) risk of breakage of glass jars; (d) weight of collection with respect to structural
limitations of facility; (e) other (specify).

Please indicate which of the following mishaps (if any) have happened in your facility during the
preparation and storage of fluid-preserved specimens: (a) staff member or visitor suffered cut from
broken glass; (b) staff member or visitor suffered from exposure to ethanol or formalin; (c) staff
member or visitor suffered cut during dissection or injection; (d) staff member or visitor spilled
significant quantities of ethanol or formalin on him-/herself or clothing; (e) other (specify).

Does your collection of spirit specimens meet local fire and safety codes? (a) yes, completely; (b)
yes, with following exception(s); (c) no; (d) do not know; (e) there are no applicable codes.

Please rank the criteria considered by you in granting use of spirit specimens by visitors (1 = most
important, ..., 6 = least important): (a) taxa involved; (b) nature of dissection intended; (c) outcome
of prior study by visitor in question; (d) publication record of visitor; (e€) reputation/experience of
visitor with techniques intended; (f) personal familiarity with visitor.

Please provide the total number of skin specimens in your collection (if not sure, please give your
best estimate and enclose the figure in parentheses).

Please provide the total number of skeletal specimens in your collection (if not sure, please give
your best estimate and enclose the figure in parentheses).

Please provide the total number of spirit specimens in your collection (if not sure, please give your
best estimate and enclose the figure in parentheses).

Do you or your staff prepare skin/partial-skeletons? Please check [tick] the most appropriate
response: (a) no; (b) yes, but rarely; (c) yes, routinely.

Do you or your staff prepare skin/partial-spirits? Please check [tick] the most appropriate response:
(a) no; (b) yes, but rarely; (c) yes, routinely.

Please indicate the number of staff members who work in the ornithological collection in your
institution at present (tally in full-time equivalents).

Please indicate the number of years that you have been a professional, museum-based ornithologist.

Please indicate the number of graduate students using museum specimens in their research with
whom you have been involved professionally during your career.

Please list the top five areas of personal research that involve to a significant extent specimens of
birds (e.g., geographic variation, functional anatomy, paleontology, illustration).

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

Leshe Christidis & Fanette Ann Norman 52 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

DNA and the museum tradition
by Leshe Christidis & Fanette Ann Norman

SUMMARY

DNA analysis is now a cost-effective and routine technique in systematics, taxonomy and
population biology. Natural history museums need to maintain their relevance to these
advances by expanding and diversifying their collection holdings. We describe different
DNA-based techniques, the type of material required, and the most appropriate methods
of storage. The needs of DNA-based research point the strategic direction for future
collection development in museums. Traditional specimens (e.g. skins and skeletons) as
sources of material for DNA-based studies are also discussed. We identify areas of concern
associated with the use of DNA material for systematic and taxonomic studies, e.g. voucher
specimens, museum accession numbers and other information standard in morphological
studies but often lacking in DNA-based analyses. Museums must play a key role in ensuring
that the necessary specimen information is included in publications. The relationships
and obligations of museums and the researchers who obtain material from them are
explored.

Introduction

Museum collections have traditionally been wholly specimen-based. In the case
of birds these include skins, skeletons and spirit specimens. Such collections have
been essential to the study of the systematics, evolution, biogeography and
functional morphology of birds. Skin collections in particular have been important
in documenting regional variation in avian species. While skins dominate most
museum avian collections, they are not as adequate as we would like when it
comes to documenting such things as geographical, age and sex variation (Zus1
1982, Winker et al. 1996, Schodde & Mason 1999). Skeletal and spirit specimen
holdings are very small by comparison (Jenkinson & Wood 1985, Livezey 2003,
Olson 2003). These traditional museum collections are, and will continue to be,
important resources for evolutionary, biogeographical and systematic studies of
birds. However, the development of new biological tools means that museums
need to expand and adapt their scope of holdings in order to continue to be at the
forefront of relevance for such studies. The most significant developments have
been in molecular genetics, given the ease with which we can now obtain protein
allozyme and DNA sequence data for phylogenetic and population studies
(Richardson et al. 1986, Avise 1994).

Maintenance of material for genetic studies

The earliest widely used molecular technique was protein allozyme electrophoresis,
which required freshly collected tissue samples or blood that was then stored in
ultra-cold freezers (e.g. Richardson et al. 1986). Proteins degrade relatively rapidly
when stored in standard freezers (-20°C), and denature when stored in ethanol.

Leshe Christidis & Fanette Ann Norman 3/3) Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Consequently, the growth of protein electorophoresis as an evolutionary tool started
the development of ultra-cold tissue banks in universities and museums.

With the advent of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) (Saiki et al. 1988),
techniques such as direct sequencing of DNA became relatively fast and affordable.
The tissue banks first established for protein allozyme studies now became just as
important for DNA sequencing and other DNA based studies. DNA is much more
robust than proteins and can be obtained from samples stored in ethanol (Houde &
Braun 1988), buffers (Seutin et al. 1991, Amos & Hoelzel 1991, Arctander & Fjeldsa
1994), standard freezers, as well as from traditional museum specimens such as
feathers (Ellegren 1991, Leeton et al. 1993), skin (Thomas et al. 1989), scrapings
from foot pads (Mundy et al. 1997) and bone (Cooper et al. 1992).

The ability to use a variety of specimen materials for DNA study has meant that
natural history museums now need to address the following issues:

e What sorts of research will in the future require DNA samples?

e What are the most common and widely applicable molecular techniques relevant
to museum holdings?

e What sorts of samples are required for these techniques and how do these relate
to current museum practices regarding specimen collections?

e What are the future directions that museums should go down to make their
collections useful for systematic and evolutionary studies using molecular
approaches?

e How can museums use these advances to enhance the information content of
their existing collections?

What sorts of research are being conducted using DNA samples?

One of the appeals of using DNA sequence data to address systematic questions is
that they can be used at a range of taxonomic levels, from the status of particular
taxa (e.g. Norman et al. 1998, Alstrom & Olsson 1999, Irwin et al. 2001, Norman et
al. 2002) through to the systematic relationships between species and genera (e.g.
Espinosa de los Monteros 1998, Omland et al. 1999, Johnson et al. 2001, Whittingham
et al. 2002), families (e.g. Moore & DeFilippis 1997, Johnson et al. 2000, Barker et
al. 2002, Ericson et al. 2002) and orders (e.g. Mindell et al. 1997, Paton et al. 2002).
These DNA-based approaches should not be viewed as a replacement for
morphological studies but rather as a complement. Nevertheless, in many cases where
the systematics were based on characters associated with feeding and locomotion,
molecular approaches have provided strong evidence that numerous examples of
convergence had been overlooked (e.g. van Tuinen et al. 2001). As the number of
nuclear and mitochondrial DNA sequences used to reconstruct phylogenies increases,
these will become robust frameworks from which morphological variation can be
interpreted. Molecular phylogenies combined with comparative approaches (Brooks
& McLennan 1991, Harvey & Pagel 1991) have been used to trace the evolution of
features such as breeding behaviour (Poiani & Pagel 1997), sexual dimorphism (Burns

Leshe Christidis & Fanette Ann Norman 54 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

1998), plumage patterns (Espinosa de los Monteros 1998, Omland & Lanyon 2000)
and ecology (Richman & Price 1992, Richman 1996, Cicero & Johnson 1998).

Another broad area of DNA-based research focuses on documenting genetic
variation within species. This includes looking at the taxonomic status of isolated
populations (e.g. Norman et al. 1998, Irwin et al. 2001), the partitioning of genetic
variation across the distributional range of species (e.g. Edwards 1993, Rising &
Avise 1993, Baker & Marshall 1997, Mila et al. 2000, Liebers et al. 2001) and its
relationship to conservation (Avise & Nelson 1989, Norman & Christidis 1997,
Robinson & Matthee 1999, Pestano et al. 2000, Zink et al. 2000). Repetitive DNA
markers such as multilocus fingerprints and microsatellites can also be used in
behavioural studies (Burke 1989, Queller et al. 1993, Painter et al. 2000, Semple et
al. 2001, Conrad et al. 2001).

Comparative genomics is a new and rapidly developing field of research which
may increasingly rely on museum collections as a source of material. Comparative
genomics involves the isolation and characterisation of specific genes from different
organisms in an effort to understand their structure, function, mechanisms of
regulation and evolution. Although domesticated species have been the major focus
of research to date, there is increasing interest in studying the genomes of native
species (Couzin 2002).

What are the most common and widely applicable molecular techniques?

The molecular techniques used commonly today in evolutionary and systematic
studies can be divided into two groups: those that are PCR-based and those that are
not. These two broad groups relate directly to the types of tissue or specimen material
that can be used, amount required and preferred method of preservation.

The most widely used non-PCR techniques have been protein allozyme
electrophoresis (e.g. Richardson et al. 1986), multi-locus DNA fingerprinting (e.g.
Jeffreys et al. 1985), and DNA-DNA hybridisation (e.g. Sibley & Ahlquist 1990,
Sheldon et al. 1995). Here a limited number of tissue sources can be used. For
example, protein allozyme analysis requires frozen tissues while good-quality DNA
is required for DNA fingerprinting.

The most widely used PCR-based techniques are direct sequencing of
mitochondrial (e.g. Mindell et al. 1997, Paton et al. 2002) and nuciear (e.g. Prychitko
& Moore 1997, Groth & Barrowclough 1999, Barker et al. 2002, Ericson et al.
2002) DNA, and microsatellite analysis (e.g. Queller et al. 1993, Painter et al. 2000,
Semple et al. 2001, Conrad et al. 2001). PCR-based techniques only require small
amounts of intact or even degraded DNA (Paabo 1989). Consequently, there is great
flexibility on the types of material that can be used with such techniques.

In the new field of comparative genomics the primary demand will be for high-
quality frozen tissues from which intact DNA and RNA molecules can be isolated.
RNA is more susceptible to damage than DNA and must be stored under ultra-cold
conditions. RNA is used to isolate specific gene sequences using reverse-transcriptase
PCR and to establish gene libraries containing all expressed DNA sequences (i.e.

Leshe Christidis & Fanette Ann Norman 55 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

those portions of the DNA that encode genes). These are termed Expression Sequence
Tagged or EST libraries.

DNA from museum specimens: advantages

As discussed above, DNA that is suitable for analysis can be obtained from bone,
feather bases, scrapings of foot pads and pieces of skin from museum specimens.
The success of this is related to the age of the specimen. The older the specimen the
more degraded is the DNA (Paabo 1989). However, there is also variation between
similarly aged specimens. Moreover, from some individuals it almost impossible to
extract DNA. This might be a reflection of the types of preservatives used (Cooper
1993). DNA can sometimes be obtained from formalin preserved material (Shibata
1994), but formalin fixation causes significant sequence alterations (Williams ef al.
1999) which can be misinterpreted as genetic variation. Nevertheless, protocols for
obtaining good-quality DNA from formalin-fixed specimens are continually being
developed (e.g. Coombs ef al. 1999, Shi et al. 2002).

DNA studies based on frozen tissue samples can suffer from a lack of coverage
of species and geographical areas in current collections. The availability of appropriate
samples has been identified as a severe bottleneck for molecular evolutionary studies
(Arctander & Fyeldsa 1994, Winker et al. 1996). Omland et al. (1999) pointed out
the importance of comprehensive species coverage, including subspecies, in
constructing well-resolved molecular phylogenies. The ability to use existing museum
skins (e.g. Dumbacher & Fleischer 2001) and skeletons for DNA-based studies (e.g.
Paxinos et al. 2002, Shapiro et al. 2002) therefore provides an enormous resource in
terms of species coverage, localities, the number of specimens and temporal sampling.
Using museum skins is often the only way of working on rare, endangered (Norman
& Christidis 1997) or extinct (Christidis et al. 1996) species. Instead of leaving out
such critical species, museum skins allow their inclusion in molecular phylogenetic
studies.

Museum collections also provide an historical perspective, as the specimen series
from some regions can span decades. Such temporal series can be used to investigate
the onset and impact of recent hybridisation events, range expansions and
contractions, and allow us to investigate temporal variation in levels of genetic
diversity (e.g. Thomas et al. 1990, Lambert et al. 2002, Paxinos et al. 2002).

DNA from museum specimens: disadvantages

Despite the advantages of coverage provided by existing skin and skeletal collections,
there are several limitations and problems associated with only using such material
for DNA studies.

The most obvious concern is that such sampling requires the removal of feathers,
skin or other material from fragile and valuable specimens (Graves & Braun 1992).
It is a form of destructive specimen sampling. While this may not be a problem for
common species where numerous specimens will exist in collections, it will be of

Leshe Christidis & Fanette Ann Norman 56 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

concern when rare, extinct or unique material is sampled. Furthermore, it is with
these latter taxa that tissue material will most probably be unavailable and taxonomic
or evolutionary questions will exist. Consequently, it is on such valuable specimens
that most pressure will be placed (Graves & Braun 1992).

Another problem with using museum specimens relates to the quality of the
DNA obtained. DNA from museum skins and skeletons is degraded (Paabo et al.
1989, Handt et al. 1994). Therefore, the DNA fragments that can be amplified using
PCR will often be small, around 200 base pairs or fewer (Handt et al. 1994). From
fresh material it is possible routinely to amplify fragments of 1,000 to 2,000 base
pairs. Another limitation of using museum skins and skeletons is that only relatively
small amounts of DNA can be obtained. Both these factors will increase the time
and costs of a DNA study. With the relatively small amounts of DNA that will be
obtained there will be a limit as to the number of PCR reactions that can be performed
from any one extraction.

There are also age-related artefacts where post-mortem changes in the DNA can
be misinterpreted as genetic variation. This is most likely to be a problem when
analysing microsatellites (Gagneux et al. 1997).

A bigger concern with using museum skins and skeletons for DNA study is
ensuring that the correct genome is being sampled. There are two problems here.
The first is contamination. Because only small amounts of degraded DNA will be
obtained from museum specimens there is a greater risk that extraneous DNA from
other sources will be preferentially amplified (Handt et al. 1994). Controls and
stringent laboratory techniques are critical to avoiding contamination in such studies.

The second problem, harder to control, is validation of the sequences. Most
phylogenetic studies concentrate on the rapidly evolving mitochondrial genome
(Avise 1994). However, it is now well established that multiple copies of
mitochondrial genes can exist in the nuclear genome (Sorenson & Quinn 1998,
Nielsen & Arctander 2001). Using PCR there is always the possibility that a nuclear
copy of a mitochondrial gene will be amplified instead. Comparing a mixture of
mitochondrial and nuclear sequences in a phylogenetic analysis will lead to highly
misleading results (e.g. Arctander 1995).

With frozen tissue samples it is possible to purify mitochondrial DNA (Tamura
& Aotsuka 1988), thereby decreasing the chance of amplifying nuclear copies of
mitochondrial genes. Unfortunately, this is not possible with museum skins given
the degraded nature of the DNA. One approach is to obtain sequences from purified
mitochondrial DNA and from total DNA extracted from museum skins for the same
species, and then compare the two to confirm that similar sequences are being obtained
from both DNA sources (e.g. Norman et al. 1998).

Museums and tissue collections

It is clear from the previous discussion that traditional skin and skeletal collections
alone are not sufficient for DNA-based evolutionary studies. These collections should
be seen as a supplement to continued tissue bank development. Even so, museums

Leshe Christidis & Fanette Ann Norman af) Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

are generally the most appropriate institutions for establishing specialist tissue

collections. They have the expertise and facilities for long-term taxonomic research,

collection and data management, and are often the official regional faunal repositories.
In establishing tissue collections, issues that need to be considered include:

e types of tissues to be stored

e whether to link all tissues to vouchers
e methods of preservation

e storage facilities

Obtaining tissue samples

When collecting specimens, skeletal muscle, heart and liver provide excellent sources
of DNA. However, liver should only be collected from freshly dead birds as the
DNA in liver degrades more rapidly. When sampling DNA from specimens that
have been dead for some weeks, feathers or foot pads provide the best source of
relatively undegraded DNA.

For non-destructive sampling, blood and feathers are both suitable (Arctander &
Fjeldsa 1994). The removal of body feathers is preferred as it is much simpler, and
adequate DNA samples can be obtained from one or two body feathers of larger
species. While pin feathers provide the best source of DNA these are not always
easy to obtain. To minimise harm to the bird it may also be better to obtain several
body feathers than one or two primaries.

Taking blood samples is more complicated as it causes stress to the bird and
requires certain skills on the part of the field researcher. With blood there is also a
greater chance of amplifying nuclear copies of mitochondrial genes because avian
red cells are nucleated and have low concentrations of mitochondria (Quinn 1992,
Sorenson & Quinn 1998).

The need for linkage to vouchers

Concerns have been raised on the use of tissues or feathers that are not linked to
voucher specimens in DNA studies (Winker et al. 1996). These are valid for
phylogenetic studies where each species may only be represented by one individual.
Misidentification of a specimen can have serious effects here. Consequently, vouchers
are necessary for species that are hard to identify from other similar-looking species,
where hybridisation is an issue, and where cryptic species may be suspected to exist.

For population studies of easily identified birds the need for vouchers may not
be as great. Even for difficult species misidentification may be a minor problem if
material is obtained from experienced researchers dealing with a local population
study. Researchers studying the ecology and behaviour of a particular species can
provide non-destructive samples of feathers and blood without the risk of
misidentification. In fact, this is one fruitful way of obtaining material from highly
threatened species. Wildlife managers involved in the translocation of individuals
can collect non-destructive samples, which can then be used for DNA study. It is

Leslie Christidis & Fanette Ann Norman 58 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

relatively easy to carry appropriate sample tubes routinely, so that material suitable
for DNA study can be obtained whenever a bird is being handled.

Museums need to develop strategies on how to deal with such non-voucher-
based samples. Rejecting all tissue/feather material without vouchers may appear to
be a sound scientific policy but it is also highly restrictive, particularly for population
studies. Museum curators and collection managers are in the best position to ascertain
the quality of material, in terms of identification and use, before incorporating it
into tissue banks. Such material should be flagged as lacking a voucher as this may
impact on the type of study for which it is later used.

Methods of tissue preservation

The most effective long-term method of storing tissue for molecular analyses is
ultra-cold freezing. This requires a significant commitment in facilities for a museum.
Ultra-cold freezers are expensive and require some form of back-up system. Field
collecting for ultra-cold storage is also difficult. Obtaining and transporting liquid
nitrogen and dry ice is not practical in many field situations. Servicing loans is also
a complicated process in terms of the practicalities of transporting frozen material
and quarantine issues. Standard freezers are not a good option for long-term tissue
storage, as some enzyme activity will continue at that temperature which will lead
to degradation of the DNA.

There are alternative storage methods for tissues. Tissue samples can be stored
in ethanol and used for DNA analyses (e.g. Houde & Braun 1988). While ethanol
may not be an ideal system for long-term storage compared to ultra-cold freezers, it
does have many practical advantages. It is more cost-effective for smaller museums
and those in less developed countries. No additional storage facilities are required,
as most museums already have ethanol-preserved specimens. Ethanol storage is also
highly convenient for field collecting, although this may not be the case in countries
where alcohol is prohibited on religious grounds.

The DNA from ethanol-preserved specimens will degrade to some extent due to
endonuclease activity (Houde & Braun 1988). Although ethanol stops endonuclease
activity, it is important that the ethanol permeate the tissue sample completely and
rapidly. Tissue samples should be sectioned into small portions so that this can occur.
It is also important that the samples be stored in such a way that evaporation of the
ethanol is minimised, and that only highly pure ethanol is used.

Tissues can also be stored in a variety of buffer solutions at room temperature
(Amos & Hoelzel 1991, Seutin et al. 1991, Arctander & Fjeldsa 1994). For long-
term storage refrigeration is probably better. The drawback with buffers is that access
to distilled water, fine balances and autoclaves is required to prepare the buffer
solutions. Although Arctander & Fjeldsa (1994) were able to extract DNA with no
detectable degradation from material stored in buffers for five years, our experience
has been that buffer-stored material provides variable results.

One limitation of both ethanol- and buffer-stored material is that it may not always
be possible to obtain purified mitochondrial DNA. This can be a problem where
nuclear copies of mitochondrial genes are an issue.

Leshe Christidis & Fanette Ann Norman 3) Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Storage facilities

As not all museums will have the capabilities to establish ultra-cold tissue banks,
alternative systems need to be considered. The pooling of resources across museums
and establishing centralised ultra-cold tissue collections is a possible solution. An
advantage to users is that it is easier to source material from a single centralised
collection. For the participating museums issues relating to individual roles,
responsibilities, databasing, acknowledgment and benefits would need to be
addressed.

Ethanol tissue storage should be possible for all museums, and is suitable for
most samples. However, some material from highly rare species should still be kept
in an ultra-cold facility. At least some representation of each species should also be
stored in ultra-cold conditions. A combination of centralised ultra-cold and individual
ethanol tissue banks is an option worth exploring.

Responsibilities of museums and users

Samples for DNA work are a form of destructive sampling. Therefore it is important
that the objectives and scope of the work are defined before loans are approved
(Arctander & Fyeldsa 1994). With requests for feathers, skin or bone from museum
specimens, material should not be provided until a strong case is presented that the
requesting researcher has the technical skills, experimental design and facilities to
extract and sequence DNA from such material.

For all DNA studies, the material should only be used for the agreed specified
project (Arctander & Fjeldsa 1994). All excess material and DNA must be sent back
and material or DNA should not be given to a third party without prior consent.

It is important that researchers include accession numbers of the tissues and
vouchers when they publish sequences. This is needed so that the same bird is not
sequenced by different laboratories and then treated as an additional data point.
Information on locality and subspecies should be included as well (Hackett er ail.
1995). The collection and collectors (if appropriate) should be acknowledged in
publications. Such information is taken for granted when morphological analyses
are published but it has not been common practice in molecular studies. Museums
can play a role in introducing such rigour by making it a condition of using either
museum specimens or tissues for DNA work.

When using material that is not linked to a voucher, it is still important that there
is a tissue accession number and that it be cited in the publication. Again this is to
ensure that specimens can be tracked across studies. It is also useful to have
researchers provide the sequence information to the museum so that this information
can be then linked directly to the specimen’s database record.

Researchers not linked to museums but who have collected material for their
own Studies should be encouraged to lodge any material left after completion of
their study with an appropriate museum. Often this excess material lies forgotten in
university freezers or drawers and is eventually discarded. This 1s a loss of potentially

Leshe Christidis & Fanette Ann Norman 60 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

very useful material that should be accessible to the wider scientific community by
being incorporated into a museum collection.

Museums which have made an effort to build up DNA collections are often
reluctant to provide samples to research groups that consistently make no effort to
supplement these collections or to contribute their own resources towards securing
material. Some museums have responded to this issue by imposing charges for
tissue loans, but this is contrary to the spirit of cooperation that has been the tradition
of museum specimen-based research. The imposition of charges ultimately
discourages researchers from lodging material in museums. More positive
approaches would be to (1) build alliances between institutions and researchers
that undertake molecular systematic and evolutionary research and are willing to
provide material to each other when needed; and (2) encourage non-museum
researchers who make loan requests for DNA material to collect (where possible)
and lodge material in appropriate museum collections. Museums have a
responsibility to ensure appropriate use of their collections. As with any loan request
we have the right of refusal if it is deemed to make inappropriate use or places
excessive demands on the collection.

Future directions for museum collections and DNA research

In developing tissue collections museums need to identify those areas that are poorly
covered in current holdings in terms of species and geographical distributions. It is
important that the development of tissue banks be integrated with that of skin and
skeletal collections. All specimens collected should have material lodged as either
frozen or ethanol-preserved tissue.

Another factor that needs to be considered when developing tissue banks is the
type of study the collections are being used for. The most common use for DNA
material from museums is for studies addressing systematic and phylogenetic
questions. Often the requests for material involve single representatives from species
and subspecies. There is less call for material to be used in population studies, even
though avian molecular ecology has been a rapidly growing area in recent years.
These latter studies require larger numbers of individuals per species, but few species
are currently represented by large numbers of frozen tissue samples (Arctander &
Fjeldsa 1994).

Museums can take active measures to become more relevant for population and
ecological studies. Museums are often the regional repositories for fauna found dead.
Tissue or feather samples should be routinely obtained from all specimens lodged
with a museum. In this way large collections of the commoner species will
accumulate.

With most museums that were contacted, the greatest users of the tissue banks
were internal staff from the museums themselves. The development of tissue banks
and in-house expertise and facilities for molecular-based research were correlated.
This is understandable given that collection development is often driven by the
research interests of curators. This is a strong reason why the collecting of material
suitable for DNA study should be integrated with general collection growth.

Leslie Christidis & Fanette Ann Norman 61 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Enhancing existing museum collections

Museums should also be aware that DNA technology has the potential to add
information to existing collections. Several PCR-based DNA markers have been
developed that are sex-linked across a range of taxa (Griffiths et al. 1998).
Consequently, it might be possible to sex museum specimens using DNA. This would
be of benefit with unique or rare unsexed specimens, immatures or those with doubtful
sex assignments. Clearly the costs involved would make this avenue only appropriate
where sex information is critical. DNA sequencing has also been used to determine
the taxonomic status of species based on a single museum specimen (Joseph et al.
1999). DNA information can determine whether the unique specimens represent
colour variants, preservational artefacts or species hybrids. In all the above examples
DNA studies can be used to enhance the information content of collections.

Acknowledgements
We thank Jon Fjeldsa for providing valuable and insightful comments on the manuscript as a referee.

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Addresses: L. Christidis & J. A. Norman, Department of Sciences, Museum Victoria, GPO Box 666E
Melbourne, Australia 3001.

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

K. M. Rajkowski 65 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

DNA and protein sequence databanks: some caveats
by K. M. Rajkowsk1

It is known that conventional museums contain specimens that are mislabelled,
incomplete or so damaged as to be unusable, and that some specimens will have
been mislaid or lost. It is less obvious that ‘silicon museums’, such as Genbank and
EMBL, which comprise collections of DNA and protein sequence data, also suffer
from similar problems. With these problems comes the corresponding risk of
compromising increasingly popular molecular phylogenetic studies. Here, types of
problem and reasons for suspicion of certain sequences, as well as examples of the
inutility of others, are outlined and methods for detecting some errors proposed.

Examples were found in the 2,470 mitochondrial cytochrome b sequence entries
obtained by searching the EMBL v.60.0/EMBLNEW vyv.61.0 databank, updated to 3
November 1999 (5,087,527 sequences), using the keyword ‘cytochrome b’. Each
entry consists of a /abel, identifying and describing the origins of the sequence, and
a specimen, the DNA and translated protein sequences.

Problem entries included: (1) specimens too fragmentary for use—as few as 13
nucleotide base pairs. Only a minority of specimens are of the minimum number of
base pairs (approx. 900) needed for protein molecular phylogenies when other genes
for the correponding species have not been sequenced (as is mostly the case); (2)
specimens where the proportion of undetermined nucleotides was so large that the
sequence was unusable; (3) specimens where the DNA sequence had been translated
into the protein sequence using the wrong genetic code (nuclear instead of
mitochondrial); and (4) specimens not identified to species level (i.e. unlabelled).
Mislaid specimens, not found in the search but present in the databank, included 14
Phylloscopus (leaf-warbler) sequences (because of a typing error in their labels
[“cytochorome b’]), and 44 sequences for Corvidae (crows), Sylviidae (warblers)
and Timaliidae (babblers) only found using other keywords. Lost specimens included
seven Phylloscopus sequences published in 1992 but still absent from the databanks.
Furthermore, many entries were confirmatory replicates that could be combined
into a single sequence entry with the corresponding annotations on the label.

While many such problem entries should be detectable with appropriate computer
programmes rather than ‘manually’ searching through (in the case of cytochrome b
sequences) some 3,000 pages of text, the problem of sequencing errors remains. It is
estimated that, on average, 0.1% of the nucleotides in databanks are mis-sequenced
and, for methodological reasons, errors will be more frequent in some sequences
than others. Some probable nucleotide sequencing errors are detectable provided
they give rise to improbable amino acid substitutions in the translated protein, and
for this reason it is recommended that the protein sequence be compared with those
of related species prior to using the nucleotide sequence in a phylogenetic study or,
preferably, before submitting it to a databank.

Address : K. M. Rajkowski, INSERM Unité 488, Hopital de Bicétre, F-94276 Le Kremlin-Bicétre, France.

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

Pamela C. Rasmussen & Robert P Prys-fones 66 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

History vs mystery:
the reliability of museum specimen data

by Pamela C. Rasmussen & Robert PR Prys-Fones

SUMMARY

Museum specimens are consistently the most reliable source of many types of information
for bird species. While the vast majority of bird specimens provide accurate data that
form the baseline of knowledge of bird distributions, a small percentage of specimens
carry various types of misinformation, and to maximise the utility of specimen data and
avoid perpetuation of errors, users need to be aware of and able to evaluate these problems.
This paper discusses and provides examples of many types of misinformation on specimen
labels, which include over-generalised or untraceable locality information, careless
labelling, consequences of the profit motive among dealers, inadequate training and
supervision of collectors, inappropriate curatorial techniques, problems in deciphering
and interpreting label data, and fraud. Inadvertent problems such as imprecision and
untraceability of localities and other data, as well as subsequent improper curatorial
treatment, are common among older specimens, while known cases in which specimen
data have been intentionally compromised tend to be rare and small-scale. The most notable
exception is the Meinertzhagen Collection, which contains numerous stolen specimens
bearing fraudulent data, as well as important specimens with genuine data.

Introduction

The collectors’ old adage “What’s hit is history, what’s missed is mystery’ reflects a
deep-seated and well-founded belief in the importance of the tangible evidence
represented by the museum specimen. Certainly when compared with the multitude
of chronic problems associated with sight records Gokingly summed up as: ‘I wouldn't
have seen it if I hadn’t believed it’), specimen documentation allows more critical
and objective study, not only now but also in the future, when new technology and
methodology may be available. It is, however, self-evident that the accumulation,
maintenance and interpretation of ornithological specimens will continue to be subject
to errors of various types and, to a lesser extent, to pathological behaviours; indeed,
the literature is replete with suspected or confirmed cases of problematic specimen
data. Even so, specimens are being increasingly used in many applications by persons
distant from, and unfamiliar with, the historical framework that makes many
specimen-related problems transparent, so these data are often uncritically assimilated
in the literature. The subject of specimen-based misinformation in ornithology seems
not to have been reviewed, a deficit this paper attempts to redress in support of a
more confident and accurate utilisation of museum material by future workers.

We review specimen-related misinformation of various categories, beginning
with the often pervasive but typically minor types of ‘noise’ due to carelessness and
casual error, and progress through to rarer but more pernicious (on a case-by-case
basis) instances of outright fraud involving specimens. However, the ubiquity of the
minor types of specimen misinformation probably makes their cumulative negative

Pamela C. Rasmussen & Robert P Prys-fones 67 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

effect on ornithology greater than for fraud. Our focus is on the numerous problems
that can arise from the specimens and their associated data, but we stress that the
very existence of the specimen enables independent, scientific evaluation of its
validity, and that some such methods deserve more widespread application. By its
nature, the matter under discussion typically involves individual collectors, but our
concern is exposition of the problems, over and above personal considerations.

Outside the scope of our review are: specimen-based (and extremely important)
sources of error such as misidentifications, hybrids and aberrant or composite
individuals; lost or destroyed specimen documentation; and mistakes and
misinterpretations of specimen data in specimen catalogues, the published record
(as distinguished from errors in baseline data) and, increasingly, in databases. While
we recognise that specimen data problems stemming from the earlier years of
ornithology are even more prevalent and often less readily solved than more recent
ones, our discussion primarily focuses on the latter half of the nineteenth century
and later. This review provides a sample of the various types of specimen
misinformation. Many additional cases have been published; others are undoubtedly
known to living researchers who have not set them in writing; and others surely
remain undetected or are long-forgotten. There is an extended history of critical
appraisal of specimen records, typically on a regional basis, and comment will be
found on the reliability of many major collections, especially the early ones, in
scattered sources. Because resolutions to certain problems may seem obvious to a
few but not to most, a compilation of such problems to improve the reliability and
utility of ornithological collections worldwide would be a valuable long-term goal
to serve current and future researchers when evaluating the probability of error or
fraud in specimen data of a given collection or type.

Collectors and error

Data-poor labels

Many older museum specimens have little or no associated data. In part this is due
to ambiguity or uncertainty over old national borders, but also because early scientists
and collectors were unaware of the importance of precise label data, so that it was
exceptional for labels to be written in the field. As a result, many early species
descriptions were based on specimens of unknown, questionable or mistaken
provenance. The demand for new zoological material was overwhelming, and in the
early descriptive years it seemed of little consequence whether a new species came
from Brazil or Peru. Since many exotic natural history specimens resulted from
round-the-world expeditions, it was not uncommon for specimens to be attributed
after a voyage to localities in the wrong hemispheres, witness the following
Neotropical species with Old World type localities or vice versa: Collared Puffbird
Bucco capensis, in which the specific name supposes an origin in South Africa rather
than the Guianas; Metriopelia inornata, a synonym of the Spotted Dove Streptopelia
chinensis, erroneously described as from Brazil instead of Java (Warren 1966); and

Pamela C. Rasmussen & Robert P Prys-fones 68 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Buff-throated Purpletuft Pardalotus pipra Lesson (now Iodopleura pipra), who
described it as ‘a Trinquemalé sur la c6te de Ceylan’, proposed as an error for Rio de
Janeiro by Hellmayr (1915). Several specimens of Hawaiian birds were labelled as
from Chile, on the same shipping route to Europe, one misleading Sclater (1862)
into listing an ‘Elepaio Chasiempis sandwichensis as an undetermined tyrannid
(Olson 1989); also, a specimen that almost certainly represents the type of the
vanished Oahu Thrush Myadestes lanaiensis woahensis was registered as ‘Sandw
Isl. or Chil’ (Olson 1996). This could happen by purchase of specimens at ports, by
failure to label specimens en route, or by lack of communication between voyager
and dealer or naturalist working up the results. The necessarily routine restriction
and/or correction of early type localities was sometimes based on questionable or
misinterpreted evidence, adding yet another level of uncertainty or error (Dickerman
IOS):

Generalised locality data on older specimens risks misleading modern workers
because of changes in the geographical applications of names: specimens simply
labelled ‘Bengal’ cannot now be certainly attributed to country (either India or
Bangladesh), much less to a more specific locality (Husain & Sarker 1972); ‘India’
on old labels could mean a much broader region than now, including areas far to the
east; and ‘Punjab’ specimens without more specific localities could be from either
present-day India or Pakistan. Numerous species were attributed to the avifauna of
Bhutan owing to a misinterpretation of ‘Bhootan Duars’, which now lie entirely
within India. Many of T. C. Jerdon’s historic Indian bird specimens were labelled as
from ‘Madras’, which then included a large portion of southern India, not just the
city recently renamed Chennai.

Incomplete or generalised label data can also often be misleading on smaller
scales. A taxon described from southern Sulawesi, now Rufous Fantail Rhipidura
rufifrons celebensis Biittikofer 1893, was shown by Hartert (1896) to have been
collected from smaller adjacent Tanahjampea. Although Curl-crested Manucode
Manucodia comrii Sclater 1876 was described from the Huon Gulf, the type actually
came from Fergusson Island (Frith & Beehler 1998). Specimens reportedly collected
in Leyte, Philippines, were actually from the small island of Buad (Parkes 1965).
Often, rather general place names were used for all specimens originating from a
given segment of an expedition: Ancon was the locality recorded on the labels of 43
Peruvian Diving-petrels Pelecanoides garnotii, although it seems more likely that
they were from the offshore Islas Pescadores (Collar et al. 1992). Some Ethiopian
specimens of White-winged Flufftail Sarothrura ayresi were labelled ‘Entotto’, which
is a ridge of wooded hills, but it overlooks the far more plausible, marshy Sululta
(Ash 1978).

Of course, many localities at which birds have been collected are known by
names shared with other localities. Some common ones such as ‘Rio Grande’ are
especially troublesome: in Bolivia, avian specimens bearing this name come from
at least two different localities (Remsen et al. 1986). An attempt to trace “Santa
Maria, Oriente’ on Cuba for Cuban Parakeet Aratinga euops was defeated by the

Pamela C. Rasmussen & Robert PR Prys-fones 69 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

sheer number of options in the available gazetteers (Collar et al. 1992:300); and
attempts to trace ‘Fategarh’ (or, e.g., “Futtegurh’) and ‘Rampur’ in various parts of
India were likewise compromised by the glut of such names in their various
permutations (Collar 2001:13). Within Afghanistan, specimens have been collected
at two Faizabads, on opposite sides of the country (PCR unpubl.). An ‘Allahabad’
specimen of Collared Pratincole Glareola pratincola, long thought (and recently
mapped as) a vagrant to Uttar Pradesh, north-central India, is clearly really from
one of several Allahabads in Pakistan, a locality specified by earlier workers and
well within the species’s known breeding range (Rasmussen & Anderton in press).
Similar problems with African collecting localities are discussed by Dowsett (1972b),
Morgan et al. (1978), Snow & Louette (1981), and Irwin (1991).

Careless labelling

It is typically difficult and frequently impossible to prove that any given specimen
bears unreliable data, and efforts to do so often involve a degree of circular reasoning.
Cautionary comments on certain collectors are commonplace, e.g. on Goodfellow
and Hamilton (Zimmer 1947), Swainson (Parker & Benson 1971), Loria (Somadikarta
1975), A. Garrett (Holyoak & Thibault 1978), R. H. Lefevre (Meyer de Schauensee
in Greenwood 1980), Doggett (Jackson in Cunningham-van Someren 1981) and A.
Ruiz (Blair in McGowan & Massa 1990), but objective evaluation is needed in each
case.

Charles Hose is best known for his pioneering Bornean collections, and had
several birds named after him. However, after a short trip to northern Sulawesi in
1895, he reported four species new to that island (Hose 1903), including one new to
science (Dicaeum hosii Sharpe 1897). The material of D. hosii was later shown
(Stresemann 1940) to comprise two mislabelled Bornean flowerpeckers and another
of a known Sulawesi species. Another species (Pied Fantail Rhipidura javanica
nigritorquis) reported from northern Sulawesi by Hose (1903) is otherwise only
known from the Philippines, and the remaining two novelties are also questionable
(White 1974). These apparent errors were formerly attributed to the once-common
practice of attaching printed labels to specimens a posteriori (White 1974), but the
considerable problems with Hose (1903) suggest more catastrophic lapses on his
part (see Collar 2001:792).

Several Southern Ocean procellariiform species have long been on the North
American list (main or hypothetical: AOU 1983) on the basis of specimens that J. K.
Townsend sent to Audubon, saying they had been procured near the mouth of the
Columbia River, between Oregon and Washington (Stone 1930). Townsend, who
also sent Audubon a Chilean finch Brachyspiza which the latter innocently named
Fringilla mortoni (Stone 1930), is assumed to have been careless in labelling.

A number of specimens from Paraguay collected by Schulze and Haack in 1939
have caused considerable confusion: the locality (235 km W of the Riacho Negro)
has proved difficult to pinpoint, their field numbers are out of sequence, dates spent
at what seem to be two different sites overlap broadly, the collection contains a

Pamela C. Rasmussen & Robert P Prys-Fones 70 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

mixture of Chaco and Oriente species, and the labels are typewritten, indicating the
strong probability of their having been prepared subsequent to the expedition (Short
S72 rlayess995)):

Hugh Cuming (a well-known malacologist and plant collector, but the namesake
of Tabon Scrubfowl Megapodius cumingi and Scale-feathered Malkoha
Phaenicophaeus cumingi) was disparaged as the authority for several species from
Sri Lanka by Layard (1880), who wrote ‘I should be very loth to accept a “habitat”
on the ground that Cuming had stated it’. Cuming’s collection included the only
record for Sri Lanka of Broad-tailed Grassbird Schoenicola platyura (otherwise a
narrow Western Ghats endemic), a record which has received cautious acceptance
to this day (see Collar 2001:2199). The Schoenicola specimen is said to have come
in with others collected in Sri Lanka by T. Thwaites (Sharpe 1906), and Natural
History Museum (NHM) records do not readily elucidate its acceptability. However,
Cuming has also been blamed for mixing up T. Bridges’s specimens from Bolivia,
Chile and Argentina (Sclater & Salvin 1879), and his Philippine localities have been
considered unreliable (Parkes 1961, Parkes 1988, Dickinson et al. 1991). Regarding
Cuming’s vast shell collection, it is agreed that, owing to his own carelessness and
that of those who cared for his collection, many specimens are wrongly labelled or
have lost their data (Dance 1966). Given such independent support for Layard’s
concerns about accepting locality records from specimens dealt or collected by
Cuming, lone Cuming specimens, such as the Schoenicola, cannot be accepted as
vouchers.

The failure of some collectors to label their specimens properly meant that
mistakes in the hands of their agents were inevitable. Richard Crossley’s pioneering
Madagascar collections all passed first through a dealer’s hands, and mistakes
evidently occurred when the usual letter recounting Crossley’s itinerary failed to
accompany a shipment (Sharpe 1875, Rasmussen er al. 2000). M. Humblot dispersed
his Comoran scops owl specimens through various agencies, and thus they bear
different ‘original’ labels depending on the dealer or institution that handled them,
suggesting subsequent labelling. This probably explains a Humblot specimen labelled
‘Grand Comoro’ but identical with Anjouan Scops Owl Otus capnodes of Anjouan
and quite unlike Comoro Scops Owl O. pauliani of Grand Comoro (Rasmussen et
al. 2000).

Many early collectors did not have ready-made paper labels, and often used cut-
up scraps, relied on memory, or sent birds back in batches using a general locality
name. Subsequent assumptions are unreliable. Charles Darwin failed to label his
now-famous Galapagos finches until ‘after leaving the Galapagos Archipelago in
late October 1835’ (Sulloway 1982a:27), resulting in considerable confusion and
even unwarranted doubts as to the provenance of some of Captain Fitzroy’s own
carefully labelled specimens. Sharpe (1879) considered the Sulu Islands the source
of a single Reddish Scops Owl Otus rufescens that had come in unlabelled
(Guillemard 1885) along with specimens both from the Sulus and Borneo; he did
not venture to name it, but Hachisuka (1934) did so, apparently assuming the

Pamela C. Rasmussen & Robert P Prys-fones 71 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

correctness of the locality Sharpe had ascribed it to. The fact that the bird matches
darker examples in the now-larger series from Borneo means that Otus rufescens
cannot be maintained on the Philippines list (Dickinson et al. 1991).

The large collections of specimens from the Yucatan Peninsula and Cozumel
amassed by George Gaumer were received enthusiastically in museums, and formed
the basis of numerous descriptions of taxa and several papers. Three species of
Chaetura alone were described by G. N. Lawrence from Gaumer’s material, although
for one Gaumer apparently sent Lawrence ‘20 tails and one entire bird’ (Greenway
1978). For many years, very little else was known of birds of the region, and only
later, when other collections began to come in, especially from the islands off Yucatan,
did something seem amiss with Gaumer’s specimens. So many of his records stood
alone or flew in the face of other data that Paynter (1955) became sceptical of them.
Nevertheless, Thompson (1962) published a number of Gaumer specimens as new
regional records, prompting Parkes (1970) to set out the apparent problems with the
material, including Gaumer’s habit of sending boxes of unlabelled specimens to
museums, where ‘Yucatan’ labels would be attached. Many records of mainland
species for small islands off Yucatan and for Cozumel are still only based on Gaumer
specimens, including groups typically lacking on islands such as woodcreepers and
antbirds. For this reason a special category based only on Gaumer specimens was
created in a table of Mexican island bird distributions (Howell & Webb 1995).
Occasionally, however, species long known from Cozumel only by Gaumer skins
have since been found there, e.g. Yucatan Flycatcher Myiarchus yucatanensis (Lanyon
1965, Parkes & Phillips 1967), illustrating the dangers of becoming over-sceptical
(see also Smith 2001).

Even in recent times the problem of post hoc labelling has adversely affected
what ought to have been valuable material. A very large collection amassed by Mario
del Toro Avilés in Mexico is flawed owing to his labelling specimens long after their
collection, sometimes perhaps not until they had been requested by a museum; he
even admitted that a series he had labelled as from Oaxaca was actually from Puebla
(Binford 1989). Some unique records from one side or other of the Isthmus of
Tehuantepec, and new taxa described (e.g. Saw-whet Owl Aegolius acadicus
brodkorbi) on the basis of the del Toro Avilés collection, therefore require
confirmation (Binford 1989, Peterson & Nieto-Montes 1996).

The reliability of local collectors

Many naturalists employed iocals to do their collecting, often not even accompanying
them into the field. Frequently these employees excelled at the work, and obviously
achieved a great deal. Inevitably, however, such staff could not be expected always
to produce specimens with reliable data. Sdderstrom’s native collectors in Ecuador
wrapped but did not attach bands of paper with locality and sex data around their
Specimens, and these easily became mixed up, leading Chapman (1926:735) to
comment ruefully: “Inaccuracies of this kind cast a suspicion on all records which
do not conform to the normal and thereby prevent papers based on native-made

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collections from adding much that is new to existing information in regard to
distribution.’ Leprosy forced the Penards, who assembled the first true series of bird
specimens from Surinam, to rely on local collectors, and several species otherwise
unknown from the country are represented in their huge egg collection, identified
only by their assistants without confirmatory data (Haverschmidt 1955).

Louis Mandelli, a tea plantation manager in Darjeeling (Pinn 1985), provided
local collectors with monetary advances, guns and ammunition, and (despite some
abscondings and deceptions) thereby amassed a huge collection, by far the largest
ever assembled in the central Himalayas. Unfortunately, the specimens have minimal
data, such as ‘Native Sikkim’, “Thibet’, ‘Bhotan Doars’, no indication of altitude,
and no safe indication of sex (Brooks 1880, Pinn 1985). It is furthermore possible
that none of his specimens is really from Tibet, owing to the then-undefined borders
(Vaurie 1972).

Many of Nepal’s birds were discovered in the early nineteenth century by Brian
Hodgson (Inskipp & Inskipp 1985), who was stationed (and under orders to remain)
in Kathmandu and its Valley; thus he was obliged to rely on collectors (Cocker &
Inskipp 1988). He took abundant notes and trained local artists to make coloured
illustrations that serve as the types of many species (although by today’s standards
these would be considered nomina nuda). Now the country is relatively well known,
but several of his species have not been found there again. This might be due to
habitat loss, but so much uncertainty surrounds the exact provenance of some
specimens (Cocker & Inskipp 1988) that an origin farther east cannot be ruled out.
Even so, Hodgson’s ‘Nepal’ material is less problematic than his later specimens
labelled ‘Behar’ and ‘India’. Those labelled ‘India’ by G. R. Gray (who in accordance
with then current museum practice destroyed the original labels) are Himalayan; the
preparation style 1s that of Hodgson’s Nepal collectors, not his Indian ones; and they
were independently considered by Thomas Moore to be from Sikkim (Horsfield &
Moore 1854, Sharpe 1906:386).

A problem particularly acute in the Andes was the failure of some early collectors
to record altitudes, for example with Salmon (Chapman 1917) and Sdderstrom’s
collectors (Zimmer 1948:32). Reliance on local collectors often meant that specimens
were labelled at a central point such as the camp, as with Sdderstrom (Chapman
1926); in the cases of Buckley, Goodfellow and Hamilton even determination of the
slope from which specimens came is impossible (Chapman 1926, Zimmer 1951b:35).
Tibetan material from the 1924 Mount Everest Expedition was collected by local
help, and nearly all the birds are labelled, without specific locality, as being from
‘10,000 ft’, an unconvincing altitudinal uniformity (Vaurie 1972:68-69).

The reliability of testimony of local collectors can have major implications for
conservation. Two twentieth-century examples come from Thailand. One concerns
the almost mythical White-eyed River Martin Eurochelidon sirintarae, the only
specimens of which are a small series supplied by local people in response to a
broadcast appeal for live wild birds for ringing. According to Thonglongya (1968)
the birds were trapped by throwing a net over reedbeds at Bung Boraphet, but a

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technical assistant subsequently reported that the birds were brought to the research
team’s hotel, so that neither the habitat nor the type locality can be entirely certain
(P. D. Round in Collar 2001:1946-1947). However, the specimen labels have no
indication of doubt as to the locality, thus lending false confidence to a provenance
that is otherwise supported only by unconfirmed sight reports.

The second and more telling case, which could perhaps be treated under the
heading ‘Fraud’ below, concerned what were for 50 years the last published records
of Gurney’s Pitta Pitta gurneyi, including the first recorded fledgling: these were
supposedly collected at 600—1,060 m on the mountain Khao Phanom Bencha, in
southern Thailand (Meyer de Schauensee 1946). These records went unquestioned
until the compilation of all other evidence on the species led P. D. Round to perceive
that, with the exception of these specimens, Gurney’s Pitta is an extreme lowland
specialist (Collar et al. 1986). Ultimately the species was relocated at this mountain,
but only at its base; searches higher up were futile (see Collar 2001). As other
exclusively lowland species were also represented in Meyer de Schauensee’s
‘montane’ collection, it became apparent that his unaccompanied native collectors
had not.ascended the mountain, but had labelled specimens in the pretence of having
done so (Round & Treesucon 1986, Round 1995).

Dealers and error

Commercial imprecision

The once-thriving business of dealing in natural history objects has long been a
source of distrust among ornithologists. Several dealers (e.g. Argent, Turner, Maison
Verreaux) were mentioned by Sharpe (1906) as having purveyed specimens with
brief or inexact localities, and carelessness by an agent caused Sharpe himself to
misattribute specimens in Sir Hugh Low’s Bornean collection to the island of Labuan
(Sharpe 1906:419). Commercial interests were often so much to the fore that accuracy
over the provenance of material was neglected. The dubious origins of many of
John Gould’s specimens are attributable to such considerations, although perhaps
no more so than those of his scientific contemporaries.

Among the most prominent dealers were Maison Verreaux of Paris, whose
specimens found their way into numerous collections, and include type and important
material for many taxa, which often appear to have acceptable localities. However,
Lord Lilford observed them cavalierly assigning identifications for an egg collection
(Trevor-Battye 1903, Mearns & Mearns 1998). A notable victim of such indifference
to accuracy is the case of Necropsar leguati, whose unique specimen, labelled
‘Madagascar’, was acquired by Lord Derby from M. J. Verreaux in 1850. Aware that
‘M. Verreaux was often very inexact in the precise geographical data he inscribed
on the labels of his specimens’, Forbes (1898) described it as a new species of
starling from the Mascarenes, whereas recent examination reveals it to be an albino
specimen of a mimid from the Caribbean (Fisher & Jackson 2002, Olson ef al.
unpubl.)! Many Verreaux specimens lack locality data, but bear large labels with

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elaborate writing, typically synonymies copied from Bonaparte’s Conspectus (Sharpe
1906) and general localities (presumably the then-known range of the species) that
could be misinterpreted as actual collecting localities.

Henry Whitely Sr: dependably undependable

The material stemming from Henry Whitely Sr is rife with problems. His son is well
known for his collections from Japan, Peru and British Guiana (Haverschmidt 1955),
although these were largely dispersed through his father’s natural history agency
(Sharpe 1906). However, many anomalous locality records have come to light based
on specimens dealt by the father. These include records that, if credible, would be
the sole ones from the Nicobar Islands for three species, White-fronted Falconet
Microhierax latifrons, Purple-naped Sunbird Hypogramma hypogrammicum and
Orange-bellied Flowerpecker Dicaeum trigonostigma (and, indeed, the sole records
from the entire Indian subcontinent for the first two). Despite Whitely’s insistence
that his two M. latifrons specimens really did originate from the Nicobars (Gurney
1881), it is wholly improbable that this narrowly endemic Bornean falconet would
occur in an undifferentiated form there. Furthermore, there are numerous other
singleton specimens from Whitely Sr with localities that would be remarkable if
true. Some have, however, been accepted in the literature, such as the NHM specimen
of Japanese Sparrowhawk Accipiter gularis supposedly from ‘Mhow’, central India
(Mees 1985a), and the NHM specimen of White-fronted Scops Owl Otus sagittatus
supposedly from Aceh, Sumatra (van Marle & Voous 1988).

Among the entries of the Rothschild Collection in the AMNH catalogues, the
localities of Whitely specimens are often surrounded by quotation marks, indicating
that others were suspicious of his often very general localities such as ‘Java’, ‘Nepal’,
‘NW Australia’, ‘New Zealand’, etc. Tristram’s (1889) catalogue contains a listing
of a Whitely specimen of Pied Lapwing Hoploxypterus cayanus (= Vanellus cayanus)
from Chile, a country from which it is not genuinely known. A Whitely skin of
Purple-bibbed Whitetip Urosticte b. benjamini from “Rio Napo’ is the ‘wrong’ race
for the eastern side of the Andes (Zimmer 195 1a), and the “Tinta’ locality of a Whitely
specimen of Purple-collared Woodstar Myrtis fanny is anomalous (Zimmer 1953a).
The sole basis for the inclusion of Lesser Swallow-tailed Swift Panyptila cayennensis
in the Peruvian avifauna is a Whitely skin from ‘Samiria’ (Zimmer 1953b). Two
Whitely Jerpsiphone specimens labelled as from ‘River Gambia’ formed the only
basis for a new species T. erythroptera (Sharpe 1879); however, the specimen was
almost certainly a mislabelled Asian Paradise Flycatcher T. paradisi (Sclater 1930,
Warren & Harrison 1971, F. Salomonsen in Traylor 1986). Numerous other similar
problems with Whitely provenances continue to surface.

Not even Whitely specimens labelled ‘British Guiana’, where Whitely Jr collected
extensively, are free of problems. The race Jodopleura pipra leucopygia of this
otherwise Brazilian species, Buff-throated Purpletuft, was described (Salvin 1885)
on the basis of Whitely skins labelled ‘British Guiana’, but it has never since been
found there—unsurprisingly, since this is within the range of a congener (Snow

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1982). Whitely Jr’s Guianan collecting took place subsequent to the collecting of
the Jodopleura specimens, which are in a trade skin style, so they seem to be
mislabelled (Snow 1982). Furthermore, birds matching race leucopygia have since
been observed in Brazil (Ridgely & Tudor 1994).

Even more significant 1s the case of the Scissor-tailed Hummingbird Hylonympha
macrocerca, named from a specimen bought from Whitely Sr, who had ‘received it
in a collection of skins which had been formed in Brazil’ (Gould 1873), apparently
purchased at London Docks (Boucard 1892-1895). More specifically, Simon (1921)
recorded that Whitely had given Gould the definite locality ‘Matura district, Manawas,
on the Bia River, north Brazil’. However, this spectacular species, imported in good
numbers by dealers and with all specimens being in the ‘Trinidad’ style (see below),
has never been found in Brazil. Instead, almost 75 years after its description, H.
macrocerca was finally located in the montane zone of the Paria Peninsula, Venezuela
(Phelps & Phelps 1948), to which it is now known to be endemic (see Collar et al.
1992):

Misattribution to commercial entrepots

For many years, countless thousands of exotic bird specimens were collected by
locals, who were mostly trained to prepare them for the insatiable European and
North American millinery markets. These collectors typically produced specimens
of a recognisable preparation style, such as ‘Trinidad’, ‘Bahia’, ‘Rio’ and ‘Bombay’,
obviously named for the point of collection and shipping. Natural history dealers
and scientists often scoured incoming shipments for unusual species. Most numerous
was the ‘Bogota’ make, which some have assumed to come from the environs of the
city of Bogota—as did Vaurie (1967) with a specimen of Blue-knobbed Curassow
Crax alberti (Collar et al. 1992)—when in fact specimens were brought from all
over the surrounding country, probably even outside the borders of present-day
Colombia and from the far slopes of the Andes (Parkes 1969). Some alleged ‘Bogota’
Specimens must have come from even farther afield, such as Sickle-winged Nightjar
Eleothreptus anomalus (Knox & Walters 1994). A great many “Bogota’ specimens
were hummingbirds, and some are still known only from such trade skins of uncertain
provenance (Chapman 1917, Graves 1990, 1997). Similarly, trade skins from adjacent
Ecuador were often labelled either “Napo’, meaning any elevation on the Amazonian
side of the Andes, or “Gualea’, meaning the equivalent on the Pacific side (Chapman
1926).

‘Malacca’ is a very common ‘locality’ for specimens from a long-standing trading
mecca where skins were brought, probably from the entire western seaboard of the
Malayan Peninsula (Gibson-Hill 1949) and even farther afield, but which matches a
present-day provincial town. Medway & Wells (1976) rightly questioned
distributional and migration conclusions based on ‘Malacca’ trade skins of Japanese
Sparrowhawk Accipiter gularis, while Mees (1985a) defended the specimens as
acceptable. Other trade-skin localities in the Malaysian region included Penang and
Singapore (Gibson-Hill 1949). A subspecies of Common Scops Ow!, Otus scops

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obsti, was described from a skin labelled ‘Java’ (Eck 1973), but the type and only
specimen, indistinguishable from dark Sulawesi Scops Owl O. manadensis of
Sulawesi, bears only a dealer’s label and seems most unlikely to represent a valid
taxon (Rasmussen 1998, unpubl.). Another major trade point was the port of Menado,
in northern Sulawesi. A specimen labelled “Menado’ was named Rhipidura lenzi
Blasius 1883, but was soon shown to be from Ambon (Forbes 1884) and subsequently
synonymised with the form cinerea of neighbouring Seram (Stresemann 1914, White
& Bruce 1986).

The make of trade skins has sometimes allowed them to be ‘identified’ by
experienced museum workers to a general region (e.g. ‘Demerara’, ‘Bahia’,
‘Cayenne’), but usually without explanation of how they differ or the levels of
certainty. For example, Zimmer (1950:30) stated without elaboration that a bird
labelled ‘Peru’ is of undoubted ‘Cayenne’ make. Occasionally, specimens of genuine
provenance may be taken for trade skins. The Moluccan Scops Owl Otus magicus
morotensis 1S an example: numerous old specimens are labelled as being from Ternate,
a Moluccan port with little forest, and the base of operations for the dealer Bruijn
(Greenway 1973). The scops owls had been considered of doubtful provenance, but
they form a series recognisably different from those of other islands (including
Morotai, with which they are still combined racially), and a recently collected
specimen confirms their Ternate provenance (PCR unpubl.).

Collections personnel and error

Assumption, accident and incompetence

Some treatments and interpretations by museum staff and ornithologists have
inevitably resulted in confusion and mistakes with respect to specimen evidence. As
noted earlier, we do not dwell here on misidentification of specimens, an inevitable
part of curation, but there is clear thematic overlap here with the earlier discussion
of data-poor specimens.

Because of problems with the localities of older specimens, these can sometimes
be discredited prematurely when they do not seem to fit with current data. The type
locality of the Brown Cacholote Pseudoseisura lophotes is ‘Bolivia?’, which
subsequent authors presumed to be incorrect, although specimens are now known
from the country (Parkes 1960). The type locality of Formicivora deluzae, a taxon
of uncertain affinities to the White-fringed Antwren F. grisea, was judged doubtful
because of other mistakes in Ménétries’s paper; only later did it become evident that
it may well be correct (Gonzaga & Pacheco 1990). Lack of records for a century
after the collection of Flores Scops Owl Otus alfredi in western Flores led to the
view that it was only the rufous morph of O. magicus albiventris, precipitating the
removal of alfredi from lists of threatened species; but close re-examination of
specimens vindicated the original data (Widodo et al. 1999). Information in itt.
from O. Neumann led Peters (1945) to substitute the Sula Islands for Makassar,
Sulawesi, as the type locality of the Ruddy Kingfisher Halcyon coromanda rufa, but

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re-examination showed Neumann to have misinterpreted the evidence (Mees 1991).
A specimen of White Bellbird Procnias alba collected by A. R. Wallace during his
historic trip to Belem seemed so far out of range that the record was omitted by
Snow (1973), but a population has now been discovered there (Roth ef al. 1984,
Oren & Novaes 1985).

Genuine localities written on labels may also misrepresent the circumstances of
the provenance of specimens in other ways. A notable case is a specimen of Grey-
faced Buzzard Butastur indicus from Sri Lanka, which would have been the first
record for that country and the only specimen for the Indian subcontinent. Enquiries
established that both the collector and the specific locality were known and
presumably reliable, but the chance discovery of an old photo of a Butastur in
falconer’s jesses prompted re-examination of the specimen for signs of captive
origin—and indeed it bears signs of having been kept both on a tether and in a pen
(PCR unpubl. data).

Carelessness to the point of serious professional incompetence was shown by
the taxonomist G. Mathews. He erected an amazing number of new taxa (most now
in synonymy) on the most tenuous of grounds. For example, he obtained a number
of birds from Gerrard, the London dealer, labelled from ‘Mackay, Queensland’,
from which he described several subspecies, usually bestowing a variant of the locality
name on them (Greenway 1973). In one case he later synonymised Globicera pacifica
queenslandica with the nominate, listing the locality as “error = Tonga Islands’. His
Ninox rufa queenslandica remains unique to the area, and the locality has been
doubted (Greenway 1978). Mathews named a new species of cuckoo Cuculus waigoui
(now a synonym of migrant Oriental Cuckoo C. saturatus) from a specimen said to
have been collected on Waigeu Island in February. He named many new
procellariiform taxa, typically surmising on slender or no evidence the natal grounds
of birds collected at sea. He named a ‘NW Australia’ Soft-plumaged Petrel
Pterodroma mollis specimen (obtained as a duplicate from NHM) as a new species,
then synonymised it with the assertion ‘locality wrong’, despite the fact that the
Species occurs widely as a vagrant (Greenway 1973). From a series of Lord Howe
Fregetta he erected four new species, three of them from single specimens (Greenway
1973). Many of Mathews’s specimens have no original label, so that their provenance
cannot be independently evaluated (Greenway 1973). Indeed, Greenway (1973) was
routinely unable even to endorse characters and measurements specifically mentioned
by Mathews as applying to his type specimens.

Label substitution

Even the most scrupulous collectors could not guard against events that might befall
their specimens in the hands of others. For many years it was standard practice for
curators, among them some of the most respected names in ornithology—G. R. Gray
at NHM (Sharpe 1906), O. Finsch at RMNH (Mees & Fisher 1986), R. Ridgway at
USNM (Deignan 1961)—to discard original labels after copying the data they
considered relevant onto labels of their own collection. These removals mean that it

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is now impossible to verify spellings, handwriting or other details for affected
specimens, or even to determine whether they ever bore original data. Thus Finsch’s
recopying and discarding of Layard’s label on a Lifu Island Thrush Turdus
poliocephalus pritzbueri, with an error of date, meant that the specimen was likely
to have been erroneously considered a type, and indeed it was so labelled by Finsch
(Mees & Fisher 1986).

Another case concerns von Rosenberg’s Leiden specimens, whose original labels
were removed by Finsch (Mees 1953). Von Rosenberg’s travels are comparatively
well documented (van Steenis 1950), and the dates of his specimens can be checked
against his itinerary. However, his series of Zosterops atrifrons ‘sharper , supposedly
from the Aru Islands (and the only material of this questionable race, described by
Finsch), is identical with the nominate race of Black-crowned White-eye from
northern Sulawesi (Mees 1953). Moreover, von Rosenberg supposedly—and
uniquely—procured a specimen of the extremely restricted Pearl-bellied White-eye
Zosterops grayi on the Aru Islands (Mees 1953); and he apparently took three
Moluccan Scops Owls Otus magicus there too, a provenance accepted by most authors
though they were suggested by White & Bruce (1986) to have come from the Kei
Islands. In this last case, although O. magicus is well differentiated with recognisable
forms on each island group, the lone adult of the three is indistinguishable from the
nominate race of Seram and Ambon, and the juveniles unidentifiable (PCR unpubl.
data). Given the considerable confusion between other of von Rosenberg’s Aru and
Kei specimens, e.g. Pied Imperial Pigeon Ducula bicolor, Orange-fronted Fruit Dove
Ptilinopus aurantiifrons, Red Lory Eos bornea and Chestnut-breasted Cuckoo
Cuculus castaneiventris (= Cacomantis castaneiventris) (Holyoak 1970, 1976, White
& Bruce 1986), all these records are dubious. Indeed, the provenance of von
Rosenberg’s specimens had been doubted by Salvadori (1880-1882) well before
Finsch’s removal of the original labels around 1900, so they seem likely to have
previously borne questionable data. Von Rosenberg employed local collectors, and
at least sometimes sent them collecting while he himself was ill (van Steenis 1950);
he collected in Sulawesi, the Arus and Keis on the same voyage, so the specimens
could easily have become mixed, a scenario rendered all the more likely given his
characterisation as an ‘idler’ (van Steenis 1950) and the description of his collection
as being of little scientific worth (von Berlepsch 1913).

A similar case is that of the lone specimen of Ambon Yellow White-eye Zosterops
kuehni from Seram, labelled as having been collected by Moens on the side of Seram
farthest from Ambon, to which the white-eye is otherwise thought endemic. While
several authors have thought it unlikely that Moens really obtained Z. kuehni on
Seram, letters show he collected there, and it seems impossible to disprove a Seram
origin (Mees 1981, R. W. R. J. Dekker in Jitt.). Often, however, reference to a
collector’s known itinerary can solve mysteries: by this means a published record of
Bare-faced Curassow Crax fasciolata from Obidos (Pinto 1938), which seemed to
indicate range overlap with Black Curassow C. alector, was shown to be an error
caused by the loss of the original label (Pinto & de Camargo 1948).

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Label-switching has been assumed in a number of cases, although it is usually
difficult to prove (e.g. Watson 1969, Farkas 1979, Cardoso da Silva & Oren 1991).
Compounding this, over the years labels occasionally fall off and are retied, inevitably
sometimes to the wrong specimen, even of another species—e.g. a Siberian Crane
Grus leucogeranus bearing also a White Wagtail Motacilla alba dukhunensis \abel
(Knox & Walters 1994)—and many labels have been and continue to be irretrievably
damaged, lost, or rendered illegible. A mysterious ‘species’ of rail (TJricholimnas
conditicius), suggested to have originated either on the Gilbert or Marshall Islands
(Peters & Griscom 1928, Walters 1987), has been shown most likely to have been
erroneously associated with a label that led to those conclusions, but in fact to be a
synonym of the Lord Howe Wood Rail Tricholimnas silvestris (Olson 1992).

A typical loss on recopied labels was the frequent omission of the collector’s
own numbering system. However, collectors’ numbers, often involving a simple
sequence related to date of collection, can provide critical evidence as to provenance
of a specimen. LeCroy & Peckover (1998) showed, through archival research and
reference to the original collector’s still-present number, that a subset of a substantial
series of specimens taken by A. S. Meek on ‘Misima Island’ off Papua New Guinea
had actually been collected from neighbouring islands during the main Misima
collecting trip.

The simple fact that a specimen does not now bear confirmatory data does not
mean that such data never existed. White (1975) stated that W. Rothschild assigned
localities to dataless cassowaries based on preconceptions over the distribution of
their phenotypes. It it true that Rothschild ventured to describe a market-bought
specimen of Grey-headed Albatross Diomedea chrysostoma as a new race he
presumed to be from Campbell Island (Hartert 1926). However, White did not present
sufficient evidence to support his contention, and Rothschild, who was normally
reasonably careful with localities, may well have had correspondence and other
information that led him to reasoned assessments, if not watertight facts;
unfortunately, many of his potentially corroborating papers were destroyed following
an ill-taken official decision (M. Rothschild 1983).

Various users and error

Problems in transliteration, translation, interpretation and reading

Misreading and misinterpretation of label data occur frequently, and have accounted
for a great deal of error: ‘Iris Brown’ has been catalogued as a collector (D. E.
Willard per N. J. Collar verbally), and ‘Mr Fernando Poo’ as a donor (F. E. Warr
verbally); ‘Mr. Kaitsumwic’, a supposed collector of Podiceps ruficollis japonicus,
proved to be a mutilation of the Japanese name for ‘grebe’ (Greenway 1973);
‘Vorondolo’ is a traceable locality in the eastern rainforest of Madagascar from which
a specimen of the Malagasy Scops-owl Otus rutilus so labelled may plausibly have
come, but is also one of several Malagasy names for owl (PCR unpubl.); and
‘Kinkimauro’ was published as a locality for Pollen’s Vanga Xenopirostris polleni

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(Sharpe 1872) when again it is the local name of the species (Collar & Stuart
1985:430). Pollen’s Vanga was also the victim of an error over the type locality by
Hartlaub (1877), who published it as north-east Madagascar, evidently because he
assumed ‘N.O. Madagascar’ on the labels of the type series to indicate ‘nord-6st’
(German north-east) rather than ‘nord-ouest’ (French north-west) (Collar & Stuart
1985:430). Certainly, foreign-language labels are particularly prone to
misinterpretation: Banko (1979) apparently mistook the notation ‘Erh[alten] von
Chili’ (‘taken in Chile’) for a collector’s name (Olson 1989), and ‘Enero’ (=January)
has been used as a locality (S. L. Olson verbally).

A locality written on an Abyssinian Thrush (subsumed into Olive Thrush) Turdus
abyssinicus label as Entebbe, Uganda, actually refers to N’dabibi (Cunningham-
van Someren & Schifter 1981). This mix-up may have been due to poor handwriting,
hearing, and/or transcription. The first category is the easiest to document: the
untraceable ‘Muguazi River’ as the type locality of Black-cheeked Lovebird
Agapornis nigrigenis has been shown to be the Ngwezi River (Dowsett 1972a); the
locality “Sandag, Sarigas’ (Seth-Smith 1910) for Philippine Eagle Pithecophaga
Jefferyi 1s in reality “Tandag, Surigao’ (Collar 2001:672); and, most strikingly, J.
Natterer’s locality ‘Tacuczar’ is, fide Vanzolini (1992), “Itacuruca’.

In the field in Myanmar in 1985, PCR’s enquiries as to the place name at which
the team was collecting resulted in helpful replies, dutifully copied down—one of
which turned out to mean ‘little stream’. According to J. P. Angle (verbally), D. S.
Rabor sometimes took students collecting with him in the Philippines, but some
‘localities’ written on the labels appeared to be students’ home addresses.

Units of measurement

One of the most obvious and yet pervasive problems involving collection dates is
the dichotomy between British and American styles of writing dates on labels. One
of the seven specimens of Forest Owlet Heteroglaux blewitti, that accessioned to
MCZ, had the (British) collection date (‘5/12’, hence 5 December) interpreted in the
American fashion (hence 12 May) on the MCZ label (Rasmussen & Collar 1999a:12).
In this particular case the species seems to be resident, and so the seven-month
disparity matters mainly in study of the plumage cycle, but for many other species
such an error would place them far from their normal haunts for that time of year.
One specimen in NHM, a House Wren Troglodytes aedon guadeloupensis, now bears
three label dates (Knox & Walters 1994), evidently at least in part owing to the use
of roman numerals for months (II = 2 but easily read as 11).

Numerous specimens lack collection dates on the labels, but may have a date of
acquisition by a dealer or accession by a museum that is not stated as such, e.g. a
Snail-eating Coua Coua delalandei bearing the date 1837, which is the date of its
receipt in Stuttgart (Benson & Schiiz 1971). Darwin’s bird specimens collected during
the voyage of the Beagle had labels inscribed “Jan 4" 1837” added to mark the date
they were accessed by the Zoological Society, not the date of collection (Sulloway
1982a,b).

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Another persistent problem is that of distances, whether kilometres vs miles,
metres vs feet, or millimetres vs inches. It has often been taken for granted by
collectors that their units would be understood, which has of course not always been
true. Several standards of measurement existed within Europe in the past, and are
briefly discussed by Zimmer (1947).

Mis-sexing and ageing

Assumptions are often made about sex and age in birds, but museum specimen data
cannot be taken as definitive without detailed corroboration. For many older
specimens, it may be that the collector did not actually view the gonads when
determining the sex. Some collectors operated in an assembly-line fashion, and are
reputed to have crossed the legs one way to indicate one sex, and vice versa, a
system that cannot fail to produce the occasional error. Early collectors often used
an upside-down female symbol to indicate male (Clench 1976, Parkes 1989), which
is open to misinterpretation by modern researchers. Collectors whose specimens are
always sexed can be assumed to have been less careful than they might, as a certain
proportion of specimens, especially when shot, will not be confidently sexable.
Breeding-condition individuals of most species (a few exceptions are noted below)
would rarely be mis-sexed when the gonads are examined, but juveniles and non-
breeding birds are subject to unknown and variable, but presumably often significant,
rates of mis-sexing. Users of specimens need to consider the field conditions that
influence accuracy of sexing, such as poor lighting; exhaustion, illness, and/or training
of the preparator; and development or deterioration of the specimen’s gonads.

Statements made about sexual dimorphism based on circuitous reasoning led to
the belief that the presumed taxon Psittacula ‘intermedia’, alone among its congeners,
had reversed sexual dimorphism (Sane et al. 1987). This helped obscure the hybrid
origin of ‘intermedia’ (Rasmussen & Collar 1999b). Mis-sexing and/or incorrect
ageing is also held responsible for some of the apparently distinctive characters of
the Moustached Kingfisher race Halcyon bougainvillei excelsa (du Pont & Niles
1980).

A few groups of birds have atypical gonads, such as female accipiters, which
have two readily visible ovaries, and Centropus species in which the males have
only one large testis. Members of these groups are obviously more likely to be mis-
sexed than those with conventional gonads. Knox & Walters (1992) documented
mis-sexing in nearly 15% of Eurasian Sparrowhawk Accipiter nisus skeletons checked
in the NHM, a surprising percentage given the gender-specific plumage and size of
this species; Storer (1989) obtained similar results for skins of the highly size-
dimorphic Brown Trembler Cinclocerthia ruficauda. RPP-J’s own first venture into
the NHM collections was prompted by a contradiction between Witherby et al. (1943)
and Svensson (1970), who respectively maintain that there is complete overlap and
no overlap in the wing lengths of male and female Corn Buntings Emberiza calandra,
a species that shows no sexual plumage difference. Scrutiny of over 40 NHM
specimens that would have been available to Witherby et al. suggested that nearly

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20%, all taken outside the breeding season, had been mis-sexed, obscuring an almost
complete sexual size difference (Prys-Jones 1976).

Even in species that are strongly sexually dimorphic from their first contour
plumage, e.g. Rufous-bellied Niltava Niltava sundara (Dickinson 1972), the incidence
of apparent mis-sexing may be high. All the specimens of Greenish Puffleg
Haplophaedia aureliae collected by Goodfellow and Hamilton were shown to have
been mis-sexed (Zimmer 1951b:35), suggesting they relied upon the plumage of
this drab hummingbird for gender determination. Some scrupulous nineteenth-century
collectors (e.g. A. Everett) as a matter of course wrote ‘nat. coll.’ or its equivalent on
the labels of specimens sexed by their assistants and which they had been unable
personally to verify.

Ageing of specimens can be notoriously problematic, and many taxonomic
blunders have resulted from misinterpretation of specimen ages, e.g. ‘Berlioz’s
Sunbird’ Anthreptes pujoli is actually a a juvenile Green Sunbird Anthreptes
rectirostris (Erard 1979). The new genus and species Antiornis grahami Riley 1926
was described from a series of juvenile specimens which Parker (1964) and Watson
(1986) considered to be Aberrant Bush Warblers Cettia flavolivacea , but which are
actually Brownish-flanked Bush Warblers C. fortipes (Rasmussen & Anderton, in
press). Even the routinely used notation of cranial ossification has its limitations, as
the extent of cranial pneumatisation in full adults of many species is not known with
certainty; for example, in Pipromorpha only a small part of the cranium appears to
ossify (Mees 1985b), and incomplete ossification in adults has also been noted for
numerous other species (Winkler 1979).

Fraud

There are a few cases within ornithology that seem to amount to major specimen
fraud, but it is often difficult to be certain whether the perpetrators realised the
consequences of their actions. Thus it is unclear exactly in what category some of
the examples below belong.

The classic case of apparent fraud, less for its intrinsic importance than the wider
publicity it received, was the ‘Hastings Rarities’ (Nelder 1962, Nicholson &
Ferguson-Lees 1962, 1971, Harrison 1968, 1971), in which records of birds rare to
Britain purported to have been collected mostly by anonymous locals within a 20-
mile radius of Hastings were traced to the dealer and taxidermist G. Bristow, who
was suspected of having had them brought over from the Continent under refrigeration
(Nicholson & Ferguson-Lees 1962). Consequently, in 1962, six species and some
600 (mostly specimen) records of rarities, made in the Hastings area between 1892
and 1930, were removed from the British list, based on the statistical improbability
of so many unusual records clustering in so small an area, plus the fact that the great
majority had links to Bristow. Bristow had claimed that he had encouraged local
people to shoot specimens for him, whether they were common or not; that the sheer
numbers of specimens sold to him resulted in the large number of rarities over the

Pamela C. Rasmussen & Robert R Prys-fones 83 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

years; and that anonymity was necessary to protect his sources from competitors
and prosecution. If we accept that the Hastings Rarities are indeed fraudulent, the
reason must presumably have been monetary gain, which is probably true of most
situations in which deliberate specimen fraud has been perpetrated.

Much collecting in earlier days was conducted as a commercial enterprise in
which the value of specimens was directly linked to their scarcity, either in total or
from a particular area. J. H. Batty, working on islands off the west coast of Panama,
duped his employer Rothschild by adding mainland (including highland) birds to
island collections, and although Hartert caught on at least once, Eisenmann (1950)
did not, and reported on Batty’s ‘surprising number of what have generally been
regarded as exclusively mountain birds’. Wetmore (1957) puzzled over discrepancies
relating to some of the specimens Batty had collected on the large island of Coiba in
1901 and assumed a specimen mix-up, but Olson (1997) recently concluded that
Batty’s entire supposed collection from the smaller islands in 1902, including such
astonishing records as male Ruby-throated Hummingbirds Archilochus colubris with
nests, is fraudulent and, indeed, that Batty probably never even visited these islands
in 1902.

A collector working in Venezuela for W. Rothschild, A. Mocquerys, was long
suspected by Hellmayr and others of having provided unreliable localities for a
rather long list of species (Zimmer & Phelps 1954). These authors concluded that
Mocquerys’s lack of success on a Caripe trip led him to augment it with specimens
from Puerto Cabello, where operations were cheaper and easier, a conclusion
supported both by Mocquerys’s written complaints to Rothschild and by irregularities
in field numbers in his ‘Caripe’ series (Zimmer & Phelps 1954).

Among the most prolific of all collecting teams in the Neotropics, the Olalla
family had already been collecting birds professionally when contracted by Chapman.
Their collections are of extreme importance for understanding avian distribution
within South America. Usually their labelling seems reliable, apart from being
ambiguous over which side of a river material was from, and the occasional lapse,
e,g. their taking of five specimens of Sharpbill Oxyruncus cristatus on a single day
at a lowland site from which it was previously unknown, was assumed to reflect
failure to label specimens accumulated earlier upstream (Mees 1974). However,
Vaurie (1965) rejected A. M. Olalla’s specimens of Little Chachalaca Ortalis motmot
ruficeps supposedly collected within the exclusive range of the nominate race, adding
that other naturalists have queried the authenticity of some Olalla material. Moreover,
a small proportion of Olalla specimens appear actually to have been fraudulently
labelled during a dispute; these include specimens sold to H. Bassler and now at
AMNH (J. Haffer verbally).

Egg collections present special problems owing to the difficulty or impossibility
of certain identification. In particular, it should be mentioned that the largest collection
of Indian bird eggs ever assembled, that of E. C. S. Baker, which serves as the basis
for much of our presumed knowledge of the eggs and nesting habits of Indian birds,
is seriously flawed. Even discounting the difficulties of identification and the

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problems involved with employing native collectors, serious charges of the “making
up’ of clutches in Baker’s collection have been levelled (Harrison 1966, Harrison &
Parker 1966, 1967a,b). Egg collections also have been subject to massive theft by
enthusiasts (e.g. stolen eggs of numerous rare species: Knox & Walters 1992, 1994).
In the case of the Bald Eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus, eggs with false registration
numbers had been substituted for the stolen ones (Knox & Walters 1994). One
documented case of specimen fraud is a painted Mute Swan Cygnus olor egg now in
the NHM that was passed off by a dealer as a genuine Great Auk Pinguinus impennis
egg (Tomkinson & Tomkinson 1966).

Meinertzhagen

The fraudulent collecting activities of one person, Richard Meinertzhagen, form a
subject apart both in scale and, probably, motivation. His case also reveals how
slow and difficult the path may be from well-founded suspicion to a reasonable
level of proof and how, in the intervening period, most researchers using a collection
may remain entirely ignorant of the doubts surrounding the data accompanying it,
with negative effects on ornithology. However, on the positive side, the case has
also proved to be one in which detailed research is allowing original data to be
restored to specimens with a high degree of probability, and which has even led,
indirectly, to the rediscovery of a supposedly extinct species (King & Rasmussen
1998). In our discussion here we draw on various sources for general background
information, notably Cocker (1989) and Rasmussen & Prys-Jones (unpubl.).

The collection Meinertzhagen presented to The Natural History Museum (NHM)
before his death in 1967 amounts to nearly 20,000 specimens, with appreciable
additional numbers of specimens held in other museums. In the Meinertzhagen
Collection are numerous important distributional records. Although born in 1878,
Meinertzhagen’s first significant publication dates from as late as 1912, on the birds
of Mauritius, where he had spent about a year in 1910-1911; the paper contains
almost no mention of specimen collecting. By 1919, however, Meinertzhagen had
already been excluded from the NHM Bird Room for 18 months for unauthorised
removal of specimens, and museum documents spanning the next 30 years contain
numerous references to suspicions by staff that he was stealing both specimen and
library material; twice these reached the verge of prosecution. Although nothing
was made public, clearly at least some senior ornithologists knew that something
was amiss. Around 1940, correspondence between H. Whistler and C. B. Ticehurst
makes explicit reference to Meinertzhagen’s theft of NHM specimens. However, no
mention of this reached the published literature until 17 years after Meinertzhagen’s
death, when Clancey (1984a), who had developed a deep antipathy to Meinertzhagen,
drew attention to the flawed nature of his collections. The accusation of fraud was
made explicit in a review of Meinertzhagen’s redpoll specimens, based on assessment
of preparation style and material used (Knox 1993). While compelling, the
implications of this paper were so enormous that independent corroboration and
further investigations were clearly demanded.

Pamela C. Rasmussen & Robert RP Prys-fones 85 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

In the case of the redpolls, further research making use of x-rays (radiographs)
has largely confirmed Knox’s conclusions, although occasionally it has shown up
limitations in what is discernible by external examination alone (RPP-J unpubl.).
While it cannot be claimed that x-rays can prove who collected a specimen, the x-
ray specimen signature of many major collectors is extremely distinctive. In many
cases, not only can the fraudulence of a specimen be shown beyond reasonable
doubt, but the original data can also be returned to a specimen with a high degree of
confidence through the location of gaps in matching specimen series that were
recorded in the NHM specimen registers.

In order to judge the scope of the problem, we have examined a large number of
Asian bird specimens in the Meinertzhagen collection, in particular focusing on key
cases such as at least 14 species and distinctive subspecies on the Indian subcontinent
list based entirely on his records. We have found that the scope of the problem is far
greater than that so far published by Rasmussen & Collar (1999a); a comprehensive
analysis, on which we draw here for examples, is in preparation (Rasmussen &
Prys-Jones unpubl.).

Meinertzhagen had a seemingly miraculous ability to stop very briefly somewhere
but nevertheless collect important material. When his ship unexpectedly docked in
February 1901 at Port Blair, Andamans, en route to Burma, he claimed he rushed off
to collect birds behind the town. However, of his good Andaman series, all supposedly
taken by him during this brief time, we have yet to find any specimens that appear to
be genuinely his. For example, his single Andaman Treepie Dendrocitta bayleyi
matches in every detail, both externally and internally, two specimens collected
there by William Davison in 1872, including having an unusual neck support in lieu
of a stick, and a distinctive under-the-wing incision, just like that of Davison’s
specimens. The NHM registers show that a third Davison specimen, collected in the
same week as the other two, is now missing.

Similarly, Meinertzhagen’s ship stopped briefly in the Seychelles in June 1910
and his collection now holds two specimens of the extremely rare Seychelles Paradise
Flycatcher Terpsiphone corvina, both with the locality given as just ‘Seychelles’.
These have the same make and materials as an NHM Nicoll specimen taken on
Praslin, Seychelles, in 1906. The NHM register reveals that three adult males collected
by Nicoll were accessioned, but only one (with detailed data) is now present in the
collection. The other two Nicoll specimens, which probably also once had full data,
had been earlier and independently noted as missing by Benson (1971). Moreover,
Meinertzhagen’s ship docked at Mahé, where the paradise flycatcher does not occur,
and according to his diary and itinerary it was present too briefly for Meinertzhagen
to have visited the islands the species did inhabit.

Many of Meinertzhagen’s frauds have potentially important zoogeographic
implications. Among his substantial collection supposedly made in Burma in 1902
are two specimens of the scarce and little-known Blyth’s Kingfisher Alcedo hercules
prepared in dissimilar styles. One of these is very similar in style to an 1899 Whitehead
specimen from Hainan, China; the NHM register shows that two such Whitehead

Pamela C. Rasmussen & Robert P Prys-fones 86 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

specimens were originally present, but only one now is. The other specimen matches
no NHM specimens, but closely matches a series of three taken on Hainan by
Owston’s collectors in 1905—1906 and now in the Rothschild Collection at AMNH;
according to Hartert’s (1910) paper on Owston’s collection, this originally held four
specimens. Thus both Meinertzhagen’s “Burma’ specimens are evidently from
Hainan, some 1,500 km to the east of the purported locality, and with considerable
potential to obfuscate knowledge of geographic variation in a scarce species
represented by relatively few specimens.

Occasionally, and notoriously in the case of the exceptionally rare Forest Owlet
Heteroglaux blewitti (Rasmussen & Collar 1999a), Meinertzhagen had extensively
remade an existing specimen in a manner which served to disguise its true origin
until detailed examination, including forensic tests, was made. This particular case
had a doubly positive outcome, as not only was the specimen—one of only seven of
the species in existence—identified as a J. Davidson specimen stolen from the NHM
and finally reunited with its original data, but the investigation led directly to the
rediscovery of the Forest Owlet 113 years after the last reliable record.

Most Meinertzhagen specimens have basic locality, date and sex data, but some
labels contain additional information. For example, a skin of Gould’s Shortwing
Brachypteryx stellata that is almost certainly a stolen Mandelli specimen now has
soft-part colour and stomach contents annotated on the label, even though of the
thousands of Mandelli’s native-collected specimens we have seen none that bears
any such data, indicating these must have been guessed at by Meinertzhagen.
Similarly, a Black-billed Magpie Pica pica bottanensis, supposedly collected by
Meinertzhagen ‘on a yak!’ in 1925 along the Sikkim-—Tibet border, closely resembles
a Mandelli specimen from Tibet in make-up and structure, to the extent that both are
(most unusually) stuffed with moss easily visible in the unsewn belly incisions. In
addition, in his own account of his Sikkim expedition, published within two years of
his expedition, Meinertzhagen (1927) specifically noted that ‘No magpie was met
with in northern Sikkim’, so he evidently forgot he had written this when relabelling
the specimen, presumably some time later.

In addition to the many spurious distributional records published by
Meinertzhagen himself on the basis of his mislabelled specimens, others have
been published in good faith by other workers, among them Pallas’s Bunting
Emberiza pallasi as new for Burma (Colston 1978), Savi’s Warbler Locustella
luscinioides as new for Arabia (Colston & Holyoak 1970), and a range extension
for Mottled Spinetail Telecanthura ussheri benguellensis (Benson & Winterbottom
1977). A Meinertzhagen Half-collared Kingfisher Alcedo semitorquata was
considered probably mislabelled, as the locality he gave would have been a swamp
instead of the species’s normal clear riverine habitat (Clancey 1984b).
Meinertzhagen (1930) reported that Sooty Falcon Falco concolor bred regularly
at Mombasa Fort, but this casual, unconfirmed record is so greatly at odds with
the observations of others that it was not usually accepted (Moreau 1969) even
before the exposition of Meinertzhagen’s frauds.

Pamela C. Rasmussen & Robert P Prys-fones 87 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Despite all these problems and many more, it is clear that much of Meinertzhagen’s
collection comprises important specimens bearing genuine data. In particular, either
the preparation style of someone who is known to have accompanied Meinertzhagen
on a particular trip, or the presence of that collector’s handwriting on a label, point
to a given specimen being genuine. A case in point is Meinertzhagen’s unique South
Yemen specimen of Northern Bald Ibis Geronticus eremita. We know that P. A.
Clancey was on this 1948 trip, and the specimen was prepared in his style and with
his unmistakeable handwriting on the label, so it is difficult to imagine how this
specimen could be other than genuine. Further important specimens from the
Meinertzhagen Collection that we are confident are genuine include his type series
of Afghan Snowfinch Montifringilla theresae. He discovered this species in 1937;
the series has all the hallmarks of authenticity, and no other source existed for them.
Similarly, our initial suspicions about his two Hume’s Owl Strix butleri specimens
(considered among the highlights of his collection) were allayed by the fact that
both still bear their original labels with full data, and Meinertzhagen had not claimed
to have collected them himself.

Other indications (to be used advisedly!) that a series purported to be from a
given trip in the Meinertzhagen collection may be genuine include: presence of
some females and immatures; some specimens being in imperfect plumage;
uniformity of preparation style; seasonally appropriate moult condition and soft-
part colours; and a lack of reworking of the specimen. In fraudulent material the
latter is often evident as a loosely restitched abdominal incision with double thread,
fresh clean cotton in belly and eyes, and legs that were crossed well after drying,
often breaking delicate bones and twisting the dried skin.

Given that the Meinertzhagen Collection contains material of great importance,
and that the original data from fraudulent specimens can often, with some research,
be repatriated with high confidence, we disagree with a former NHM curator with
first-hand experience of Meinertzhagen, who stated that the entire collection should
be destroyed. Without the specimen evidence, suspicion regarding Meinertzhagen’s
records might never have been made public. Moreover, there would certainly have
been no way, many years later, to establish which records are genuine and which
fraudulent, and to restore the correct data to at least some of the latter.

Conclusions

We do not wish to leave the reader with the impression that specimen data are
unreliable. On the contrary—the vast majority of specimens provide the most reliable
source of baseline data available in ornithology. However, specimen evidence must
be assessed probabilistically. The user needs to be aware of the exceptions and to be
informed as to how to evaluate individual problem cases. It is not sufficient simply
to throw out specimen data as unreliable because they do not fit one’s hypotheses or
the published record. Corroborative evidence should be sought, and there are many
ways to seek it. In any particular case the reliability of associated data can often be
tested in various ways.

Pamela C. Rasmussen & Robert P Prys-Fones 88 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

The specimens that exist now in museums are largely irreplaceable. Many of
them have been mistreated in various ways, usually by well-meaning collectors,
dealers, curators and users. Those who are responsible for the care of specimens and
who may consider certain material worthless, for example if data are lacking, should
reconsider this stance in the light of the potential for data recovery using combinations
of historical reconstruction and modern analytical techniques. A dataless specimen
may turn out to be something as valuable as the unique type of the Mysterious
Starling Aplonis mavornata (Olson 1986), even if it takes 160 years for someone to
recognise the fact.

Acknowledgements

We thank J. P. Angle, N. J. Collar, J. Haffer, S. L. Olson, A. T. Peterson and M. P. Walters for providing
information and anecdotes included in the present paper. N. J. Collar spent several days helping with the
ordering and editing of the typescript.

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Addresses: Pamela C. Rasmussen, Division of Birds, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560,
USA. Present address: Michigan State University Museum, West Circle Drive, East Lansing, MI
48824-1045, U.S.A.; Robert Prys-Jones, Bird Group, Department of Zoology, The Natural History
Museum, Akeman Street, Tring, Herts HP23 6AP, U.K.

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

N.F. Collar & Rudyanto 95 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

The archive and the ark:
bird specimen data in conservation
status assessment

by N. Ff. Collar & Rudyanto

SUMMARY

The enterprise of naming all life-forms on earth reached its zenith in the years 1850—
1950, but it is often forgotten that our knowledge of the distributions of species stems
primarily from the same museum endeavour. However, various good reasons dictate that
not all material deposited in museums is documented in the public domain, leaving the
conservationist with a rich body of essentially new Gf commonly predictable) information
for use in fixing the ranges (and indeed ecologies) of threatened species. By its use of
museum material, BirdLife International’s Red Data Book programme has found numerous
significant range extensions (whose effect—predictably, given that more localities indicate
a wider extent of occurrence and stronger population—is generally to diminish the concern
with which the species in question are regarded). Drawing on 60 museums, Threatened
birds of the Americas used unpublished museum range and ecological data in 232 (77%)
and 138 (46%) species accounts respectively. Drawing on 30 museums, Threatened birds
of the Philippines identified a total of 830 localities, 228 (27%) of which were based
solely on museum evidence. Museums also hold contentious specimens that require re-
evaluation, but there is disconcerting evidence of the decline of the specimen-based
taxonomy which helps to bind conservation and science together.

Naming and placing

All modern endeavours concerning biological diversity—its manifestations, patterns,
measurement and conservation—rest almost entirely on the extraordinary programme
of classification that natural history museums in Europe and the U.S.A. accomplished
mainly in the period 1850—1950. This great century of accumulation, evaluation and
synthesis of biological material was facilitated and fuelled by European capitalist-
imperialist expansion (victory in the Second Opium War, suppression of the Indian
Mutiny, and so on) and by the socially and intellectually convulsive insights of
Darwin & Wallace (1858). It was effectively finished off by the colonial dismantlings
in the aftermath of the Second World War (70 independent sovereign states in 1945;
over 170 in 1975) and by the decisive (if debatable) observation of Mayr (1946) that
‘the period of new discoveries is practically at an end’.

In that period, the vast majority of all known vertebrate (and perhaps invertebrate
and plant) reference material was assembled—often (it is worth remembering) at
the great personal risk and expense of the collectors themselves (see, e.g., Stewart
1984, Mearns & Mearns 1998:40-42). Taxonomy was the biological science of the
late nineteenth century, and its practitioners worked with single-minded energy on
the identification and attribution of this flood of material, issuing catalogues and
accounts of collections with a regularity and thoroughness that defies modern
comparison. The British Museum’s million or so bird specimens were almost all
acquired during this period, thus at an average of 10,000 a year, or some 40 every

N.F. Collar & Rudyanto 96 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

working day (by 1990 the intake was under 50 per year: Knox & Walters 1992), and
in the years 1874-1898, when the hundred-year period in question was less than
half run, the trustees issued a catalogue of its avian material, running to an
encyclopaedic 27 volumes with an accumulated length of very approximately 16,000
pages. This work was descriptive and synthetic: everything was assigned an identity
by matching it to published evidence, so that huge synonymies were accumulated as
taxonomists sought to determine the status of specimens and the priority of names
associated with them. A major element in this process was the provenance of the
material, which allowed museum workers to anticipate whether they were dealing
with species already documented elsewhere. As a consequence, from this monumental
labour a coherent pattern of the distributions of species began, slowly but steadily,
to emerge.

It is remarkable how slight public appreciation has been and remains of this
crucial role played by museums in defining both species and ranges. Our entire
understanding of faunas and floras around the world stems from the great systematics
enterprise, begun effectively with Linnaeus two and a half centuries ago and now—
at a point when it might be thought no longer achievable or even necessary—
formulated outright (as for example ‘Systematics Agenda 2000’: Biodiversity and
Conservation 4 no. 5 [1995]; and the “All Species Inventory’: Lawler 2001, Gewin
2002), of identifying and classifying every one of the species alive today on earth;
yet the debt, owed very largely to the great nineteenth-century museums of Europe
and North America, continues to go almost entirely unacknowledged.

Undocumented material: new voyages of discovery

For various reasons, only a moderate proportion of the information attaching to
holdings in a natural history museum is likely ever to be published. There is, to
begin with, the time-lag between acquisition and classification, given the predictable
difficulties in identifying parts of the material. (It is worth making the point that
museums create their own in-house expertise: taxonomy is a skill acquired by its
practice, and the speed and accuracy of workers at any given point is almost certainly
correlated with the length of their employment.) Second, in any working museum
the appropriate staff must inevitably be otherwise engaged, so that sometimes even
commissioned collections will be set aside for the sake of other priorities and
commitments. Third, when material is bought or bequeathed or delivered in bulk—
i.e. when acquisitions occur randomly (see, e.g., Kitchener & McGowan 2003, this
issue)—the human resources needed to undertake a full review of incoming stock
are unlikely to be available for years or even decades (if at all). Fourth, it is not in
any case the remit of museums publicly to itemise their holdings (despite the precedent
of certain institutions in the nineteenth century): reasons of economy combine with
the immediate interests of science in restricting publications to the more significant
additions and the insights they bring. Fifth, the financial fortunes of museums vary
over time like all other institutions, public or private, and inevitably many have lost
the power to curate or publish on their holdings.

N.¥. Collar & Rudyanto OF Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

As aconsequence of all this, a great deal of information associated with museum
material never enters the public domain, and represents a resource awaiting any
number of future uses. One might expect that, even if the information itself remains
undisclosed to the public, the public would at least be aware that such information
exists; yet this is not (or at least not always) so, nor is it even the case that directly
interested parties, such as natural history students and conservationists, who stand
to gain most from the resource, recognise the fact; indeed, even curatorial staff
themselves sometimes seem oblivious to the importance of this aspect of the material
in their care. The fact remains, however, that so much unpublished information resides
on the labels of specimens in most major and many minor natural history museums
around the world that a visit to any one of them represents something of a voyage of
discovery in miniature: even today, the opening of a cabinet door can bring a
researcher face to face with startling new evidence, intriguing new puzzles, and
even—on the rarest occasions—hitherto unrecognised new species.

This circumstance has been particularly important for the assessment of bird
Species conservation status at the global level. The quality of such assessments
depends directly on the completeness of the information assembled (Collar 1996).
Naturally the majority of information comes from published sources, and much of it
is supplemented and updated by the personal testimony of field experts. However,
the material stored in museums, although sometimes ancient and ostensibly therefore
irrelevant, represents another data source which should not be neglected or
underestimated. Since the early 1980s museums have played an integral role in the
data-generating processes of BirdLife’s Red Data Book programme and, as the
following examples indicate, have contributed in large measure to a better
understanding of the true ranges of many species. This in turn has affected perceptions
over their conservation needs and options, the general effect—by increasing the
number of locations for species, and therefore the sense of their numerical status—
being to reduce the sense of alarm over status that the thitherto less complete published
data have inevitably tended to create.

Three policies followed in the Red Data Book programme are relevant here. The
first is the obligation to cite every source from which an item of information is
derived. The second is the decision not to cite information from unpublished sources
if it already exists in published sources. The third is the requirement that, wherever
possible, a locality record for a species should also have a month and year attached.
Therefore any reference in a Red Data Book species account to a museum-derived
item of information indicates something that cannot be (or at least has not been)
found in the literature; this may be a record representing an entirely new locality,
but it may also simply be an extra datum that adds to published information (for
example, in museum catalogues and accounts of particular collections, localities
were sometimes given without dates; these can often be supplied by direct reference
to the specimen evidence).

With this clarification, it is possible to understand how munificent a contribution
museum data have made to the process of global conservation status assessment in

N.F. Collar & Rudyanto 98 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

birds. Threatened birds of the Americas (Collar et al. 1992) documents 302 species
in full, with every reasonable attempt having been made to assemble as much
information as possible relevant to their conservation (as token of which the
bibliography itemises some 2,600 references and occupies 80 pages of text, while
some 550 correspondents are acknowledged for information provided through
personal communications). In spite of this effort, no fewer than 232 (77%) of these
accounts carry previously unpublished range data from museums; and 138 (46%)
carry previously unpublished ecological data from museums. No fewer than 60
museums are listed as sources of information in the introduction to the book.

While of course it cannot be claimed that all these items were of particular
significance—some, for example, merely established an entirely predictable locality,
food or clutch size—the figures clearly suggest that increased substance and authority
was brought to the book through the addition of museum data. Some individual
items of information were, however, particularly important, and here we select some
of these as well as others from the companion volumes Threatened birds of Africa
and related islands (Collar & Stuart 1985) and Threatened birds of the Philippines
(Collar et al. 1999).

International range extensions

The BirdLife Red Data Book programme has uncovered and published first species
records for at least five countries, namely: Dwarf Tinamou Taoniscus nanus in
Argentina (two specimens in BMNH), Chestnut-throated Spinetail Synallaxis cherrieti
in Colombia (two specimens in FMNH), White-necked Picathartes Picathartes
gymnocephalus in Guinea (five specimens in ZFMK), Grey-necked Picathartes P.
oreas in Equatorial Guinea (specimen in EBD; information passed to and first
published by Ash 1991) and Nimba Flycatcher Melaenornis annamarulae in Ivory
Coast (specimen in MNHM). Collar et al. (1992) also provided the first unambiguous
records of Yellow Cardinal Gubernatrix cristata from Paraguay (specimens in
BMNH, also MCZ). Clearly one effect of these discoveries is to extend the
responsibility for the conservation of the species in question to new countries,
although this is not to suggest that it in any way diminishes the responsibility of
those countries to which the species were previously believed confined.

State or province range extensions

Significant within-country range extensions (involving new political subunits or
mountain ranges) based solely on museum material have been documented for several
countries in the Caribbean and Central and South America, for example: records of
Rusty-flanked Crake Laterallus levraudi in Carabobo and Miranda states, Venezuela
(12 specimens in AMNH, ANSP, COP, USNM); Chestnut-bellied Hummingbird
Amazilia castaneiventris in Santander, Colombia (nine specimens in DMNH, LACM,
WFVZ); Black Inca Coeligena prunellei in the Central Andes of Colombia (specimen
in MHNUC); Blue-headed Quail Dove Starnoenas cyanocephalus in Guantanamo,

N.7. Collar & Rudyanto 99 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Cuba (multiple specimens from seven localities in AMNH, BMNH, CM, FMNH,
MCZ, USNM); Eared Quetzal Euptilotis neoxenus in Nayarit, Zacatecas and
Michoacan, Mexico (14 specimens in BMNH, DMNH, MCZ, USNM); Keel-billed
Motmot Electron carinatum in Tabasco, Mexico (specimen in USNM); Three-toed
Jacamar Jacamaralcyon tridactyla in Espirito Santo, Brazil (six specimens in MNRJ);
Cuban Flicker Colaptes fernandinae in Guantanamo, Cuba (multiple specimens
including 39 from around Guantanamo town and bay—from nine localities in
MNHM, ROM, USNM); Imperial Woodpecker Campephilus imperialis in Nayarit,
Mexico (specimen in MLZ); Moustached Woodcreeper Xiphocolaptes falcirostris
in Goias and Pernambuco, Brazil (specimens in MNRJ and MZUSP respectively);
Multicoloured Tanager Chlorochrysa nitidissima in Caldas, Colombia (specimen in
USNM); and Turquoise Dacnis Dacnis hartlaubi in Quindio, Colombia (specimen
in ICN).

Significant proportions of range data

Some threatened species, although relatively unknown in the literature, prove to be
surprisingly well represented by museum specimens, and thus our knowledge of
their ranges has been substantially enhanced. Perhaps the most striking example is
the White-tailed Sabrewing Campylopterus ensipennis, established by Collar et al.
(1992) as known from 23 localities, although only 5—6 of them had until that point
been published, the remaining |7—18 being based solely on museum specimens (in
AMNH, ANSP, BMNH, CM, COP, FMNH, LACM, USNM, YPM; see Fig. 1). Other
notable cases include Nahan’s Francolin Francolinus nahani, six of whose 11 known
sites (in “Zaire’) were established from museum material (in IRSNB, MNHM,
MRAC); Yellow-eared Parrot Ognorhynchus icterotis, with 13 ‘museum’ sites out
of 23 all told (Gn AMNH, ANSP, BMNH, FMNH, LACM, MCZ, MECN, USNM,
YPM; see Fig. 2); Giant Antpitta Grallaria gigantea, with 12 out of 21 (Gan AMNH,
ANSP, BMNH, FMNH, IRSNB, MHNG, MNHN, USNM, WFVZ); Cochabamba
Mountain-finch Poospiza garleppi, with seven out of 13 (in BMNH, CM, MCZ,
NRM, ZMUC); and Saffron-cowled Blackbird Xanthopsar flavus, with 31 out of 71
(in AMNH, BMNH, FMNH, MCN, MNHN, MNHNM, MNRJ, MZUSP, UMZC).

Range extensions in Madagascar

In the century before the Second World War the birds of Madagascar were heavily
collected by American, Dutch, English, French and German explorers, but even
today the island remains inadequately documented ornithologically, nor has the
breadth of the existing museum material been fully appreciated or utilised. The
publication by Langrand (1985) of a significant but overlooked collection of Malagasy
birds in the museum in Grenoble was an important reminder of the possibilities of
provincial museums (see Roselaar 2003, this issue). In the early 1980s the most
recent book available on the Malagasy avifauna dated back to 1970, and subsequent
information on the rarest species and their habitats was largely anecdotal. Plotting

N.F. Collar & Rudyanto 100 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

TOBAGO Le

TRINIDAD

: &, © $£

VENEZUELA

© Museum data

@ Non-museum data

Fig. 1. The range of White-tailed Sabrewing Campylopterus ensipennis. Black circles are localities
identified from published sources. Grey circles are localities identified from unpublished museum
specimens.

the ranges of these birds was crucial to understanding the severity of their plight,
and the museum evidence of north-west Europe (no budget then existed for Red
Data Book research further from Cambridge, U.K., than Frankfurt-am-Main) proved
to be indispensable. From it came proof of (at least former) occurrence of the
Madagascar Fish-eagle Haliaeetus vociferoides on the north-east coast (specimen
in RMNH); Brown Mesite Mesitornis unicolor as far north as Antongil Bay
(specimens in RMNH), a range extension of 300 km; Scaly Ground-roller
Brachypteracias squamiger as far south as Andohahela (specimen in SMP), a range
extension of 750 km; Pollen’s Vanga Xenopirostris polleni as far south as 30 km
north of Taolanaro (Fort Dauphin) (specimen in MNHN), a range extension of 350
km (information which reduced the threat status of the species from the highest
category in which it had been placed by King [1978-1979]); and Madagascar
Yellowbrow Crossleyia xanthophrys south to the Betsileo region (specimen in
BMNH), a range extension of some 250 km.

Range and natural history parameters in the Philippines

Following volumes on threatened birds in Africa and the Americas, the BirdLife
Red Data Book programme turned in the mid-1990s to Asia. However, because the
Philippines had recently emerged as the world’s leading nation for the highest number
of highly threatened endemic bird species (Collar et al. 1994:24), it was felt
appropriate to dedicate a volume exclusively to that country; hence Threatened birds
of the Philippines (Collar et al. 1999).

N. F. Collar & Rudyanto 101 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

The Philippines has strong historical and cultural links with the U.S.A., and the
museum tradition has been maintained in the country ever since the one-time explorer
D. C. Worcester established R. C. McGregor in the Philippine National Museum at
the start of the twentieth century (see Dickinson et al. 1991:433). The unfortunate
destruction in the Second World War of the collections that McGregor and his
colleagues had amassed (Sibley 1946) was in large part compensated through the
remarkable energies of D. S. Rabor (Kennedy & Miranda 1998), and indeed
considerable quantities of his specimens were placed abroad, particularly with U.S.
museums. Chicago’s Field Museum (FMNH) alone acquired no fewer than 12,500
Rabor specimens (D. E. Willard in litt. 2000), and the Delaware Museum of Natural
History (DMNH) accumulated material from the expeditions and purchases of J. E.
duPont (some involving Rabor) in the lead up to (and for a short time after) the
publication of his Philippine birds (duPont 1971).

COLOMBIA

Museum data

@ Non-museum data

ECUADOR

Fig. 2. The range of Yellow-eared Parrot Ognorhynchus icterotis. Black circles are localities identified
from published sources. Grey circles are localities identified from unpublished museum specimens.

N.F. Collar & Rudyanto 102 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Threatened birds of the Philippines covers 65 species in full, cites around 625
references and acknowledges 104 personal contacts and 30 museums (14 North
American, 7 continental European, 6 Philippine, 2 British and 1 Japanese). A total
of 830 localities were identified, 228 (27%) of which were based solely on museum
evidence. We map two species by way of example: Blue-capped Kingfisher
Actenoides hombroni (22/34, 65%; Fig. 3) and Palawan Hornbill Anthracoceros
marchei (14/27, 52%; Fig. 4). An even more remarkable circumstance 1s the Mindanao
distribution of Azure-breasted Pitta Pitta steerii (it also occurs on Samar, Leyte and
Bohol): Collar et al. (1994) mistakenly thought the species restricted on Mindanao
to the Zamboanga Peninsula, missing two publications from 1993 which reported it
from Bislig on the other side of the island, but even so it proves to be in various
other parts of the island, with no fewer than 15 of its 18 localities there being derived
from previously unpublished museum material.

One notable trend, partly discernible on the maps used, is the way museum
material highlights the importance of Samar. Samar is the sister island of Leyte, but

NEGROS

© Museum data

@ Non-museum data

Fig. 3. The range of Blue-capped Kingfisher Actenoides hombroni. Black circles are localities identified
from published sources. Grey circles are localities identified from unpublished museum specimens.

N.F. Collar & Rudyanto 103 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

PALAW/#

G.
a

BALABACIS

© Museum data

@ Non-museum data

Fig. 4. The range of Palawan Hornbill Anthracoceros marchei. Black circles are localities identified
from published sources. Grey circles are localities identified from unpublished museum specimens.

whereas Leyte was the subject of a major review by Parkes (1973), Samar has suffered
almost complete neglect, with only one paper in the entire twentieth century (Rand
& Rabor 1960) devoted even in part to the island’s avifauna. Consequently we find
that of its 82 localities for threatened species, no fewer than 49 (60%) are derived
solely from museum evidence. Without this significant extra body of testimony,
Samar would have remained undistinguished and irrelevant to avian and very possibly
biodiversity conservation in the Philippines. Moreover, when forest cover is overlaid
it transpires that a substantial part of the island is as yet intact; and when logging
concessions and protected areas are added, it further emerges that the situation is
poised to change rapidly for the worse, and that not a single protected area is in
place to mitigate the circumstance (see Fig. 5). When this was disclosed at a priority-
setting meeting held after Threatened birds of the Philippines went to press, it
precipitated a major initiative, with USAID/Global Environment Facility support,

N.7. Collar & Rudyanto 104 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

SEEaeEe == Ss =

ae

oO

0D Protected area

r] Ld i ¢ 7
tae” Mining application

Forest cover

© Musenm data

@ Non-museum data

Fig. 5. Point-locality records of threatened birds on Samar, Philippines. Black circles are localities
identified from published sources. Grey circles are localities identified from unpublished museum
specimens.

to develop a large national park on the island (N. A. D. Mallari verbally 2000). If
this duly comes to fruition, it will be in large measure to museum data that future
generations will be indebted.

Implications for species status assessment

The fundamental drawback in using museum data is that they are, inevitably, out of
date, usually by decades and sometimes by over a century, and therefore there is a
strong possibility that the ‘new’ sites revealed have long become ‘old’ sites in terms
of their avifauna. Habitat destruction has been proceeding so fast in recent decades
that we would guess that fewer than 50% of unpublished museum localities still
might be sufficiently intact to be available for conservation management. Thus—
while always accepting that forest cover overlays tend to be highly schematised and
inaccurate—the map of Samar (Fig. 5) shows the elsewhere undocumented collecting

N.F. Collar & Rudyanto 105 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

sites as all sitting at the edge of known forest, and it is probably the case that most of
them have now lost this original habitat.

Even so, it is hardly surprising that the chief effect of the addition of unpublished
museum data to information on the distribution of threatened species must be, in
general, to reduce the degree of threat under which the species are judged to labour.
What basically happens is that the museum data fill out the more expected parts of
the map (largely true in Figs. 2-4 and even in Fig.1). After all, really surprising
range extensions represented by museum specimens commonly are reported in the
literature. Inevitably, therefore, it tends to be the rather less interesting material that
is allowed to sit undocumented in a cabinet, but even so it would be greatly mistaken
to underrate the importance of the corroboration this material furnishes. Again and
again we find that species’ range maps, as published in otherwise authoritative and
revered handbooks and fieldguides, are inaccurate, the product of assumption overlain
on assumption. With threatened species, of course, it is particularly important to
minimise the use of non-precautionary assumption, and the patient documentation
of their ranges, however predictable some of it may be, represents a cardinal obligation
in the quest for best judgement.

Equally important is the greater opportunity that a suite of previously unknown
sites offers to a conservation manager contemplating the best options for attempting
to secure a species’s long-term future. This includes the chance to identify key areas
based on sympatry of threatened species at given sites. Using the data in Collar et al.
(1992), Wege & Long (1995) were able to highlight several such areas based
exclusively on museum material, for example Parnagua and Corrente (Piaui, Brazil),
from collections made in 1927 and 1958; Santa Ana (La Paz, Bolivia) in 1934;
Serrania del Baud6 (Choc6, Colombia) in 1912 and 1940; Valle de Yunguilla (Azuay,
Ecuador) in 1940 and 1961; Horqueta (Concepcion, Paraguay) in 1933 and 1938;
Cajabamba (Cayamarca, Peru) in 1894; and San Esteban (Carabobo, Venezuela) in
1875 and 1945.

Unworked material: new insights on distributional
and taxonomic status

Ever since point-locality data were deployed in the highly incomplete Atlas der
Verbreitung paldarktischer Vogel (1960-1989) and the British Museum’s two atlases
of speciation in African birds (Hall & Moreau 1970, Snow 1978), the fundamental
rigour and honesty inherent in this form of range mapping has been self-evident.
Sadly, however, it is also extremely labour-intensive and, apart from such rare cases
as Threatened birds of the Philippines or Paynter’s Nearctic passerine migrants in
South America (1995), point-locality mapping has almost always been used only for
single species, sometimes with extensive use of museum data, e.g. Hook-billed Bulbul
Setornis criniger and the White-throated Babbler Malacopteron albogulare (Sheldon
1987), Blue-cheeked Amazon Amazona dufresniana (Wege & Collar 1991), Bornean
Bristlehead Pityriasis gymnocephalus (Witt & Sheldon 1994) and Bearded Tachuri
Polystictus pectoralis (Collar & Wege 1995). Nevertheless, some of these single-

N.F. Collar & Rudyanto 106 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

species exercises have a particular value in illustrating the ways in which museum
material can transform the received wisdom represented by maps based on less
rigorous sources. The following examples relate to elevation, range and date,
respectively.

GURNEY’S PITTA Pitta gurneyi In early 1986 the only hard evidence for the
survival of Gurney’s Pitta was a live captive bird in Bangkok; even so, the species
could then have been declared extinct under CITES criteria, as the last published
sighting in the wild had been 50 years previously in 1936, when four birds were
collected for Meyer de Schauensee (1946). Curiously, however, a major review of
rare birds in Thailand had mapped it as present throughout the forests of the peninsula
(Bain & Humphrey 1982), strongly suggesting that alarm for the species was
premature. By contrast, the tracing of over 100 specimens of the species and the
mapping of every published and unpublished locality (Collar et al. 1986) allowed
the opposite conclusion to be drawn. It emerged that all sites except one (Meyer de
Schauensee’s!—apparently owing to deliberate mislabelling by his collectors,
intending to suggest that they had ascended a mountain when they had not: Rasmussen
& Prys-Jones 2003, this issue) were in the level lowlands. Accordingly the emphasis
of the search for the species was shifted and, with the help of a trade tip-off, the
species was rediscovered in June 1986, just in time to initiate conservation measures
at what was then the only viable remaining site in Thailand and what is now the only
one known in the world (Round & Treesucon 1986, Gretton et al. 1993). It was a
cause of considerable dissatisfaction that Bain & Humphrey’s 1982 map somehow
managed to be republished unaltered, in greatly enhanced format (Humphrey &
Bain 1991), five years after the truth about Gurney’s Pitta was set forth in the public
domain.

PLAIN-POUCHED HORNBILL Aceros subruficollis Both ‘editions’ of Birds to
watch, the abbreviated Red Data Book which updates the world list of threatened
birds, included Plain-pouched Hornbill, and both credited Kemp (1988) for
determining the characters that separate it from Wreathed Hornbill A. undulatus
(Collar & Andrew 1988, Collar et al. 1994). Even so, Kemp (1995) was evidently
unable to apply his insights to the breadth of museum material available, since he
mapped the species as occurring throughout Myanmar and into north-east India,
and shaded in Peninsular Malaysia and Sumatra as possible parts of the range. Only
with the detailed inspection and analysis of museum specimens by Rasmussen (2000)
has a clarification of the range of the species been achieved, and on this basis it
proves to be almost as limited as the original range of Gurney’s Pitta, extending
from the Thailand—Malaysia border north to Toungoo in south-central Myanmar.
The consequences of this important insight are too obvious to state.

VEERY Catharus fuscescens Work driven by J. V. Remsen, attaching times of year
to point-locality records of migrant birds in South America, has begun to revolutionise

N. 7. Collar & Rudyanto 107 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

our perceptions of their annual spatio-temporal patterns (see, e.g., Remsen & Parker
1990, Marantz & Remsen 1991). A striking example involves the Veery, which has
been mapped in several publications in the past—including the excellent Paynter
(1995)—as occupying a significant segment of northern South America during the
boreal winter period. These maps are not ‘wrong’; but they are inevitably construed
as implying an undifferentiated spread of the population through the areas mapped
for the duration of its residency there. By contrast, mostly using museum label data,
Remsen (2001) has demonstrated that the Veery undertakes a long loop movement
through South America involving a mid-winter pause in a circumscribed area of
Brazil in or near the basin of the Rio Xingu. It turns out therefore that the Veery has
a much smaller winter range than a simple map would have us believe, because each
general staging area in its protracted non-breeding circuit is far smaller than the
total area it visits. The loss of any one area, considered as a proportion of the whole,
would not result merely in the loss of an equivalent proportion of the bird’s population;
rather, it might result in the loss of its entire population.

The evaluation of problematic specimens

Specimens that defy classification generally qualify as ‘undocumented material’. In
some cases the matter may be genuinely intractable; in others it may be more one of
the experience and ability of the taxonomists. Olson (1986) observed that unique
specimens tend to be regarded as ‘freaks, hybrids, or... subspecies’ and thus
‘overlooked and ignored’. It requires considerable time and dedication to investigate
such materia! and attempt to resolve the problems, simply because the returns on
such endeavours may be so small. Nevertheless it clearly matters to conservation
whether one or a small series of apparently anomalous specimens represents a species
or not.

Collar & Stuart (1985) treated at least two taxa known from single specimens
over which serious taxonomic doubts have been raised, namely White-chested
Tinkerbird Pogoniulus makawai and Red-tailed Newtonia Newtonia fanovanae.
Collar et al. (1992) did the same with Magdalena Tinamou Crypturellus saltuarius,
Coppery Thorntail Popelairia letitiae, Tachira Emerald Amazilia distans, White-
masked Antbird Pithys castanea, Cone-billed Tanager Conothraupis mesoleuca,
Cherry-throated Tanager Nemosia rourei and Hooded Seedeater Sporophila melanops.
Four of these, Coppery Thorntail (Graves 1999), White-masked Antbird (LSUMZ-—
MHNSJP project rediscovery in 2002: D. F. Lane in litt.), Red-tailed Newtonia
(Goodman & Schulenberg 1991) and Cherry-throated Tanager (Pacheco 1998), have
proved to be genuine, while one, Tachira Emerald, has been judged invalid (Weller
& Schuchmann 1997, Graves 1998), and another, White-chested Tinkerbird, has
been quietly dropped as ‘generally considered no more than [an] aberrant individual’
of Yellow-rumped Tinkerbird Pogoniulus bilineatus (Short & Horne 2002), although
G. R. Graves—whose elucidations of taxa known by few or single specimens (e.g.
Graves 1992, 1996, 1998, 1999) have been particularly helpful, not least for the
perplexed conservationist—has commented informally (verbally 1999) that,

N.F. Collar & Rudyanto 108 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

following a preliminary (two-hour) inspection of the type, the White-chested
Tinkerbird seems likely to prove a good species.

An interesting case—and one which actually conflicts with Olson’s thesis, since
he regretted the reluctance of ornithologists ‘to accept unique specimens as
representing valid species’—is the ‘Rufous-tailed Parrot’ Tanygnathus heterurus.
Forshaw (1989; previous editions in 1973, 1978) has always treated this under an
independent heading, thus giving it at least the illusion of species status (reinforced
by a most attractive illustration), despite the fact that his examination of the type
suggested that ‘it is probably an aberrant specimen of T. sumatranus’ . Inskipp et al.
(1988) revealed that over 500 true Blue-backed Parrots 7: sumatranus (protected
under Indonesian law) were traded in the period 1981-1985 under the name 7:
heterurus (unprotected under Indonesian law). They observed that ‘it is imperative
that the true nature of this taxon is resolved as soon as possible’, not least because of
the cover it appears to provide for illegal trade in another species. Despite this plea,
we know of no recent interest in examining the type specimen afresh.

There are many such taxa whose type and only specimens await evaluation. A
helpful feature of the old AMNH world checklist (Morony et al. 1975) was its
asterisking of species of uncertain status, usually owing to a paucity of material.
However, this practice only extended to those taxa which had somehow been given
the benefit of the doubt; excluded were taxa which in some cases may simply have
received a single negative assessment and thus fallen from sight, amongst them, for
example, Spotted Green Pigeon Caloenas maculata (Anon. 1898, Peters 1937, Gibbs
et al. 2001). A list of persistently dubious taxa, whether on or off world lists, is
highly desirable as a working document for future researchers; however, the business
simply of discovering the discarded yet inadequately evaluated taxa is likely to be
problematic, and may only be achievable by a concerted pooling of information by
collection managers, who are most likely to know of the oddities in their care. We
encourage them to make a start; and it should go without saying that we regard the
maintenance of specimen-based taxonomy and systematics as vital to the elucidation
of the problems these specimens represent and indeed to the needs of conservationists
in general over the coming decades.

Hopes and fears

We call this paper “the archive and the ark’; we might just as easily have called it
‘the anchor and the ark’, because natural history museums are to conservation, and
indeed to all biological science, the great link to the natural world, a key point of
reference, and a mechanism for locking the management of natural resources into
the hard substrate of science. These few examples help demonstrate the value of
museum collections in one small but significant aspect of conservation work, relating
to the documentation and management of threatened species—for a catalogue of
other conservation uses see especially Remsen (1995)—and this paper has been
written as an expression of gratitude to the many institutions which, over some 20

N.#. Collar & Rudyanto 109 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

100

—/— BirdLife

ae oN) ci)
Ss) s) N

Q \o)
O) S
SPST TS

Fig. 6. Staff level changes in two institutions over the same period, 1975—2000: continuous line = BirdLife
International Secretariat (including regional offices) executive staff (source: NJC); dashed line = Natural
History Museum research and curatorial staff (source: F. E. Warr in itt. 2002), but note that the stabilised
level from 1990 onwards represents the retention of curatorial staff only, with all research capability
removed (see text).

years, have unfailingly made their material available for consultation and use by
conservationists from BirdLife International.

It is also written as a gesture of support at a time when natural history museums
are, in general, finding it increasingly hard to convince governments and institutions
to provide for their vital work. It is as if their political masters have interpreted the
close of the great era of exploration and discovery as an indication that there is no
more work to do. It is true that a new era of work in natural history has begun—that
of conserving as much as possible of the habitats that yielded up all those museum
specimens in the previous hundred years or so—but this is not of course to say that
such work should replace the work of museums. In the period 1975-2000, staffing
levels within ICBP/BirdLife International, the world’s leading bird conservation
organisation, rose from one to almost 90 (9,000%). In the same period, research
capacity at the Subdepartment of Ornithology at the Natural History Museum, Tring,
where the largest single collection of avian museum material on earth is housed,
was reduced by 90% (Collar 1997), with no full-time taxonomist or systematist
being employed since 1988 (R. P. Prys-Jones verbally 1999; see Fig. 6). It hardly
needs to be said that this circumstance is unpropitious. ‘Without taxonomy to give
shape to the bricks and systematists to tell us how to put them together,’ wrote May
(1990), ‘the house of biological science is a meaningless jumble’. Conservationists
are themselves dwellers in the house of biological science, and are likely to be the
greatest losers in this scenario. One might go on to say that without taxonomy and
systematists to keep the house of biological science orderly and functioning, museums
become mausoleums and nature becomes a garden in which conservationists cannot
tell weeds from wonders (and in which ‘biological diversity’ becomes the only, but
now meaningless, binomen they can claim to be helping).

N.f. Collar & Rudyanto 110 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Curiously enough, however, some of the most immediate threats to museum
specimen collections are from seemingly competitive internal pressures. Molecular
studies have become so fashionable in the past two decades, and are apparently so
much less expensive and so much more efficacious than more traditional museum
science, that they have begun to marginalise specimen collections in the eyes both
of space-stressed administrators pondering their budgets and of result-oriented
academics planning their immortality. There is no short-term solution to this, but it
is of vital importance that biochemical work complements and does not simply replace
specimen-based analysis. Most of all, museums need to prove their continuing
relevance by being used, and one measure to revive their fortunes in the face of
official indifference or even hostility might be the re-importation of formal taxonomic
studies into university curricula, so that biological research students will possess
greater interest and confidence in designing all or part of their projects around the
use of museum material.

This will, of course, depend on their being able to get into the institutions in
question, which may not in the future be as simple a proposition as it once was. The
new recognition that the biochemical properties of species can quickly become the
legal properties of businesses has produced a sharp interest amongst parties to the
Convention on Biological Diversity in asserting national rights of ownership over
specimen material, and a tranche of impending prohibitions on researchers appears
to be in the making. ‘If implemented as proposed’, Grajal (1999) has observed,
‘most of the access laws will make biodiversity access permits more difficult for
scientists to obtain than for mining concessions, tougher on museums than on
hydropower development, and more cumbersome for herbaria than for logging
companies’. Indeed, in our work towards the completion of Threatened birds of
Asia, we were informed (by J. Hon in /itt. 1999) that to gain access to the Kuching
Museum in Sarawak foreign researchers must now obtain (1) a “Permit to Access,
Collect & Research on Biological Resources in Sarawak’ from the Sarawak
Biodiversity Centre, which entails completing a 20-page form and allowing a three-
month processing period, and (2) permits of entry from both the Economic Unit and
the State Planning Unit in Kuala Lumpur, which base their decisions in part on the
issuance of the Sarawak research permit but which are reported to include other,
undisclosed considerations in their decisions.

These new impediments to ‘biodiversity prospecting’ are understandable, but
it will be heavily ironic if they also obstruct the real conservation of the resources
in question. A dialogue is urgently needed between users of museums and the
institutions that regulate such use in order to reach a fair accommodation of
interests. In the same vein, recent requests made by some conservation organisations
for full-scale museum ‘data dumps’, as a quick means of achieving an outward
degree of authority in priority-setting exercises, have been greeted with scepticism
or worse in some institutions, and they evidently risk causing a general backlash
for inadequately acknowledging the professionalism, commitment and sheer
expense that underpin the major specimen collections of the world today. Again,

N.¥. Collar & Rudyanto Hi Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

if this only serves to produce greater restrictions on access, the irony will be as
withering as the effect.

Acknowledgements

Museum initials used in this paper are: AMNH, American Museum of Natural History; ANSP, Academy
of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia; BMNH, The Natural History Museum, U.K.; CM, Carnegie Museum
of Natural History, Pittsburgh; COP, Coleccion Ornitologica Phelps, Caracas; DMNH, Delaware Museum
of Natural History, Greenville; EBD, Estaci6n Bioldgica de Donana, Seville; FMNH, Field Museum of
Natural History, Chicago; ICN, Instituto de Ciencias Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Colombia,
Bogota; IRSNB, Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles, Brussels; LACM, Los Angeles County Museum
of Natural History; LSUMZ, Louisiana State University Museum of Zoology, Baton Rouge; MCN,
Museu de Ciéncias Naturais, Rio Grande do Sul; MCZ, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard;
MECN, Museo Ecuatoriano de Ciencias Naturales, Quito; MHNG, Muséum d’ Histoire Naturelle de
Géneve; MHNJP, Museo de Historia Natural “Javier Prado’, Lima; MHNUC, Museo de Historia Natural,
Universidad de Cauca, Popayan; MLZ, Moore Laboratory of Zoology, Occidental College, Los Angeles;
MNHN, Muséum National d’ Histoire Naturelle, Paris; MNHNM, Museo Nacional de Historia Natural,
Montevideo; MNRJ, Museu Nacional de Rio de Janeiro; MRAC, Musée Royale de I’ Afrique Centrale,
Tervuren, Belgium; MZUSP, Museu de Zoologia, Universidade de Sao Paulo; NRM, Naturhistoriska
Riksmuseet, Stockholm; RMNH, Rijksmuseum voor Natuurlijke Historie (now Naturalis), Leiden,
Netherlands; ROM, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; SMF, Senckenbergmuseum, Frankfurt; UMZC,
University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, U.K.; USNM, United States National Museum, Washington
DC; WFVZ, Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, Los Angeles; YPM, Peabody Museum, Yale,
New Haven; ZFMK, Zoologisches Forschungsinstitut und Museum Alexander Koenig, Bonn; ZMUC,
Zoological Museum of the University of Copenhagen.

We thank J. Hon of Sarawak Biodiversity Centre for information on application procedures to visit
the Kuching Museum, and N. A. D. Mallari for commenting on a draft. The paper was kindly refereed
by P. Andrew.

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© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

Per Alstrom & Richard Ranft 114 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

The use of sounds in avian systematics and the
importance of bird sound archives

by Per Alstrom & Richard Ranft

SUMMARY

The steady increase in the global total of bird species is in part due to the discovery of
distinct vocalisations which reveal hitherto unrecognised information, either the presence
of entirely new species or the level of differentiation in taxa previously treated as
conspecific. There are many examples of both types of discovery (and some where taxa
previously given species status prove conspecific). The importance of vocal analysis in
establishing the relationships between taxa is also demonstrated by numerous examples.
Avian sound archives are clearly crucial to the advancement of such studies, but many
more recordings are needed, their quality must be high, the circumstances of recordings
need to be documented, the identity of vocalising birds needs to be firm, and a fuller
system of cooperation between sound archives is required.

Introduction

The number of bird species in the world was estimated to be c.8,600 by Mayr (1946),
c.9,000 by Bock & Farrand (1980), and c.9,700 by Sibley & Monroe (1990). This
increase widely exceeds the number of newly described species in that time period.
Part of this increase can be attributed to the growing knowledge of bird vocalisations
in combination with the current trend to recognise allopatric taxa with distinctive
songs as species rather than as subspecies (Sibley & Monroe 1990, Parker 1991,
Price 1996, Peterson 1998).

Although sounds have mainly been of use in the ranking of closely related
allopatric taxa, vocalisations have also been used to infer relationships, both within
and between genera, and have been crucial in the discovery of several new species.
We here review the use of vocalisations and other acoustic signals in systematics;
see also Payne (1986) for a thorough review and Morel & Chappuis (1992) for a
review of West African taxa. We also discuss the importance of sound archives and
suggest how they may be made more useful to future researchers.

The importance of vocalisations in the discovery
of new species

Several new species have been discovered because of their distinct vocalisations.
Some of these escaped attention because they are highly secretive and difficult to
see, and others because they are sibling species which are morphologically similar
to other species. Several examples are given here.

A rallid heard in September 1997 on a steep mountain slope in primary forest in
the Talaud archipelago, Indonesia, later proved to be an undescribed species, the
Talaud Bush Hen Amaurornis magnirostris (Lambert 1998).

Per Alstrom & Richard Ranft lS Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

The existence of two new species of Andean pygmy-owls, Subtropical Pygmy
Owl Glaucidium parkeri (Robbins & Howell 1995) and Cloud Forest Pygmy Owl
G. nubicola (Robbins & Stiles 1999), was first indicated from tape-recordings of
their voices.

The Cryptic Warbler Cryptosylvicola randrianosoloi was first detected in 1992
in eastern Madagascar by its voice (Goodman et al. 1996) and it was subsequently
found to be common (Morris & Hawkins 1998). Likewise it was its song that first
disclosed the presence of the Jocotoco Antpitta Grallaria ridgelyi in the Andes of
southern Ecuador (Krabbe ef al. 1999).

The Ancient Antwren Herpsilochmus gentryi was discovered by José Alvarez
Alonso and Bret Whitney when Whitney identified it as a new species from among
Alvarez’s unclassified tape-recordings of unseen canopy birds from Peru (Whitney
& Alvarez Alonso 1998). They later managed to find it in the field (and to collect
two birds), confirming its distinctness.

Four new species of Scytalopus tapaculos from South America, Choc6é Tapaculo
S. chocoensis, Chusquea Tapaculo S. parkeri (Krabbe & Schulenberg 1997),
Diademed Tapaculo S. schulenbergi (Whitney 1994) and Tall-grass Wetland Tapaculo
Scytalopus iraiensis (Bornschein et al. 1998), were discovered because their songs
differed from other known species.

The observation that there were ‘two markedly different vocal types’, and
pronounced differences in display, in what was originally believed to be Suiriri
Flycatcher Suiriri suiriri led to the discovery of the Chapada Flycatcher Suiriri
islerorum (Zimmer et al. 2001).

The song of the Nepal Wren Babbler Pnoepyga immaculata (Martens & Eck
1991) was long thought to be a variant of the song of Scaly-breasted Wren Babbler
P. albiventer. It was later realised that the individuals with this kind of song also
differed morphologically from Scaly-breasted Wren Babbler, and the existence of a
previously unknown species was thus revealed.

Three previously unknown species of warblers were discovered in China during
the 1990s as a result of their vocalisations. Emei Leaf Warbler Phylloscopus
emeiensis, restricted to a small area in central China, was first noted because its
song and call differed markedly from two other sympatric, similar-looking species,
Blyth’s Leaf Warbler P. reguloides and White-tailed Leaf Warbler P. davisoni
(Alstro6m & Olsson 1995). Vocalisations were also of paramount importance in the
discovery of two new species of Seicercus warblers, S. soror and S. omeiensis, and
in the elucidation of a group of sibling species (Alstrom & Olsson 1999, 2000,
Martens et al. 1999; see below). Other new warblers have been found because of
their distinct vocalisations, e.g. Dorst’s Cisticola Cisticola dorsti (Chappuis & Erard
1991) and River Prinia Prinia fluviatilis (Chappuis 1974), both from West to Central
Africa.

The Taiwan Bush Warbler Bradypterus alishanensis was previously treated as
the subspecies melanorhynchus of Russet Bush Warbler B. mandelli (=seebohmi),
but was described as a new species (Rasmussen et al. 2000a) when it was realised

Per Alstrém & Richard Ranft 116 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

that its song differed markedly from other populations of Russet Bush-warbler and
that no name was available for this population.

No fewer than three indigobirds, Jos Plateau Vidua maryae, Goldbreast V. raricola
and Barka V. larvaticola, were discovered mainly because of their songs (Payne
1982, 1998, Payne & Payne 1994). However, the discrimination of the first of these
species led to the even more remarkable discovery of the Rock Firefinch Lagonosticta
sanguinodorsalis (Payne 1998). Indigobirds are species-specific brood parasites that
mimic the songs of their host species, mainly firefinches Lagonosticta spp. (e.g.
Payne 1968, 1973a, 1973b, 1982, Payne & Payne 1994), so when it was realised
that the song of the Jos Plateau Indigobird differed from the songs of all other
indigobirds, it was predicted that there must be an unknown firefinch song model in
the area.

At least two new species of corvid, Sinaloa Crow Corvus sinaloae from western
Mexico (Davis 1958) and Little Raven C. mellori from southern Australia (Rowley
1967a,b), were discovered because of differences in vocalisations from other species,
in the second case a sympatric species (Australian Raven C. coronoides).

The importance of vocalisations in the assessment of
taxonomic rank

There are many cases, in a wide range of genera, where allopatric taxa have been
‘upgraded’ from the rank of subspecies to species, or even from colour morph to
species, because of differences in their acoustic signals. The converse is less common.
Some examples are presented here.

The North American Western Grebe Aechmophorus occidentalis and Clark’s
Grebe A. clarkii were previously considered to be colour morphs of the same species
(Western Grebe A. occidentalis). However, Nuechterlein (1981) showed that the
‘advertising call’ used in mate attraction differs significantly between the two and
that, in an area of sympatry, each ‘morph’ responded almost exclusively to its own
call. This confirmed the studies of Storer (1965) and Ratti (1979), which had shown
strong assortative mating in these ‘morphs’.

In many seabirds, especially those that breed in burrows and only visit their
breeding islands at night, females probably identify conspecific males by their
vocalisations, at least at long range (James & Robertson 1986, Bretagnolie 1990,
1995, Bretagnolle et al. 1990, Bretagnolle & Robinson 1991). Studies of sounds
have sometimes revealed differences between populations that were considered
conspecific, and have been used in conjunction with other evidence to show that
these taxa are better considered separate species. The Antarctic Prion Pachyptila
desolata, Salvin’s Prion P. salvini, Broad-billed Prion P. vittata, Slender-billed Prion
P. belcheri and Fairy Prion P. turtur have been treated differently by different authors
on the basis of morphological data. Bretagnolle er al. (1990) studied these taxa on
their breeding islands, where two to four occurred in sympatry. They showed that
their voices (as well as morphology, phenology of breeding and diet) differed

Per Alstrém & Richard Ranft Wh 7/ Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

consistently, especially in sympatric taxa, and they therefore considered all to be
separate species.

Bretagnolle (1995) analysed the vocalisations of Soft-plumaged Petrel
Pterodroma mollis from several different localities. Based on this (in conjunction
with morphological characters), he concluded that the Soft-plumaged Petrel should
be split into two species, one in the northern hemisphere, P. feae, and one in the
southern hemisphere, P. mollis. (It should be mentioned that others, following the
lead of Bourne [1983], believe that the North Atlantic taxa feae and madeira should
be treated as separate species based on morphological differences, although
Bretagnolle [1995] remarked that their calls were similar and overlapped.)

The Herald Petrel Pterodroma heraldica was formerly believed to have a dark-
bellied and a pale-bellied colour morph. However, Brooke & Rowe (1996) noted
consistent differences in the vocalisations of pale and dark birds (especially in the
rate of delivery of the calls in a series). These differences, in combination with
evidence of assortative mating and lack of gene flow, led them to propose that the
two morphs are in fact separate species, Herald Petrel P. heraldica and Henderson
Petrel P. atrata.

The 22 currently recognised species of megapode Megapodiidae differ little in
plumage, but markedly in bare-part colours and proportions (Roselaar 1994, Jones
et al. 1995). Although their vocalisations are imperfectly known, there are ‘minor
differences between the races and sometimes marked ones between species’,
supporting the proposed classification (R. W. R. J. Dekker in Roselaar 1994).

Even in groups such as bustards Otididae, which are not very vocal, voice has
proved useful in taxonomic assessments. It is now widely accepted that the Crested
Bustard Eupodotis ruficrista involves three allopatric species owing to differences
in vocalisations and morphology (Chappuis et al. 1979, Morel & Chappuis 1992,
Payne et al. 1997); and it has been suggested by Gaucher er al. (1996) that the
Houbara Bustard Chlamydotis undulata is better treated as two allospecies, C.
undulata and C. macqueenii, owing to differences in ‘display call’ and courtship
display (supported by morphological and genetic differences).

Acoustic signals have been used comparatively rarely in wader taxonomy, despite
the fact that most waders have distinct sound displays. The Amami Woodcock
Scolopax mira is an exception. It was once treated as a subspecies of the Eurasian
Woodcock S. rusticola, but Brazil & Ikenaga (1987) pointed out differences in (among
other things) vocalisations and the apparent lack of a display flight.

Thonen (1969), Olsson (1987) and Miller (1996) remarked that the ‘drumming’
made by the tail-feathers during flight display differed between European (nominate)
and North American (subspecies delicata) populations of Common Snipe Gallinago
gallinago. Based on this (in combination with morphological differences), they
suggested that these should be considered separate species.

American Golden Plover Pluvialis dominica and Pacific Golden Plover P. fulva
were formerly treated as conspecific (under the name American Golden Plover P.
dominica). Connors et al. (1993) studied these taxa in an area of sympatric breeding

Per Alstrém & Richard Ranft 118 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

in western Alaska and showed that there were consistent differences in vocalisations
(‘song’, alarm calls and other calls) and in habitat choice, and that mating was
assortative. Byrkjedal & Thompson (1998) came to the same conclusions. These
results supported the proposition by Connors (1983), based on a study of specimens,
that these taxa are separate species.

Miller (1996) noted differences in five variables in the display vocalisations of
Common Ringed Charadrius hiaticula and Semipalmated C. semipalmatus Plovers,
but only very slight intra-taxon differences over large areas. These findings lent
support to the widely accepted notion that these taxa are better treated as separate
species.

Song characteristics have been used to re-estimate species limits in several
cuckoos: Square-tailed Drongo Cuckoo Surniculus dicruroides, Round-tailed Drongo
Cuckoo S. /ugubris, Moluccan Drongo Cuckoo S$. musschenbroeki and Philippine
Drongo Cuckoo S. velutinus (Payne 1997, in press); Horsfield’s Cuckoo Cuculus
optatus (=horsfieldi) and Oriental Cuckoo C. saturatus (Payne 1997, but lumped in
Payne [in press] “because a larger sample of songs shows some overlap, and
specimens show overlap also’: R. B. Payne in Jitt.); Common Cuckoo C. canorus
and African Cuckoo C. gularis (Payne 1986, Morel & Chappuis1992); Rufous Hawk
Cuckoo Hierococcyx hyperythrus, Philippine Hawk Cuckoo H. pectoralis, Whistling
Hawk Cuckoo H. nisicolor and Javan Hawk Cuckoo H. fugax (Payne 1997, in press,
King 2002); and Asian Lesser Cuckoo C. poliocephalus and Madagascar Lesser
Cuckoo C. rochii (Becking 1988, Payne in press).

In owls, voice has often been of major importance in the assessment of taxonomic
rank. The classic study by Marshall (1978) on small Asian owls, in which he classified
taxa with dissimilar vocalisations as separate species and, conversely, taxa with
similar vocalisations as conspecific, led to a multitude of taxonomic rearrangements.
For example, he suggested species status for no fewer than seven scops owls (genus
Otus) that had previously been treated as subspecies. Other studies on the voices of
Asian scops owls have been important in resolving taxonomic matters, and have
further increased the number of recognised species (Roberts & King 1986, Marshall
& King 1988, Becking 1994, Lambert & Rasmussen 1998).

Another example is that all the taxa previously associated with Otus rutilus of
Madagascar have been shown to differ in voice (and morphology), and have been
suggested to be treated as separate species: O. moheliensis (Lafontaine & Moulaert
1998), O. capnodes (Safford 1993), O. pauliani (Herremans et al. 1991), O. [r.]
mayottensis (Lewis 1998), O. madagascariensis and O. rutilus (Rasmussen et al.
2000b). Chappuis (1974-1985) and Morel & Chappuis (1992) suggested that
European Scops Owl O. scops and African Scops Owl O. senegalensis should be
considered separate species based on differences in voice.

The Least Pygmy Ow] Glaucidium minutissimum, which is widely distributed in
South America, was formerly treated as a polytypic species. However, Howell &
Robbins (1995) analysed vocalisations and in conjunction with morphology and
other evidence suggested that it ought to be treated as four separate species.

Per Alstrém & Richard Ranft 119 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Vocalisations have been used extensively in taxonomic revisions of nightjars.
For example, Jerdon’s Nightjar Caprimulgus atripennis, Sulawesi Nightjar C.
celebensis and Philippine Nightjar C. manillensis were all split from Large-tailed
Nightjar C. macrurus because of their distinctive vocalisations (Mees 1985, Ripley
& Beehler 1987, Rozendaal 1990). Likewise, Tawny-collared Nightjar C. salvini,
Yucatan Nightjar C. badius and Silky-tailed Nightjar C. sericocaudatus have been
judged to be specifically different on the basis of differences in voice (Hardy &
Straneck 1989). Conversely, Dowsett & Dowsett-Lemaire (1993) pointed out that
the songs of Fiery-necked Nightjar C. pectoralis and Black-shouldered Nightjar C.
nigriscapularis were similar, and suggested that these should be treated as conspecific.
They also showed that the taxa ruwenzorii (Ruwenzori Nightjar), guttifer (Usambara
Nightjar) and poliocephalus (Abyssinian Nightjar), which have at one time or another
been considered separate species, are best treated as conspecific, under the name
Montane Nightjar C. poliocephalus, owing to basically similar vocalisations. (It
should, however, be noted that Cleere [1995], also using vocal characters, disagreed
with this assessment.)

Voice has been important in the assessment of species status of a taxon that is
believed to be extinct in the wild: Grayson’s Dove Zenaida graysoni from Socorro
Island south-west of Baja California (Baptista et al. 1983). It was established that
the voice (and visual display) of this bird differ significantly from the Mourning
Dove Z. macroura, with which it has often been considered to be conspecific. It was
also noted that it only rarely interbreeds with Mourning Dove in captivity.

Vocalisations have been used to assess the taxonomic rank in other doves. The
insular endemic Grenada Dove Leptotila wellsi was shown to differ vocally (as well
as morphologically) from the closely related continental Grey-fronted Dove L.
rufaxilla (Blockstein & Hardy 1989). Playback tests were also of importance in this
re-evaluation. Chappuis (1974-1985) and Morel & Chappuis (1992) showed that
the vocalisations of the morphologically closely similar Eurasian Collared Dove
Streptopelia decaocto and African Collared Dove S. roseogrisea differ markedly,
and proposed species status for them.

Pittas Pittidae have loud, relatively simple songs which have been used (in
conjunction with especially morphology) to show that the mainly allopatric Fairy
Pitta Pitta nympha, Blue-winged Pitta P. moluccensis, Indian Pitta P. brachyura and
Mangrove Pitta P. megarhynchus are best treated as separate species (Lambert 1996,
Lambert & Woodcock 1996).

The Neotropical Tyrannidae include many species that are poorly differentiated
morphologically, and vocalisations have often been of great importance in the
recognition of species. Lanyon (1978) used vocalisations and playback tests
extensively in his monumental revision of the genus Myiarchus, because he was
‘convinced that the use of vocal characters, in conjunction with more conventional
morphological characters, would be the key to any successful attempt to determine
specific limits and relationships within the genus’. He proposed several taxonomic
rearrangements based on this research.

Per Alstrém & Richard Ranft 120 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Willow Flycatcher Empidonax traillii and Alder Flycatcher E. alnorum were
formerly considered conspecific, but Stein (1958, 1963) showed that they differed
in vocalisations and other aspects, did not respond to playback of each other’s songs
and were partly sympatric. Similarly, studies of vocalisations together with
morphology and allozymes showed that the Western Flycatcher E. difficilis of western
North America was in fact two separate, partly sympatric, species: Pacific-slope
Flycatcher E. difficilis and Cordilleran Flycatcher E. occidentalis (Johnson 1980,
Johnson 1994).

The species in the South American suboscine genus Scytalopus (tapaculos) are
extremely similar in plumage and structure, and are very secretive and difficult to
observe (e.g. Fjeldsa & Krabbe 1990, Ridgely & Tudor 1994). Until recently, their
classification was based on comparative studies of museum specimens (Zimmer
1939, Peters 1951). Areview by Krabbe & Schulenberg (1997) using vocalisations
(in combination with morphology and distribution) led to a virtual ‘explosion’ of
species, from 11 recognised by Zimmer and Peters to no fewer than 37. Three of
these, Choc6é Tapaculo S. chocoensis, Ecuadorian Tapaculo S. robbinsi and Chusquea
Tapaculo S$. parkeri, were new to science, and an additional two or three were
considered to be undescribed. Several of the species were shown to be sympatric.
Krabbe & Schulenberg classified allopatric taxa with unique songs as species, an
approach that was supported by DNA data presented by Arctander & Fjeldsa (1994).

The use of vocalisations has led to the recognition of many South American
Thamnophilidae and Formicariidae as species. For example, Isler et al. (1997)
suggested that the widely distributed polytypic Slaty Antshrike Thamnophilus
punctatus is better treated as at least six separate allospecies:; Isler et al. (1999)
argued that Streaked Antwren Myrmotherula surinamensis should be treated as four
species; and Whitney ef al. (2000) concluded that the Black-capped Antwren
Herpsilochmus pileatus complex consists of three species, of which one, Caatinga
Antwren H. sellowi, was previously undescribed because it had been confused with
pileatus for almost a century.

The Bengal Bushlark Mirafra assamica was previously treated as a polytypic
species ranging from India to Sri Lanka and Vietnam. However, Alstrém (1998)
showed that there are pronounced differences in songs, calls and song-flights (as
well as morphological differences, and in one case in habitat) between four allopatric
taxa. Based on this, he proposed that they be treated as four separate species.

Bicknell’s Thrush Catharus bicknelli has received much interest lately, because
it has been shown to differ from Grey-cheeked Thrush C. minimus (with which it
was formerly considered conspecific) in a number of aspects, including song (and
lack of response to playback to two other subspecies of Grey-cheeked Thrush,
minimus and aliciae) (Ouellet 1993).

Old World warblers are renowned for being morphologically poorly differentiated,
although the species usually differ more clearly by their songs. This was noted more
than 200 years ago, when White (1789) remarked that ‘I have now, past dispute,
made out three distinct species of the willow-wrens (motacille trochili) which

Per Alstrom & Richard Ranft 121 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

constantly and invariably use distinct notes.’ He was referring to Willow Warbler
Phylloscopus trochilus, Common Chiffchaff P. collybita and Wood Warbler P.
sibilatrix, of which only the first had at that time been named. In fact, in the genus
Phylloscopus (leaf warblers) in Eurasia excluding the Philippines, Greater Sundas
and Wallacea, the number of recognised species went up by 31% in the last decade,
and in all except two species, songs were important in the assessment of their
taxonomic rank (Irwin et al. 2001). Two examples are given below.

Pallas’s Warbler P. proregulus used to be considered a wide-ranging polytypic
species, breeding in Siberia, northern Mongolia and north-east China (nominate
proregulus); central China and the Himalayas west to central Nepal (subspecies
chloronotus); and western Himalayas (subspecies simlaensis); a fourth taxon,
kansuensis, from northern central China, was treated as a synonym of either
proregulus or chloronotus. First, Alstrom & Olsson (1990) proposed that proregulus
and chloronotus/simlaensis should be treated as two separate species based on
pronounced differences in vocalisations and lack of response to playback of each
other’s songs. Subsequently, Alstrém et al (1997) pointed out that kansuensis also
differed considerably in vocalisations from the others, and did not respond to playback
of their songs, and concluded that it ought to be treated as a separate species.
Meanwhile, Alstr6m et al. (1992) found a species with unique vocalisations that
was sympatric with chloronotus in central China (differing also in morphology, habitat
choice and nest site). It was described as a new species, Chinese Leaf Warbler P.
sichuanensis, though it was later realised that this name was pre-dated by yunnanensis
(Martens & Eck 1995, P. Alstrom & U. Olsson unpublished).

The taxonomy of the Common Chiffchaff Phylloscopus collybita complex has
received much attention in recent years. It was formerly considered a single polytypic
species, although extensive studies of its vocalisations and other data (e.g. Martens
& Hanel 1981, Martens 1982, Salomon 1987, 1989, Martens & Meincke 1989, Helbig
et al. 1996) have led to the suggestion that at least four species ought to be recognised:
Common Chiffchaff P. collybita, Iberian Chiffchaff P. brehmii, Canary Islands
Chiffchaff P. canariensis and Mountain Chiffchaff P. sindianus, leaving the
relationships of the Siberian taxon fristis unresolved (Helbig et al. 1996). These
taxa are allopatric, except for Mountain and Common Chiffchaffs, which occur
together in western Asia, and the latter meets Iberian Chiffchaff in a narrow zone in
the Pyrenees. Hansson et al. (2000) showed that Swedish populations of Common
Chiffchaff of the subspecies collybita and abietinus responded more strongly to
song of their own than to the other subspecies and, based on other differences such
as habitat choice, they predicted that there would be only limited hybridisation if
these taxa met in the future.

The Golden-spectacled Warbler was until recently treated as a single polytypic
species, Seicercus burkii, with a wide distribution in mountains of southern Asia
(mainly the Himalayas and China). Alstr6m & Olsson (1999, 2000) and Martens ef
al. (1999) demonstrated that this is actually a complex of no fewer than six sibling
Species, with up to four occurring at different altitudes on the same mountain (two,

Per Alstrém & Richard Ranft 122 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

S. soror and S. omeiensis, were previously undescribed: see above). Differences in
vocalisations and playback tests were of major importance in the elucidation of this
situation.

Song has been used extensively in the classification of African cisticolas Cisticola,
both to split and to lump taxa (e.g. North 1964, Chappuis 1974, 1980, Erard 1974,
Morel & Chappuis 1992). Keith & Gunn (1971), Chappuis (1974-1985), Chappuis
(1980) and Morel & Chappuis (1992) used vocalisations to review the taxonomy of
some apalis Apalis species.

One remarkable case where possible cryptic species were revealed by their
vocalisations is the study of North American Common (Red) Crossbill Loxia
curvirostra sensu lato by Groth (1988, 1993a,b). He (1988, 1993a) studied a large
number of individuals from across the continent, and correlated sonograms of calls
with measurements of the same individuals. Based on these variables, the birds
clustered into eight different groups. Several of these are sympatric, e.g. six in the
Pacific Northwest. Strong assortative mating was shown to occur in two different
populations in the Appalachians (1993b). He concluded (1993a) that ‘L. curvirostra
is a group of sibling species’ but, owing to the morphological similarity and overlap
in measurements, he was unable to assign names to all of these species. The American
Ornithologists’ Union (1998) recognised only one species but interpreted Groth’s
results as indicating the probable existence of at least nine different species in North
America. Studies of vocalisations by Robb (2000) have suggested that there may be
cryptic species of crossbills also in Europe.

Some of the most amazing discoveries involving vocalisations involve the African
indigobirds Vidua (e.g. Nicolai 1964, Payne 1968, 1973, 1976, 1982, 1990, 1998,
Payne & Payne 1994, 1995, Payne et al. 1992, 1993; see above). Although most
indigobird species are morphologically poorly differentiated, their songs are often
markedly different. This insight has led to the recognition of several ‘forms’ as distinct
species (all 10 indigobird species now recognised were at one time or another
considered to be either subspecies or colour morphs of Village Indigobird V.
chalybeata, or overlooked).

Crows Corvus are morphologically relatively poorly differentiated, but their
voices are often clearly different. Vocalisations have been of major importance in
the classification of the North American species American Crow C.
brachyrhynchos, North-western Crow C. caurinus, Tamaulipas Crow C. imparatus,
Sinaloa Crow C. sinaloae and Fish Crow C. ossifragus (Brooks 1942, Davis 1958,
Hardy 1990).

Use of vocalisations in inferring relationships

Although vocalisations have mainly been used to answer questions of species status,
some authors have used voice to judge relationships among species. In a few cases,
features of songs and calls have been used as characters to infer phylogenetic
relationships.

Per Alstrém & Richard Ranft 123 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Bretagnolle (1995) compared the vocalisations of several different Pterodroma
species and drew conclusions about their relationships based on the similarities and
dissimilarities between them.

The calls of downy Anatidae young were analysed by Kear (1968), who concluded
that they had phylogenetic information. The shape and frequency range of the distress
call tended to be similar in closely related species and to be more divergent in more
distantly related ones. For example, she remarked that the call of White-backed
Duck Thalassornis leuconotus, whose taxonomic position had been in doubt, was
‘very like those of Dendrocygna and quite unlike the distress call of Oxyura’. A
recent phylogenetic analysis (McCracken et al. 1999) confirms that Thalassornis is
not closely related to Oxyura, but also suggests that the similarity between
Thalassornis and Dendrocygna 1s due to retention of ancestral character states in the
former. )

Andersson (1973, 1999) studied calls and displays of skuas (Stercorariini) and
concluded that some of these are synapomorphies (shared derived characters) for
Great Skua Stercorarius skua and Pomarine Skua S. pomarinus—supporting the
controversial but now well-supported (see Andersson 1999) view that the latter is
more closely related to the large skuas (which are often placed in the genus
Catharacta) rather than to the smaller Arctic S. parasiticus and Long-tailed Skua S.
longicaudus.

Miller (1996) used characteristics of nuptial vocalisations to infer relationships
among Pluvialis plovers and some Calidris sandpipers. He also concluded that
‘acoustic characters seem to have great potential for resolving species relationships
at various levels’ in Gallinago snipes and Charadrius plovers.

Acoustic data were used by Winkler & Short (1978) to infer relationships among
pied woodpeckers (Picoides/Dendrocopos). In many cases, their analysis
corroborated previous studies (e.g. the probable monophyly of the New World group).
In other cases the vocal data were in conflict with other evidence (e.g. Middle Spotted
Woodpecker Dendrocopos medius was considered to be more distantly related to
White-backed Woodpecker D. leucotos than previously thought, and the same applied
to Black-backed Picoides arcticus and Three-toed P. tridactylus Woodpeckers).

Vocalisations were used to determine probable relationships of some antwrens
in the genus Myrmotherula (Whitney & Pacheco 1997). Based partly on vocalisations,
Whitney (1992) suggested that Bicoloured Antvireo Thamnomanes occidentalis be
placed in the genus Dysithamnus instead. Whitney & Pacheco (1994) also used
vocalisations in discussing the affinities of the little-known monotypic genera
Gyalophylax and Megaxenops.

Songs, calls and display flight were used in addition to other data to show the
close relationship between Berthelot’s Pipit Anthus berthelotii, endemic to the Canary
Islands and Madeira, and Tawny Pipit A. campestris (Alstr6m & Mild 1993), a
circumstance later corroborated by molecular data (Arctander et al. 1996, Voelker
1999).

Per Alstrém & Richard Ranft 124 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

King (1989) showed that the different species in the genera Jesia and Urosphena
clustered in two groups according to characteristics of their songs. Based on this (in
conjunction with other behavioural and morphological differences) he proposed a
new classification of these genera.

The relationships of various treecreepers Certhia have been discussed based on
their vocalisations (Martens 1981, Martens & Geduldig 1988), and the affinities of
Brown Creeper C. americana to Short-toed Treecreeper C. brachydactyla and
Eurasian Treecreeper C. familiaris have recently been studied using sounds (Baptista
& Krebs 2000).

The Black-collared Bulbul Neolestes torquatus from the Afrotropics has variously
been treated as a bulbul (Pycnonotidae) or a shrike (Malaconotidae, Laniidae or
Prionopidae). A recent investigation (Dowsett et al. 1999) used vocalisations (together
with morphology and DNA) in support of the view that it is not a shrike, but most
closely related to bulbuls.

Payne (1986) stated that ‘similarities in song quality may express genetic
similarities’ even in species in which song is learned, and accordingly may be of use
in phylogenetic analyses. He used vocal characters to reconstruct the phylogeny of
the Black-throated Green Warbler Dendroica virens complex. Since his tree was
largely congruent with a previous hypothesis of relationships (Mengel 1964), he
concluded that ‘the distribution of song traits among species indicates that cultural
changes may have followed the same branching events as in the genetic differentiation
of the species’.

Characteristics of song were also used by Stein (1968) to analyse relationships
among North American Vermivora warblers.

The role of bird sound archives

Modern studies on bird vocalisations would have been impossible without the
collecting of sound recordings, yet, in comparison with the collecting of physical
specimens, the means to do so have been available only recently. The first recording
of any bird (a captive White-rumped Shama Copsychus malabaricus) was made in
Germany in 1889, and the first recording of a wild bird was made in England in
1900, on wax cylinders (Boswall 1969). However, it has only been in the past 40
years, long after the invention of electrical amplification and with the development
of new recording technologies and the wider availability of portable, battery-operated
tape-recorders, directional microphones and parabolic reflectors, that recording in
the field has become truly practicable. Further refinements in recording techniques
and equipment since then means that birds in any environment around the world can
now be recorded relatively easily with high-quality equipment that is modestly priced,
portable and reliable.

In the pre-recording era, the value of vocalisations for identifying and classifying
birds was well known. But a far more detailed scrutiny of bird sounds has become
possible with technological advances. Sound recordings have multiple applications,

Per Alstrém & Richard Ranft 125 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

not only in taxonomic research: they reveal the structure of sounds, and facilitate
their description and comparison between different populations and species, while
playback experiments can test reactions of birds to answer questions about song
function, or to identify and draw out hidden birds for identification in faunal surveys
(Johnston et al 1981, Parker 1991) as well as identifying individual birds (e.g.
McGregor 1992). Recordings are used by birdwatchers and field researchers for
familiarisation of species’ diagnostic sounds, a key factor in efficiently determining
their ranges in a short time-frame (Parker 1991); to help trap birds for ringing and
relocation projects; to help deter pest species from urban areas, agricultural crops
and airports; in educational programmes in museum and zoo exhibitions, audio and
multimedia publications and websites, and in television and radio broadcasts.

The emerging science of bioacoustics received a boost after Thorpe’s (1954) use
of the sound spectrograph to analyse and compare Chaffinch Fringilla coelebs songs.
Originally developed as a speech aid for the deaf (Potter et al. 1947), the sound
spectrograph allowed more rapid and objective description and comparison of bird
vocalisations.

The first archive of bird sounds was formed from a collection originally started
in 1932 at Cornell University in the USA (Gulledge 1979). There are now numerous

TABLE 1

Major institutional bird sound archives, based upon Kettle (1989) with updated figures
from archive curators (in litt.).

Location Year

Number of Total Collection strengths

established bird species number
represented of bird
recordings
Macaulay Library Cornell University, 1956 6,400 130,000 Worldwide,
of Natural Sounds New York state, USA especially neotropics
British Library National London, England 1969 7,800 120,000 Worldwide
Sound Archive
Tierstimmenarchiv Humboldt University, 1952 1,800 100,000 Central Europe,
Berlin, Germany Mongolia

FitzPatrick Bird Transvaal Museum, 1979 3,000 30,000 Africa
Communication Library Pretoria, South Africa
Australian National CSIRO, Lyneham, 1961 400 25,000 Australasia
Wildlife Collection Australia
Sound Library
Borror Laboratory of Ohio State University, 1945 876 21,000 USA
Bioacoustics USA
Florida Museum of Florida, USA 1973 2,700 15,000 USA and neotropics
Natural History
Arquivo Sonoro Campinas University, 1978 1,000 12,000 Brazil

Neotropical

Sao Paulo, Brazil

Per Alstrém & Richard Ranft 126 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

institutional collections worldwide (Kettle 1989; see also Frommolt 1996, Nelson
& Gaunt 1997, Ranft 1997); however, only the eight largest collections (Table 1),
which altogether hold around half a million recordings, receive public funding to
ensure the long-term preservation of and access to the recordings in their care. These
collections have been built up mainly through the donations from many scientists
and recordists, and they represent many hundreds of thousands of hours of work in
the field. As with traditional museum collections of bird skins, they are invaluable
especially for comparative studies between individuals, populations and species
where it is often impossible for one person to replicate, even in a lifetime of work,
the dedicated efforts of so many collectors of sounds.

The rapid growth in systematic collections of bird sound recordings has been
encouraging and the value of this material is now widely appreciated (Parker 1991,
Kroosdma et al 1996). Some of the challenges these collections are faced with are
discussed below.

(1) There is an urgent need to add many more recordings to these collections.
Comparative studies of bird sounds usually require a large sample of recordings
from different localities. Yet even for well-recorded species there are many gaps in
geographical range (see, e.g., Kroodsma et al. 1996). As expected, the tropical regions
are the most inadequately covered, with many species represented by few recordings
often from a single, well-studied site, or by single recordings from widely scattered
localities or even simply by a single recording. Many recordings exist in private
collections without adequate access or long-term preservation (Kroodsma et al 1996,
Harrington 1997). To deal with all the extra recordings, however, requires a substantial
effort on the part of the recordists, and of course a commitment of resources by the
archives, some of which are seriously underfunded. Publishing recordings on cassettes
and CDs or on the internet is a useful way to make them widely accessible but this
is not a solution to their long-term availabilty: recordists should be urged to commit
their recordings to archival facilities.

The vocalisations and behaviour of many species of bird, especially tropical
songbirds, are so poorly known that it may be difficult to judge whether variation
between individuals or populations is of taxonomic significance or merely indicative
of a rich repertoire. Large samples of recordings can help assess such variation. An
analysis of the catalogues from the major sound collections, and many other smaller
private collections, reveals that there are no recordings at all of around 940 species
of bird, or nearly 10% of the total. Over 100 of the missing species are hummingbirds
(Trochilidae). For taxa currently treated as subspecies, the situation is much worse.
For example, based primarily on morphological differences, Collar & van Balen
(2002) suggested that the Blue-tailed Trogon Apalharpactes reinwardti is better
treated as two species, Javan Trogon A. reinwardti and Sumatran Trogon A. mackloti;
the Javan form apparently lacks the distinctive song of the Sumatran one, but the
paucity of recordings from Java meant that vocalisations were not conclusive in
supporting the rearrangement. Similarly, Garrido et al. (2002) judged the Hispaniolan
and Cuban forms of Grey-headed Quail Dove Geotrygon caniceps to be sufficiently

Per Alstrom & Richard Ranft 2a Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

different morphologically to be treated as different species, but they lacked examples
of the song of the Hispaniola race to support their contention.

(2) Recordings need to be of the highest technical quality to be of full value for
analysis. C. Chappuis (in /itt.) has remarked that the speed of cassette recorders is
often wrong, and suggested that a reference sound (e.g. from a tuning fork) should
be recorded in the field. A frequent problem when making sonograms of recordings
is that the sounds of interest are obscured by background noise, or reverberation
from vegetation. Recordings should ideally be made with the microphone as close
as possible to the subject, using well-maintained professional audio recording
equipment. Nevertheless, a great deal of useful information can often be extracted
from a poor recording. For example, computer techniques have improved the quality
of a unique recording of the almost extinct Slender-billed Curlew Numenius
tenuirostris that was otherwise nearly obliterated by a louder and similar song of a
Eurasian Curlew N. arquata (Chappuis 2000). Further advice on recording can be
obtained from the major sound archives.

(3) The paucity of collection data associated with each recording needs to be
addressed. A recording must be accompanied with data collected at the time it was
made, including locality, time of day, date and other details. The more complete the
data, the more applications the recording will have for future researchers. As with
skin collections, missing or insufficient locality data in bioacoustic collections can
reduce their value. Efforts have been made recently to encourage the standardisation
of data collection (see Kettle & Vielliard 1991, Bradbury ef al. 1999).

(4) Certain identification of the species involved is required. Few sound recordings
are associated with skin specimens, so that corroboration of their identity depends
either on the skills of the original recordist or matching against known reference
recordings, which may of course also be unreliable (see, e.g., Payne 1973a, 1982,
1998 for recordings linked to museum specimens). There are several instances of
rare recordings that were for some years archived as authoritative recordings and
published as such, only later to be found to have been misidentified. For example, a
recording of the Boreal Owl Aegolius funereus erroneously attributed to Northern
Hawk Owl Surnia ulula was published in several American and Swedish identification
guides in the period 1960-1980 (Hardy et al. 1989). Similarly, Wahlstr6m (1968)
revealed that a recording made in 1948 and published several times in Europe until
1968 as the voice of Baillon’s Crake Porzana pusilla was in fact that of Little Crake
P. parva.

(5) Sound archives need to be able to share and make more widely available
their collections. All the largest archives can provide basic inventories of their
holdings. But so far just two archives, the Borror Laboratory and The British Library’s
National Sound Archive, have their full catalogues on the internet (see http://
blb.biosci.ohio-state.edu/BLBCatalog.htm and http://cadensa.bl.uk/). These
catalogues contain full details about recordings, but not the actual sounds. Sound
recordings can be easily replicated and distributed over digital networks such as the
internet, and several audio archives are presently implementing the means to enable

Per Alstrém & Richard Ranft 128 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

worldwide direct access to at least parts of their collections over the internet. A
large-scale roll-out of these collections depends on the resolution of technical and
copyright issues, in particular achieving the right balance between safeguarding the
unauthorised use of recordings and providing unrestricted access, and allowing access
to sounds over a worldwide web that is currently too slow for rapid distribution of
high-quality audio files.

Discussion and conclusions

We have firmly established that acoustic signals have been of great use in a wide
range of birds in (1) the discovery of new species, (2) the assessment of taxonomic
rank of allopatric taxa under the biological species concept (Mayr 1942) and (3)
phylogenetic analyses. The importance of vocalisations in the discovery of new
species 1s now widely acknowledged, and it seems likely that more sibling species
will be discovered in the future as a result of thorough vocal analyses, especially in
geographical areas that have been poorly surveyed. However, it seems unlikely that
such discoveries will substantially increase the total number of bird species.

By contrast, growing knowledge of the vocalisations of different taxa (which is
largely due to the increased use of tape-recorders and sound analysis software, and
the greater ease of travel in recent years), in combination with the current trend to
afford species status to allopatric taxa with distinctive vocalisations, will probably
produce a steady increase in the number of recognised species. A large proportion of
all bird taxa (estimated at 27,000—28,000 by Mayr & Gerloff 1994) is poorly known
with respect to their vocalisations, and the taxonomic status of many of these will
undoubtedly be re-evaluated when their voices become better known. It is thus vital
that more taxa are tape-recorded, especially those that are currently treated as
subspecies, and that recordings are properly documented, curated and made
accessible.

All bird species produce sounds (even the New World vultures Cathartidae, which
lack a syrinx, make functional sounds). Songs, in particular, are usually fairly loud
and hence can be detected and recorded from a distance without disturbance. For
birds that are difficult to observe, i.e. nocturnal or cryptic species, or those occurring
in dense habitats such as forests and reedbeds, recordings may be the only convenient
method of data collection. The usefulness of recordings in systematic research has
increased in recent years since (a) recordings are relatively easy and cheap to collect,
preserve, replicate and share; (b) there is an existing extensive dataset of bird
recordings in sound archives to draw upon; and (c) tools such as computer software
for sound analysis are now cheap and widely available.

There is still a need to refine and standardise the methodology for employing
sound recordings as a systematist’s tool. Such an attempt was made by Isler et al.
(1998), who analysed vocalisations of eight syntopic, similar-looking and similar-
sounding antbird species (Thamnophilidae). Based on this, they proposed that when
deciding the rank of allopatric antbird taxa, three diagnosable vocal characters (the
minimum number that distinguished the syntopic pairs in the study) should be used

Per Alstrém & Richard Ranft 129 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

as a point of reference. They recommended that for taxa that are very poorly
differentiated in other respects, more than three vocal characters are required to
allow classification as species, whereas for taxa that differ strongly in other ways,
fewer vocal characters may suffice.

Finally, sounds alone should not be used in making taxonomic decisions. However,
they can be a first pointer to the field ornithologist to gather additional evidence
such as further morphological, DNA or behavioural data, and these data can then be
used in conjunction in taxonomic revisions.

Acknowledgements
We are indebted to Claude Chappuis, Nigel Collar, Robert B. Payne, Fredrik Ronquist and Bret Whitney
for their valuable comments on the manuscript, to Vincent Bretagnolle, Robert J. Dowsett, Alain Guimond,
Alan Knox, Lars Larsson, Pamela C. Rasmussen and Kees Roselaar for suggesting some useful references
for us, or for checking certain parts of the text, and to Effie Warr for much help with references throughout
the preparation of this paper.

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Addresses: Per Alstr6m, Department of Systematic Zoology, Evolutionary Biology Centre, Uppsala
University, Norbyvagen 18 D, 752 36 Uppsala, Sweden. E-mail: per.alstrom @ebc.uu.se; Richard
Ranft, British Library, National Sound Archive, Wildlife Section, 96 Euston Road, London NW1
2DB, U.K. Email: richard.ranft @bl.uk

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

C.T: Fisher & FE. Warr 136 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Museums on paper:
library & manuscript resources

by C.T. Fisher & FE. Warr

SUMMARY

A natural history museum collection typically houses a great deal of paper-based material
(additional to specimen labels) that may directly or indirectly relate to specimen material
in its own, or other, establishments. This material may be of great value to the study of
natural history and the promotion of conservation. Amongst the documentation most useful
in ornithology are field and museum labels, field notes and reports, itineraries, diaries,
letters, stock books, annotations in catalogues, and captive breeding records. Among the
figurative materials of great potential value are field sketches, drawings and photographs,
any of which may relate to the history of a specimen, species or habitat. We exemplify
these uses and values, drawing on cases involving mainly rare or extinct species (in order
of appearance: Vanellus macropterus, Amaurocichla bocagei, Diaphorapteryx hawkinsi,
Psephotus pulcherrimus, Pinguinus impennis, Cistothorus platensis, Calidris ferruginea,
Haliaeetus albicilla, Melopsittacus undulatus, Rhodonessa caryophyllacea, Sceloglaux
albifacies, Rallus nigra, Janthoenas godmani, Cuculus poliocephalus, Sitta longirostris
and Tympanuchus cupido). However, paper-based museum resources also have great
potential for such studies as those which help delineate the extent and nature of population
declines in common birds. These resources need to be better known by and more accessible
to scholars.

Introduction

Most people think of museums solely as repositories for three-dimensional specimens
(such as Greek pots, Roman coins or bird skins) and two-dimensional works of art
on canvas and paper. In fact, there are many other items on paper that are just as
important to preserve. Museums—including natural history museums—often house
considerable collections of paper-based material. These collections can be broadly
divided into archival matter (paper which the institution itself has produced, such as
foundation documents, stock books, correspondence files, biographical information,
photographic records of staff and events, records of financial matters), manuscripts
(written items considered worth preserving in their own right) and works of art on
paper. Large museums (such as the Natural History Museum in London, the Australian
Museum in Sydney, or Naturalis in Leiden) have large departments of library and
archive services to look after such material, and the curatorial staff regard these
departments as a core function of their institution.

The preservation of original paper-based material relating to ornithology—
whether writing, picture or photograph—is just as important as biological material
for the study, particularly historical, of birds. Such records are especially useful for
the safe keeping of knowledge about those species that are now extinct or endangered,
and in many cases provide the only record of extinct species. All biological bird
material is to a considerable degree devalued if it is dissociated from originally
accompanying (or, indeed, subsequently provided) written, drawn or photographic

C. T, Fisher & FE E. Warr 137 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

material. In this paper we identify and illustrate some of the types of contribution to
ornithology and conservation made by the paper archives maintained by museums.

Written material

Amongst the written materials most useful in ornithology are: field and museum
labels, field notes and reports, itineraries, diaries, letters, stock books and annotations
in catalogues, and captive breeding records. In this essay we largely assume the
crucial importance of ensuring the permanent attachment and good condition of
original specimen labels as a means of verifying and evaluating specimen material,
but we do allude to cases which demonstrate this particular truth. It is also to be
noted that the preservation and improvement of label condition are well worthy of
the close attention of the museum curatorial community. We also assume the obvious
necessity of regarding biological field records as specimens in their own right, and
would like to emphasise that when these are on computer, rather than on file cards,
it is nevertheless both practical and precautionary to keep hard copies, since members
of the public may not always have computer access at the time of their visit.
Furthermore, we assume that the need for an accurate and detailed paper catalogue
or register of all specimen material in a particular institution is acknowledged and
understood (although it is apparent that the development of such documents into
computerised format remains a challenge of very considerable dimensions, as it
does for other paper-based materials). For the most part we use this essay to furnish
some noteworthy examples of how paper-based materials have yielded significant
pieces of information in ornithology.

Field notes, 1: Bartels on the Javan Lapwing

Max E. G Bartels was a plantation owner on Java who had a great love of birds both
in the wild and in the aviary. His detailed field notebooks, written between 1915 and
1931, are held in the Rijksmuseum van Natuurilijke Historie (Naturalis), Leiden,
the Netherlands. Bartels’s notes include an account of the Javan Lapwing Vanellus
macropterus, which is possibly now extinct. This is the only known field description
of the species, without which absolutely nothing would otherwise be known about it
in the living state. This account has been recently published (Collar et al. 2000) but
some extracts follow:

Xiphidiopterus cucullatus, Temm.

The area of distribution of this Spurred Lapwing in Java is very restricted ...
found ... only in the extensive steppe-like swamps of the Sedari estuary and its
tributaries, as well as... in the lowlands of the Tjitaroem delta and at Rawah
Tangerang... [where] it is an everyday sight, impossible to miss... As they are
clever and very cautious birds, they never dive-bomb people but instead they
generally ‘create a stink’ at an appropriate distance... During the east monsoon...
they undoubtedly prefer the patches where [Teki] grasses stay moist the longest...
During the rainy season the birds keep to areas in the swamps which are relatively
little flooded, since despite their long legs they prefer not to walk in open water

C. T. Fisher & E E. Warr 138 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

like stilts. In the Tjitaroem delta they often busy themselves in wet cattle pasture
at the borders of their normal foraging areas, which are densely overgrown swamps
with rush/sedge and other shorter water plants... Their food consists mainly of

water- or swamp-living insect larvae, water bugs, beetles, snails... and seed of
aquatic plants... (Fig. 1).

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Figure 1. Account of the Javan Lapwing, from Max Bartels’ field notes (© Naturalis, Leiden).

C.T; Fisher & FE. Warr 139 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Field notes, 2: Correia and the Sao Tome Short-tail

When working on Threatened birds of Africa and related islands (Collar & Stuart
1985), N. J. Collar noticed that David Bannerman, in Birds of the Atlantic islands,
made repeated reference to notes on species made by J. G. Correia during collecting
work he undertook for the American Museum of Natural History on the Azores and
Cape Verdes. In 1928-1929 Correia had also collected on the islands of Sao Tomé
and Principe (Amadon 1953)—islands of immense importance to conservation yet
in the early 1980s still virtually unknown biologically—so Collar (verbally 1999)
made inquiries at AMNH whether.Correia had left any notes there on his work.
Initially Mary LeCroy was unable to find anything, but eventually a typescript came
to light in Dean Amadon’s desk and was copied to Collar for his use. The value of
this typescript is to some extent limited by the fact that Correia, understandably,
was not entirely sure of what he was seeing, and so named the birds he saw in
accordance with his sense of what they might be (‘Yellow-bellied Flycatcher’ and
so on). Nevertheless, once these names can be identified with complete confidence,
by relating dates in the typescript to dates on specimen labels, the manuscript has
great potential to illuminate species’ former abundance and habits.

Perhaps the most remarkable entry in the typescript concerns Amaurocichla
bocagei, to which Collar & Stuart (1985) gave the name Sao Tomé Short-tail, since
no-one then was very sure what it was (although the Abbé René de Naurois had just
sent Collar a manuscript in which he proposed the possibility that the species was
the Old World’s only furnariid). At the time of Correia’s visit, the bird was only
known from three nineteenth-century specimens, and it was only by obtaining the
dates of the specimens Correia collected and matching them to his notebook entries
that it was possible to identify the subject of the entry. His entry for 4 December
1928 (reproduced exactly as typed) show that the bird did indeed present a striking
problem of taxonomic placement:

No rain in the morning but dark weather; I went up to the Ob6 (forest) for my
good luck I foudn two new birds to-day Rail. a new bird for me and for the
residentes of these part of the island which told me that they as never seen such
bird yet. The Rail is a very small bird the back is dully brown and the belly is
ruffs brown very shirt tail but litle long legs with long toe too. I found its on the
creek quite at the head of the Rio Quija, its was on the small stones in the centre
of the creek looking for some thing among the sand, when I shot the first an other
took a short flight and restd on a dry limb right among the stones so I shot it too.
Its were male and famely. I shot one Yellow-belly, one Ossobo, and three large
honey-eaters all in the Ob6 excpet the Ossobo.

Of course the species is not a rail (it appears to be an aberrant sylviid). However,
Correia’s observations of its rail-like behaviour were an important insight into its
ecology and helped guide researchers when they became the first people since Correia
(and, at that time, the only others last century) to see the species in the wild (Atkinson
et al. 1991).

C.T. Fisher & FE E. Warr 140 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Itineraries

It is obviously imperative for collectors to keep accurate records of where and when
specimens were collected in the field, and that these data are permanently attached
to the specimen. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century specimens on the whole lack
this depth of information, and it is often only by recourse to original diaries and
expedition reports that information can be reunited with specimens. Conversely,
labels with data can be very usefully employed to create a diary for an explorer
where this does not exist, or has been lost. In the Victorian period, in particular, the
custom was for dispersal of specimens from a particular expedition to museums
around the world (in essence to whomsoever would pay for them). Databasing the
locality and dates on these specimens, after searching them out in the many museums
which contain good Victorian natural history collections, can give unexpectedly
positive results. These are not only of biographical interest: Australians, for instance,
have found the database and itinerary compiled by the Liverpool Museum about
John Gilbert’s travels in Australia between 1838 and 1845 (housed in computer
form, as a card index and as numerous notes and photocopies, which indeed fill the
shelves of one whole office) essential for confirming exactly where he had collected
some of his rarest species (see below). In many cases a specimen with a missing or
obscured collecting date can be checked against another with the same locality;
conversely specimens with dates but no localities can be reunited with place names
when compared to other specimens collected on the same day (Fig. 2).

Rasmussen & Prys-Jones (2003, this issue) also refer (in their section “Label
substitution’) to the use archival material can make in determining provenance of
suspect material (e.g. Meek’s ‘Misima’ material) and to the frustration of science
that results from the loss of archival material (e.g. the ill-considered destruction of
many of Rothschild’s papers).

Letters: Dannefaerd on the Giant Chatham Island Rail

The Giant Chatham Island Rail Diaphorapteryx hawkinsi is only known from fossil
bones first collected in 1892 by W. Hawkins (for whom the bird is named). However,
a letter (from Auckland, dated 21 February 1895) held in the Rothschild
Correspondence archive at the Natural History Museum, London, from Sigvard
Dannefaerd to his employer Walter Rothschild, includes unique observations on the
living rail and other bird species that Dannefaerd gleaned second-hand during a
visit to the native Chatham Island Morioris. The Giant Rail became extinct before
the arrival of Europeans in the mid-1800s, but obviously coexisted with the Moriori
for some time. However, the abundance of its remains in Moriori middens indicates
that it was frequently hunted as food, an interpretation corroborated emphatically
by the information in Dannefaerd’s letter. A full description of the letter and its
significance is being prepared by Joanne Cooper of the Natural History Museum,
Tring, as part of a wider survey of Rothschild’s Chatham island collections. There is
an artist’s reconstruction of the Giant Chatham Rail in Gill & Martinson (1991:
Figure 18), and a complete skeleton of a bird collected by Dannefaerd for Rothschild
was illustrated in Andrews (1896: plate XII).

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

141

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C.T. Fisher & F E. Warr 142 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

This is not the only scientifically interesting letter amongst Dannefaerd’s
correspondence, which is also greatly revealing about how extensive Dannefaerd’s
previously unrecognised contribution to Rothschild’s fossil collection was.

Letters and field labels: Gould, Gilbert and the Paradise Parrot
The Paradise Parrot Psephotus pulcherrimus was first collected on the Darling Downs
of southern Queensland by John Gilbert, John Gould’s collector in Australia, in
May 1844. Gilbert wrote to tell Gould about his new bird, which is now thought to
be extinct (Brooks 2000). The story of Gilbert’s discovery is now known only because
of the finding of two letters, the first in 1938. This was a draft' of Gould’s reply to
Gilbert’s letter, found in an old trunk belonging to Gould’s descendants. In this
letter Gould exclaimed ‘I am especially delighted about the new Platycercus...’
Since then it has been suspected that Gould had used Gilbert’s account, as
contained in his original, but lost, letter, to help compose the type description of the
Paradise Parrot (Gould 1845). Luckily, a copy of Gilbert’s original letter was quite
recently found in Liverpool City Libraries’ (Fisher 1985) (Fig. 3). The copy was by
the 13th Earl of Derby, an ardent amateur ornithologist, to whom Gould was hoping
to sell some specimens of this spectacular new parrot—hence he had obviously lent
Gilbert’s letter to Lord Derby as an encouragement. Lord Derby was an inveterate
copier of letters (many into copybooks, although this copy is loose) but was not
always punctilious about returning them. It seems he never sent the original of
Gilbert’s letter back to Gould and it cannot now be found. This means Lord Derby’s
copy is the only record of the collection of the first specimens of this now extinct
species, and confirms that Gilbert’s description in the letter was used by Gould for
the type description. In fact, most of the type description was lifted word-for-word
from Gilbert’s letter, as this extract demonstrates:

I ... seize the opportunity of writing to you a few observations... almost the first
bird shot is a totally new parrot...without exception the most beautiful of the
whole tribe I have ever yet seen in Australia... the mingling of the beautiful
shades of green, is its most conspicuous and beautiful character... it is in habits
truly a grass-eating Parrot, assembling in small families and feeding in high
grass...

Gould succeeded in selling two of Gilbert’s specimens of the Paradise Parrot to
Lord Derby. Both still have Gilbert’s original field labels attached to them*. The
hand-written collecting date on the label attached to one of these specimens predates
Gilbert’s letter. This bird, a fine male*, must therefore be considered to be from the
original type series. The fact that it still has Gilbert’s original label (Fig. 4) gives us
locality detail missing from the designated type specimens in the Academy of Natural
Sciences, Philadelphia, as most of these have had their original field labels removed.
Gilbert’s letter and label details, coupled with research which has pinpointed Gilbert’s
route and dates as he travelled through the Darling Downs (see ‘Itineraries’ and
‘Diaries’ ), means that the original location of the discovery of the Paradise Parrot
can now be accurately recorded.

C.T. Fisher & FE. Warr 143 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

This shows how imperative it 1s for specimen labels to be carefully looked after.
National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside (NMGM), recognising this fact, have
started a programme of conserving bird skin labels, which are cleaned, mended and
encapsulated in plastic sheaths before being re-attached (see Fig. 4). The conservation
project is being undertaken by Paper Conservation staff of the Conservation Centre
Division of NMGM, in conjunction with their Organics Conservation staff, who

a Ago LRP? 2

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Figure 3. First page from Lord Derby’s copy of John Gilbert’s letter, in which Gilbert told John Gould
about the discovery of the Paradise Parrot (© Liverpool City Libraries).

C.T. Fisher & FE. Warr 144 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Figure 4. Labels on Liverpool Museum’s paratype of the Paradise Parrot, which include Gilbert’s original
collecting label. Note that all the labels have been encased in protective plastic (O NMGM).

first repair the cabinet skin. In addition, they insert a dowelling rod into the skin to
make a stronger base not only for the body, but for the attachment of legs and labels;
these can be tied to the rod and extra stability provided by winding cotton round the
legs and through a small drilled hole.

Diaries: Gilbert on the Leichhardt Expedition 1844-1846
The discovery of the Paradise Parrot can also be used to illustrate the importance of
daily diaries, which were often kept by naturalists and explorers. Practically all that
is known about the range of the Paradise Parrot in the 1840s has been extracted from
the labels on John Gilbert’s specimens and from remarks he made in his diary, begun
during his solo expedition through the Darling Downs area from May 1844. His
diary continued after he joined the Second Leichhardt Expedition. The expedition
members aimed to cross Australia from southern Queensland to Port Essington, on
the north-west coast; Gilbert was a member of the expedition from October 1844 to
June 1845, when he was killed by Aboriginals in northern Queensland (Fisher 1985).
The Paradise Parrot is first mentioned when Gilbert collected specimens in the
Condamine River area of the Darling Downs, but he also noted the bird several
times in his diary as the Leichhardt Expedition travelled north through Expedition
Range and up the Comet River. His last recorded sighting of it was in June 1845 at
the Mitchell River, over 600 miles north of the Darling Downs, just before he was
killed (Chisholm 1945, Fisher 1985). These diary entries extend the known range of
the Paradise Parrot much further to the north than would otherwise have been
suspected, and give conservationists a better chance of rediscovering this beautiful
species, which was last seen in the wild in 1927 (Schodde & Tidemann 1986).
Gilbert’s diary is very difficult to read (Fig. 5), but it is remarkable that it survived
at all. It was eventually returned to John Gould by Ludwig Leichhardt after the rest

C.T. Fisher & F E.Warr 145 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Soe hhc Zee, - mae Cane Cape 5
RE ee ST Bs |S pane ee
3
: 1s fe ee es eee oO LF ee eel 10 ChE
Se yeas <— 5 ma ee Vat Sates os x Aclf cuct, S

GLEN Se ine lo ge
Lye: a
I 2 an Foe DA PE gga oe oe

etm Mra Lew Led S

Figure 5. Page from Gilbert’s diary from the 2" Leichhardt Expedition. This includes details of birds he
prepared as skins, information which is not always on their labels (© Mitchell Library, Sydney).

of his party, near starvation, finally reached the north-west coast. Gould never read
Gilbert’s diary properly, but it was passed down to Gould’s descendants. It was
eventually rediscovered by Australian journalist Alex Chisholm in 1938 (Chisholm
1945) and is now in the Mitchell Library in Sydney’. It is presently being transcribed
for publication, with Gilbert’s comments on the birds he collected being matched
(where possible) with the specimens that survive in several museums. This is only
possible because many of these specimens still bear Gilbert’s original field labels.

Compilations: the Whistler-Ticehurst notes, and the Great Auk Scrapbook

Natural historians interested in their subjects sometimes compile scrapbooks or
working collections of notes. These often include unpublished material, or material
that would otherwise most probably have been missed.

Hugh Whistler and Claud Ticehurst compiled a huge collection of notes and
illustrations for a proposed book on the birds of India, a project never fulfilled owing
to their untimely deaths. They tried to gather together all the available information,
which involved cutting and pasting published information and adding remarks of
their own. The compilations were extensively used by Ali & Ripley in their own
ten-volume Handbook of the birds of India and Pakistan (1968-1974). They did not
use all the information, however, and much unpublished material remains amongst

C.T: Fisher & F E. Warr 146 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

129

Palas! Frdking Ragle Sokailus fence hhus (Pai).
teraghes Dok AGM =14.2 «
Ya) |atuse Senwal-tux use 3
2o.| Ine abuve frac geou agains aus Trex Cyr w abut Te faak Vrce of AT bridge
| Wud — a hese skyuctuse zich was = :
Ode usd absent a Tye 5 = Ken vw © Seed nook 2 te nenk Vree -
[Bur Seen 4,9 toeuk wpe to Tange: neat Ons frac teak a (oie gross Grass + Masham
_ | Seseca! abot Churcale jhaf yheck voile 3 egge (|
| Qa sacs Seuk (To Se ee f te agtod. eshich
Ko me.
ee e peet a. bere 2 Gee Se
oe Ste Se gets cee
One -
cues Shisha. leases jin Ur Sere DAUal, Bucs Sy sect |
on ve Cats wSehoss lie clukecwers uacletereeieen i
{She abr hos ha olrea®> iN Cn Lhe d a nes nel Ke ~ Shisha Vree
as At We Gud | Re foo pp. ew fe cidinet Wihik I teas l one of
| ter eC) es uf tol 2 Lox 4 reammer <{ Dyy | Nua Grose balk
was aktechect 2th. ue ORD ©
| Owe egg tte Nene neal: (fer dsaertphen. Sa p66 4 sae

Gj vomoale DA tgs:
1223, Pallas’ Vishing-Eagle—Halasitus leucorypius (Pall. )

Occurs and breeds in the district, but I had no opportunity of |
visiting its haunts.

free ‘Mees & Crehketa Matlian .

[Nest with a Wett feattired chuck
On ~ henge Free hh fe Inde

i
i
\
}
{
{
{
|
{

Qntiabe Dut. (qis—6-
{
Pallas’ Fishing Wagle— Haliaéius tencoryphus (Pall. ).

Observed on the Ghaggar at Mubariqpur on 19th Pebrnary, 5
and at Rupar on 20th March. I also found a pair vesting in
a jarce Peepul tree ut Ruparon the ISth December, and
ascertained that the nest contained two eggs, one addled, and
one hard-set

ty ih a ye o
4f2/sz. gms af \Chakh; -
Js. 7 fee. pt Chath ~ :
= Sea feces? ology reves Behrese Hor por < < Inn ure 1h ree ot Savana -
22/7 Gu ak pasate -— Wee
tf 1 Wan Eacae ¢

Figure 6. A page from the Whistler-Ticehurst notes, with information on Pallas’s Fish Eagle Haliaetus
leucoryphus (© The Natural History Museum, London).

C.T. Fisher & FE. Warr 147 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

the Whistler—Ticehurst manuscripts. These are still used by visiting naturalists using
the Ornithology Library at Tring, where they are now kept (Fig. 6). The page
illustrated also shows the damage that rusting metal pins cause to manuscripts;
librarians now use plastic, or plastic-coated, paper clips.

The Great Auk Scrapbook is an unpublished single-copy compilation, originally
from the library of Colonel Hanbury Barclay, who made a handwritten index of the
contents. In 1911 the scrapbook was sold at auction and it passed into the possession
of Thomas Parkin, who continued the collection of printed papers, and added letters,
press-cuttings and photographs concerning sales of Great Auk Pinguinus impennis
relics. The Natural History Museum purchased the scrapbook in 1961°. This collection
of published and unpublished snippets on the Great Auk has proved very useful to
many researchers (Fig. 7).

Annotated catalogues and associated manuscripts: Sharpe and Darwin

Staff at the Natural History Museum have been trying to match all Charles Darwin’s
bird specimens that are now in their collections against his original field notebooks.
The museum’s published bird Catalogue (Sharpe 1881: 244-245) lists their specimens
of Sedge Wren Cistothorus platensis from the Falkland Islands. However, the
annotations in the working library copy of this catalogue at the NHM’s outstation at
Tring’ are much more revealing than the printed text, as details of several specimens
have been added in manuscript in the opposite margin. These skins had been added

teresting Eyo of the Greet Aok

de fi

Figure 7. The Barclay-Parkin Great Auk Scrapbook (© The Natural History Museum, London).

C. T. Fisher & E E. Warr 148 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

ay es Ce.
77 ie sttlawet PG, i Re ON Bos
ec an L ’
A. 7h. : Shin
Satine: { —- tn 2
ads ge Ct = Z Ort ets 32. crstormorts. 245
ae LEG 2 ind slightly barred ap-
Se ERE ie a ey Magia & te rts and edging
: = j +01 Jonr. Total length
af 4 ou - ae
CA 4 . tail 1-5, tarsus 6°65.
a2 ymmon birdin Chili and Patazoms,
Le vil and Bolivia. It also inhabits the

;
p- SpA AN. ee ay k Ky, acim here

Apul st 1976. HE

IG 5
Yerr Landbeck [C7
agellan (Capt. Keng). The Admiralty (Pa

5. Cistothorus polyglottus. Gok G

Lib p. 29; IWarth Ind. Azara, p 10. és
as, Fill. N. Diet. @ Hist. Nat. xxxiv~ p- 39
Ess 5

Jaris, Von Nord. in Ermawe Rais. p. W,
Nomenct. Av. Berol. p. 34; Gray, Hand L B,

pularis, Cab. Mus. Heim. Th. i. p. 78)
apularis, Burm. Th. Bras. ip ab

1S2; So. & Sale, Nomenel. Ac.
b3 idgic. Hist. N. Amer. B. i. p. 159

Figure 8. Manuscript annotations detailing additional specimens of Cistothorus platensis, opposite the
printed list on Sharpe (1881), page 245 (© The Natural History Museum, London).

to the NHM collections after the publication of Sharpe (1881). One of these
annotations reads: ‘K. ad m. ? [? presumably for unknown locality]. Darwin. Godman
[= Godman-Salvin Collection]’ (Fig. 8). This refers to specimen NHM 1885.3.6.480,
which indeed gives very little information on the attached label. However, on cross-
referencing against Darwin’s Red Notebook (which is in the Fitzwilliam Museum at
Cambridge, and has long been known to contain collecting details about his
specimens), there are actually good field data for this specimen: “1053 B X Sylvia
Falkland Islands ... lives in the coarse herbage, close to the ground ...’ (Fig. 9).
Thus the bird can now be relabelled with the correct location and with additional
ecological detail.

Eggs and texts: Popham and the Curlew Sandpiper, and eagle eggs
The impossibility of attaching a label to an egg means that clutch cards and diary
entries are crucial to the maintenance of key data on egg collections. Labels placed in
the box with the clutch (or clutches) are easily lost or misplaced. Usually a small
clutch code written on the egg is the only way to link it to the clutch card and its data.
Hugh Popham (1864—1943) found the first authenticated nest-site of the Curlew
Sandpiper Calidris ferruginea in 1897; these eggs and their clutch card are now in
the NHM. His diaries were presented to the NHM in 1947, four years after the

C.T. Fisher & FE. Warr 149 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

March Falkland Islands

1046 B X Emberiza. Falkland Islands [note opposite] I have seen
these two constantly in the same flock. They are by far the
commonest land-bird in the Island.— [listed as Chlorospiza ?
melanodera in Zoology 3:95-6}

1047 B do (not shot with the last, but perhaps it is the male)
1048 B Scolopax Falkland
1049 1 Coleoptera. Tierra del F, chiefly Hardy Peninsula
1050 I Harpalide. Falkland Island
HOSty oD Ricinus from Scolopax (1048)
10527 P. Lichen common in mountain on the rocks. Tierra del F.
1053 B X Sylvia Falkland Islands [note opposite] Beak & legs large
in proportion. lives in the coarse herbage, close to the
ground:— [with different pen] I never saw a bird so difficult
to make to fly after marking it down within a few yards in
open plain it could never <i/leg.> [listed as Scytalopus; = |voj\od+%,
Magellicanus Gray in Zoology 3: tas and see Ornithological Wore. (her lea)
p. Zio BS
oso P Excrescences or Fungi; edible; on the Beech same as in spirits
(528) [Cyttaria darwinii. See Plant Notes p. 168]
1056 =P Junctions of Parasite bush with the Beech of Tierra del F.
same as in spirits (532-534)
; 1833 March
‘\

i L 1057 Moth. on leaf of Black Currant bush. G. Success B.
: : Xx Harpal: (Sphodrus?) Falkland Island [note opposite] Was this
o nported or is it an original inhabitant

Figure 9. Page from the printed version of Darwin’s Red Notebook, which includes information on
‘Sylvia, Falkland Islands’ (= Cistothorus platensis) which does not exist on the specimen’s label (©
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge).

eggs®. The clutch card reads: ‘Calidris ferruginea. Korsakoffski Is. Yenesei R.,
Siberia. [Collector] H. L. Popham. 3 July 1897. [Set Mark] 387. [No. of eggs] c/4.
Shot bird off nest, notebook vol.1, exhibited B.O.C. 20.10.97 [see Bull. B.O.C., 7
(1897): 2]; first authentic eggs on record’ (Fig. 10).

The clutch card therefore includes information cross-referenced to one of Popham’s
original diaries, but these would not have been available to NHM staff when they first
received the eggs. Popham’s diary indeed has a long entry describing his discovery
and collection of the contents of the Curlew Sandpiper nest, and also recounts how he
collected the female parent. Of the eight Popham Curlew Sandpiper skins in the
collections at Tring, three have their legs, with attached labels, detached. Popham’s
skinning technique obviously involved cutting the legs inside too low down the bone
shaft, and not tying the bones together inside; thus the legs eventually fall out of the
body. One of the three birds with detached legs is the female shot off the nest on 3 July
1897°, but which one of the three skins belonged to which legs will now be impossible
to say until genetic testing is more refined (and affordable). This situation underlines
the importance of keeping legs—and thus labels—attached to birds, by repairing them,
or in the immediate future by individually bagging each skin.

By the very nature of egg collections, where many have been illegally taken,
data are encrypted, and clutch cards and diaries are often kept far away from the
eggs to avoid prosecution, it is often worth waiting—often for years—for missing

C.T. Fisher & F E. Warr 150 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

information to turn up. A clutch of White-tailed Sea Eagle Haliaeetus albicilla eggs,
now at the National Museum of Scotland (Fig. 11), is labelled in ink as having been
collected at Ardnamurchan on 7 May 1874 and were apparently without further data
when the private collection they were in was confiscated by the RSPB!’. The
collector’s diary'' was given to the NMS by a completely separate source at a later
date and gives a more detailed account of the collection of these two eggs (Fig. 12):
*... Simon Ross took a nest situated on the cliffs overhanging the sea on the farm of

:

Grigadale about 2 miles south of the lighthouse and Point of Ardnamurchan ....’.

Captive breeding records and studbooks: the first Budgerigar and
Smalley’s pigeons

The first Budgerigar Melopsittacus undulatus to be hatched in captivity in Britain
was the subject of a letter in 1848 from the 13th Earl of Derby to John Gould. Gould
had imported the parent ‘Sparrow Parakeets’ from Australia for Lord Derby, for his
aviaries at Knowsley Hall, near Liverpool. In 1840 Gould had been the first person
to import live budgerigars successfully from Australia to Britain. Lord Derby’s letter
to Gould (Fig. 13) recorded that:

I have the pleasure to tell you we have been overjoyed here by the fact of a Pair
of the Melopsittacus undulatus breeding. It was first observed by Thompsons

Figure 10. Popham’s diary, open at the page where he recorded that he had shot a parent Curlew Sandpiper
off its nest in Siberia on 3 July 1897. The picture also shows the eggs from this nest, the clutch card, and
four Curlew Sandpiper skins collected by Popham (© The Natural History Museum, London).

C.T: Fisher & FE. Warr 151 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

ta eres Al lsrcrlle

Het

Ar

Figure 11. A clutch of two White-tailed Sea Eagle eggs, collected at Ardnamurchan in 1874 (© The
National Museum of Scotland).

| UTM CL Af AI yl he

.
Lown a heal on | Othe, Habe
palates cise wath oe

attic dah ol oe Lig trea omc |
Pork of Wutharnuthan. Pumon Ise one : |
tts ees ue amd |

Plea eh les. ae de

ioe pub im crcl yaeeeecl Yn et er
cts an an we Baek Jbxsee ore noo.

oe ch ued:

Figure 12. Diary page, with a detailed account of the collecting of two White-tailed Sea Eagle eggs
(© The National Museum of Scotland).

C. T. Fisher & FE E. Warr

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Figure 13. Extract from a letter from
the 13" Earl of Derby to John Gould,
dated 11 February 1848 and recording
the hatching in captivity of
Budgerigars, for the first time in
Britain (© The Natural History
Museum, London).

Figure 14. A Budgerigar chick, from
the first pair to be hatched in captivity
in Britain (at Knowsley Hall, in 1848)
(© NMGM).

C.T: Fisher & FE. Warr I3)3) Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

noticing that the hen never left the hole she had taken to ... we can hear the
young ...this is curious and I believe the 1* instance”.

The two young birds unfortunately died soon after hatching, but one 1s preserved
in the collections of the Liverpool Museum, complete with a label recording when it
died’? (Fig. 14).

Two manuscript volumes representing Smalley’s pigeon studbook (1904) refer
to domestic pigeon varieties represented by specimens now in the collections at the
Natural History Museum, Tring, and give details of plumage and lineage which are
not on their labels’* (Fig. 15). Although it might not seem that storing information
on captive birds is an important part of a museum’s remit, such information is often
sought by aviculturists and historians and is an inviting topic for the general public.
The Liverpool Museum budgie, for instance, was by far the most popular and most
photographed exhibit out of all the hundreds of specimens and works of art in a
recent exhibition about the 13" Earl of Derby.

Incidental biographical material

An incidental part of working with paper is the occasional fleeting insight it may
grant into personal circumstance and social history. Manuscript bird labels are often
recycled backs of calling cards, entrance tickets or invitations. Many of John Gould’s
Specimens, for instance, are labelled on the back of strips cut from the entrance
tickets to his 1851 Hummingbird exhibition at Crystal Palace in London. This also
can be useful in dating his specimens. Figure 16 shows a Royal Society invitation to
Burlington House for the eminent ornithologist Canon Tristram ‘and a Lady’. This
invitation was reconstructed from the reverse side of bird skins labels in the National
Museum of Scotland (Fig. 16).

Figurative material

Illustration, first by drawing and more recently also by photograph, has been a crucial
means of conveying information about species and indeed their habitats. However,
in much the same way that specimen material is often simply archived in a museum
collection without being published (see Collar & Rudyanto 2003, this issue), so it is
with figurative material, and with the same result—that there is often a great deal of
important information to be discovered through the examination of these types of
record.

Illustrations of extinct species, 1: the Pink-headed Duck

The Impey Collection (1774-1783) contains exquisite gouache paintings, of which
about 120 are thought to survive, executed by artists trained in the Moghul tradition.
They are mainly portraits of birds which lived in captivity in the gardens created in
Calcutta by Lady Impey and her Chief Justice husband, Sir Elijah Impey. Many of
these paintings were the first known records of particular species of bird and, after

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

154

C.T: Fisher & FE. Warr

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C.T; Fisher & F E. Warr 155) Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

7

Figure 16. Invitation from the Royal Society to Canon H. B. Tristram, reconstructed from the backs of
bird labels at the National Museum of Scotland (© The National Museum of Scotland).

the Impeys had returned to Britain with their pictures, were used extensively by the
distinguished English ornithologist John Latham to describe forms new to science.

Two of these ‘iconotypes’, both by Shaikh Zayn-al-Din, are described below,
and were from a group of four Impey paintings recently purchased by NMGM (Fisher
1999)!>. Another fine painting from this group is by the Moslem artist Ram Das. It
was purchased on the grounds that it is probably the earliest known portrait of the
Pink-headed Duck Rhodonessa caryophyllacea (Latham). This duck has not been
seen since the 1940s and is probably, but not certainly, extinct (BirdLife International
2001). Latham (1787, supplement 1: 276) stated that the duck ‘Inhabits various
parts of India ... [and] Is often kept tame ..’. The painting by Ram Das was almost
certainly painted using a living model, and as such this composition is of great
interest and importance (see Fisher & Kear 2002).

Illustrations of extinct species, 2: Lieutenant Robins’s Macaw

A spectacular and interesting painting (Fig. 17) by a Lt. L. J. Robins has recently
been discovered in a private collection, in a bound volume of works dated 1765'°.
The volume is entitled The natural history of Jamaica, but the bird does not match
very well with the description of the only known specimen—shot near Lucea in
1765 (Gosse 1847)—of the Jamaican (or Yellow-headed) Macaw Ara gossei, a species
which is sadly no longer extant. In Joseph Smit’s plate in Extinct birds (1907), which

Cole Pusher, Sas Warr 156 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Figure 17. Macaw, from a volume of paintings entitled The natural history of Jamaica by L. J. Robins
(© The Earl of Derby).

accompanies Walter Rothschild’s quotation of Gosse’s account of the Jamaican
Macaw (and from which Rothschild took his 1905 type description), the bird clearly
has a yellow crown, whereas Robins’s Macaw seems only to have a yellow crest;
nor does Robins’s Macaw seem to match the plumage of the now-extinct Cuban
Macaw Ara tricolor.

Illustrations of extinct species, 3: the Great Auk

This species, which became extinct in the 1840s, is known from mounted specimens,
eggs and osteological material. However, much of its ecology and behaviour, as
well as the story behind the bird’s extinction, has been deduced from written accounts

este =

Figure 18. Painting of a New Zealand Laughing Owl, by an unknown artist, from the Rothschild Library
at Tring (© The Natural History Museum, London).

C.T: Fisher & FE. Warr 157 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

and from old pictures. One such old drawing is an engraving (see Fuller 1999: 65)
from Newfoundland by F. W. Keyl and E. Evans, produced in about 1880, which
gives a very strong impression of the hunting techniques used for the mass dispatching
of the flightless bird.

However, probably the earliest drawing of the Great Auk known is one that not
only proves that the bird occurred on the Isle of Man but also suggests that it bred
there. The drawing (reproduced in Williamson 1939, Fisher 1997, Fuller 1999: 367)
is by Daniel King and dated about 1652. It is captioned “These kind of birds are
about the Isle of Man’, and shows a Great Auk standing on a flat rock, which were
their usual breeding sites. Other contemporary accounts record the species on the
Isle of Man, and some pieces of bone excavated at two archaeological sites on the
island—Perwick (Garrad 1972) and Castletown (Fisher 1996)—have confirmed its
presence there.

Illustrations of extinct species, 4: the New Zealand Laughing Owl

The Laughing Owl Sceloglaux albifacies was first named by George Gray in 1844
from a specimen from the voyages of the ships Erebus and Terror. He was struck
with the white face of the specimen, hence albifacies (= ‘white-faced’). Later,
specimens with rufous faces (which may be colour morphs) were collected.

This species has been extinct since 1914, and is only known from about 30
specimens. Only two paintings of the bird exist which appear to be done from life:
one by J. G. Keulemans in Rowley’s Ornithological miscellany (1875, vol 1: opp.
p.35), painted from Rowley’s own captive specimens, and a painting now in the
Rothschild Library at Tring, which was done by an unknown artist. The few other
pictures of the Laughing Owl show it upright, but in this last painting it has a sideways,
hunched stance (Fig. 18). The painted tail has been much changed, from thick to
thin. Rothschild had this picture up on his wall in his museum at Tring for many

LD ARA IE LE

Figure 19. Rallus nigra from “Otheila” (= Tahiti), by George Forster (© The Earl of Derby).

C.T: Fisher & FE. Warr 158 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

years, so he obviously thought it was special.
It may have been of the live specimen he
had in confinement in Cambridge, in which
case the painting was probably done from
life. This Cambridge bird is now in the
collections of the NHM at Tring.

Figure 20. Lord Howe Island Pigeon, by George Raper
(1790), from the Raper Drawings at the Natural History
Museum (© The Natural History Museum, London).

Illustrations of unknown species, 1: the Tahiti Black Rail

An original watercolour (now in private hands’’) of a rail named Rallus nigra was
published in 1784 in Jcones animalium by the artist John Miller, but without locality.
It was therefore supposed to be either a picture of the Henderson Island Rail Porzana
atra (‘Nesophylax ater’; as synonomised in Peters 1934, 2: 188), or an earlier version
of George Forster’s picture of Porzana tabuensis (which is from Tahiti and
neighbouring islands). Thus it was recommended that the name Rallus nigra be
suppressed. However, the original watercolour is clearly marked ‘Otheila (= Tahiti).
Dr Forster’ (Fig. 19) and the bird does not look like Porzana tabuensis. Michael
Walters of NHM (who has been analysing this picture) thinks that Rallus nigra was
probably more closely related to P. atra but was a distinct species that once lived on
Tahiti. It would be useful to discover some fossils to prove this theory.

Illustrations of unknown species, 2: the Lord Howe Island Pigeon

There are only two known portraits of the Lord Howe Island Pigeon Janthoenas
godmani. One is amongst the collection of George Raper’s drawings in the NHM’®
and is dated 1790. The other (which is almost identical and is probably a copy of
Raper’s picture, although the bird is sitting on the ground rather than perched on a
branch) is amongst an important collection of paintings’’ produced by an unknown
artist in about 1790. This latter picture is reproduced in Hindwood (1940, plate 1).
The Raper picture was used by Gregory Mathews to name the species in 1915, and
copied by Henrik Grénvold for Mathews’s Birds of Norfolk and Lord Howe Island
(1928) (Fig. 20).

C.T: Fisher & FE. Warr 159 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Illustrations that involve taxonomic types

Of the four Impey paintings recently purchased by NMGM (see above), two—both
by Shaikh Zayn-al-Din—are almost certainly types (pictures, rather than specimens,
to which the author was referring when writing the type description of a new species).
The first is entitled “Bhu’khur’ (= ‘Cuckoo’ )”° and was painted in 1782. This shows
the Little or Asian Lesser Cuckoo Cuculus poliocephalus, which was given this
scientific name by Latham (1790, I: 214). Latham stated that he founded his scientific
name on the “Grey-headed C[uckoo]’ of his General synopsis of birds (1787,
Supplement I: 102), where he reported that his description was based on a bird in
one of Lady Impey’s collection of drawings. This must be the drawing he was referring
to. Shaikh Zayn-al-Din’s painting therefore has type status for the name Cuculus
poliocephalus.

Another of the four Impey paintings recently purchased by NMGM is a delightful
portrait of a “Syam Chakar’ (“Siam Nuthatch’) on what appears to be a cinnamon
tree (Fig. 21)". We are fairly sure that this portrait is the basis of Latham’s name
Sitta longirostra (1790: 264; the “Long-billed Nuthatch’ from “Batavia’), which Peters
(1967: 142 footnote) reported to be ‘not identifiable’. James Greenaway, who wrote
this footnote, did not have the luxury of seeing Shaikh Zayn-al-Din’s portrait of the
bird, which was in private hands at the time, nor had he traced Latham’s latinised
description back to the General synopsis of birds (Supplement Part I: 118, 1787) or
to A general history of birds (4: 73). In both these accounts Latham states that he
was describing his Long-billed Nuthatch ‘From the drawings of Lady Impey’. The
plural ‘drawings’ is interesting; it could be construed that there was more than one
of this nuthatch. Indeed, the Impey ‘Syam Chakar’ at NMGM is actually more
probably a syntype, because several of the Impey drawings seem to be duplicates of
the same species, and Latham is likely to have had access to all the paintings, including
the duplicates.

A very similar painting of a nuthatch is in a bound volume of original paintings
in the Rothschild Library at the NHM, Tring, entitled Indian birds colourd”’. For a
long time the artist, or artists, responsible for the illustrations in this volume remained
unidentified. In recent years a Farsi-speaking visitor translated some signatures as
‘Sheikh Ed-dine’. On comparing the two nuthatch paintings, it was confirmed that
the Tring picture was another original by Shaikh Zayn-al-Din (Fig. 22). The only
real difference is the way the cinnamon plant on which the bird is perched has been
painted. The two pictures are therefore now regarded as syntypes for Latham’s name
Sitta longirostra. However, there still remains the puzzle of which species Sitta
longirostris actually is equivalent to in modern terms. The fact that ‘Syam Chakar’
is written on the NMGM version hints that S$. Jongirostris could be a Siamese (Thai)
species.

Photographs of birds: the New Zealand Laughing Owl and the last Heath Hen
Only a few photographs were ever taken of the now-extinct New Zealand Laughing
Owl; two reproduced in Tyto 3 (1998: 17-18) were taken in about 1909 by Cuthbert

C. T, Fisher & FE. Warr 160 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

;

Ficisndaeneneceonncmsciocnomaicosrscoerceccacoennenniein mene hN OM RN NES NNR SNE TL ITE TI TNT IIIT

Figure 21. ‘“Syam Chakar” (Siam Nuthatch), painting by Shaikh Zayn-al-Din, recently purchased by
Liverpool Museum, NUGM (© NMGM).

Figure 23. Previously unpublished photograph of
Figure 22. Painting of a nuthatch, by Shaikh Zayn- a Heath Hen, taken by Alfred O. Gross at Martha’s
al-Din, from a bound volume entitled Indian birds Vineyard on 31 March 1930 (© The Natural
colourd in the library at Tring (© The Natural History Museum, London). Registration number
History Museum, London). 654-J-22).

C.T. Fisher & FE. Warr 161 Bu BOG 2003 1234

and Oliver Parr. Both show an owl in a small rocky shelter, with a mouse in its beak.
The only other photograph is one by Henry Wright of a captive bird, probably one of
the pair shipped to Rothschild by Walter Buller in 1892 (this is also mentioned in
Tyto 3). These photographs are very useful historical records in themselves, but are
also valuable in relation to the pose and shape of the Laughing owl in the painting at
Tring (see above).

Five excellent photographs were taken of living Heath Hens Tympanuchus cupido
at Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, by Alfred O. Gross in 1929 and 1930, just
before the species became extinct. One of these photographs is reproduced in W. T.
Hornaday’s book Thirty years war for wildlife (1931). The rest remain, so far as we
are aware, unpublished; prints are in the Ornithology Library at Tring (Fig. 23).

Discussion and conclusions

The examples above indicate the various ways in which material on paper, stored in
museums, can serve science well if it is only recognised for its potential value and
put to good use. We say ‘stored in museums’ but the title of our essay acknowledges
that with this material there is a great deal of interplay between museums and libraries.
Often the libraries are part of the museum (most large collections of birds have their
own dedicated library), but sometimes they are, as it were, equal members of a
wider institution. Thus, for example, we now have available the notes of H. H. Slater
(c.1875) on the birds of Rodrigues, which came to Alfred Newton via his brother
Edward as part of a consignment of material sent to the Cambridge University
Museum of Zoology. These were tracked down and used by Cheke (1987), but are
now in the Newton/Balfour Library in the Department of Zoology at the University
of Cambridge and no longer therefore a document preserved in the museum itself.
The movement of scripts and illustrations from museum to library is doubtless a
common one, and future workers should be aware that events of ostensibly trivial
significance at the time (such as the sale or disposal of papers, or the administrative
restructuring of faculties and departments) can dissociate documentation from its
subject material in such a way as to require considerable extra diligence and
scholarship on the part of future interested parties.

The examples we have used in this essay are perhaps rather dramatic and extreme,
since for the most part they deal with the very rarest species, or species that are now
lost to us. We should also stress that field notebooks, diaries, letters (and so on) can
be extremely valuable sources of information about the status of what were, in
centuries past, common birds. These manuscripts can, of course, also tell us a great
deal about the status of the habitats these birds then occupied. Indeed, their value
may become increasingly obvious as biologists and conservationists investigate
declines of species that were once so common that their detailed documentation was
considered unimportant, with the result that their former status has perhaps only
very generally been described in the published literature. If museum archives hold
documentation that can more precisely account for the former status of a species,
then in due course they are likely to become more and more valuable to researchers.

C.T: Fisher & FE. Warr 162 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

There are, however, very considerable drawbacks with regard to the status of
paper holdings in museums. Two key ones are that (1) most of the material is very
little known to museum users and indeed museum staff, and (2) most of it is
inadequately indexed for ease of reference; moreover, although this is a separate
and less ubiquitous problem, (3) it is often either unavailable, or available in only
constrained physical and/or temporal circumstances (thus, for example, A. S. Cheke
[verbally 1999] found that, in the 1970s, the correspondence of Alfred Newton—
Professor of Zoology at Cambridge University and dead since 1907—was not open
for consultation because it was uncatalogued; this embargo lasted until the mid-
1990s when the material was transferred to the University Library). We might also
add (4) that there are fewer and fewer biologists at present who have the necessary
training and type of scholarly outlook and interest to make valuable use of paper
holdings. In the past, much of this expertise was handed down by day-to-day example,
difficult to maintain in these modern times of staff shortages and alternative duties.

AS a consequence, museum users are unlikely to make routine reference to such
material. Certainly it is the case that a researcher needs to be extremely focused, or
obsessed, in order to work through a body of paper holdings in search of particular
items of information or pieces of evidence. Nevertheless, there is much that museums
can do to improve the situation—by providing more details in a more public manner
about their paper holdings (through exhibitions, catalogues, scientific papers,
websites), by liaising with other academic institutions and inviting debate about the
scholarly study of their materials, and by setting up programmes of cataloguing,
indexing and description of holdings. All of this might cost money, but not necessarily
great sums, and some of the work could be entrusted to volunteers. We would, at any
rate, be inclined to feel that the long-term security of much of the paper-based material
in museums would be enhanced by greater clarity and assertiveness over its value as
a relevant contemporary research resource in history and biology.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following ornithologists and librarians for their suggestions and help with
examples included in this paper: the Javan Lapwing—Nigel Collar, Rene Dekker and Jorn Scharlemann;
the Sao Tomé Short-tail—Nigel Collar; the Giant Chatham Island Rail—Joanne Cooper; the Tahiti Black
Rail—Amanda Askari and Michael Walters; the Great Auk—Errol Fuller; Sharpe’s Catalogue and
Darwin—Frank Steinheimer; Popham’s diary—Michael Walters and Jorn Scharlemann; the White-tailed
Sea-eagle eggs and for Canon Tristram’s invitation—Bob McGowan.

We also acknowledge the many hours that Nigel Collar, Jo Cooper and Jorn Scharlemann have
spent improving this paper. We are very grateful to the following institutions and owners for permission
to reproduce original illustrations or manuscripts: the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie, Leiden;
the Natural History Museum, London and Tring; the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; National
Museums & Galleries on Merseyside, Liverpool; Liverpool City Libraries; the Mitchell Library, Sydney
and The 19th Earl and Countess of Derby, Knowsley Hall, Merseyside.

References:

Amadon, D. 1953. Avian systematics and evolution in the Gulf of Guinea: the J. G Correia collection.
Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist. 100: 393-451.

Andrews, C. W. 1896. Note on the skeleton of Diaphorapteryx hawkinsi Forbes, a large extinct rail from
the Chatham Islands. Geological Mag. (Decade V1) 3(8): 337-388 and plate XII.

C.T; Fisher & FE E. Warr 163 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Atkinson, P. W., Peet, N. B. & Alexander, J. 1991. The status and conservation of the endemic bird
species of SAo Tomé and Principe, West Africa. Bird Conserv. Internatn. 1: 255-282.

BirdLife International. 2001. Threatened birds of Asia. BirdLife International, Cambridge, U.K.

Brooks, T. 2000. Extinct. Pp.701-708 in Threatened birds of the world. BirdLife International, Cambridge,
U.K.

Cheke, A. S. 1987. Observations on the surviving endemic birds of Rodrigues. Pp.364-402 in Diamond,
A. W. (ed.) Studies of Mascarene island birds. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Chisholm, A. H. 1945. An explorer and his birds: John Gilbert’s discoveries in 1844-45. Brown, Prior,
Anderson Pty. Ltd., Melbourne.

Collar, N. J. & Stuart, S. N. 1985. Threatened birds of Africa and related islands: the ICBP/IUCN Red
Data Book. International Council for Bird Preservation, and International Union for Conservation
of Nature and Natural Resources, Cambridge, U.K.

Collar, N. J., Scharlemann, J. P. W. & Fisher, C. T. 2000. Max E. G Bartels and the Javan Lapwing
Vanellus macropterus. Kukila 11: 122-124.

Collar, N. J. & Rudyanto. 2003. The archive and the ark: bird specimen data in conservation status
assessment. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 123A: 95-113.

Fisher, C. T. 1985. A type specimen of the Paradise Parrot Psephotus pulcherrimus (Gould, 1845).
Australian Zoologist 22 (3): 10-12.

Fisher, C.T. 1992. The importance of early Victorian natural historians in the discovery and interpretation
of the Australian fauna, with special reference to John Gilbert. PhD Thesis, Liverpool Polytechnic,
School of Natural Sciences.

Fisher, C. T. 1996. Bird bone. Pp.144-151 in Davey, P. J., Freke D. J. & Higgins, D. A. (eds.) Excavations
in Castletown, Isle of Man 1989-1992. Liverpool Univ. Press.

Fisher, C. T. 1997. Past human exploitation of birds on the Isle of Man. Jnternatn. J. Osteoarchaeology
Vs DI

Fisher, C. T. 1999. Patna artists. Four watercolours of birds. Pp.98-101 in National Art Collection Fund
1998 Review. National Art Collections Fund, London.

Fisher, C. & Kear, J. 2002. The taxonomic importance of two early paintings of the Pink-headed Duck
Rhodonessa caryophyllacea (Latham 1790). Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 122: 244-248.

Fuller, E. 1999. The Great Auk. Errol Fuller, Southborough, Kent.

Garrad, L. S. 1972. Bird remains, including those of a great auk Alca impennis from a midden deposit in
a cave at Perwick Bay, Isle of Man. /bis 114: 258-259.

Gill, B. & Martinson, P. 1991. New Zealand’s extinct birds. Auckland: Random Century.

Gosse, P. H. 1847. The birds of Jamaica. John van Voorst, London.

Gould, J. 1845. On a new species of Platycercus. Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist. 15: 114-115.

Gray, G. R. 1844. The zoology of the voyage of H.M.S. Erebus and Terror: birds. Janson, London.

Hindwood, K. A. 1940.The birds of Lord Howe Island. Emu 40 (1): 1-86.

Latham, J. 1787. General synopsis of birds. Supplement 1. Leigh & Sotheby, London.

Latham, J. 1790. Index ornithologicus (vols. 1 & 2). Leigh & Sotheby, London.

Mathews, G. M. 1915. Raperia godmanae, a new bird from Lord Howe Island, now extinct. Austral.
Avian record 3: 21-24.

Mathews, G. M. 1928. The birds of Norfolk and Lord Howe Islands and the Australasian South Polar
Quadrant, with additions to “The birds of Australia”. Witherby, London.

Peters, J. L. 1934. Check-list of birds of the world, 2. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Peters, J. L. 1967. Check-list of birds of the world, 12. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Rasmussen, P. C. & Prys-Jones, R. P. 2003. History vs mystery: the reliability of museum specimen
data. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 123A: 66-94.

Rothschild, W. 1905. Notes on extinct parrots [= type description of Ara gossei]. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 16:
14.

Rothschild, W. 1907. Extinct birds. Hutchinson, London.

Rowley, G. D. 1875. Ornithological miscellany. Triibner, London.

Schodde, R. & Tidemann, S. C. 1986. Complete book of Australian birds. Reader’s Digest, Sydney.

C.T. Fisher & F E. Warr 164 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Sharpe, R. B. 1881. Catalogue of the birds in the British Museum, 6. Trustees of the British Museum,
London.
Williamson, K. 1939. The great auk in Man. J. Manx Mus. 4: 168-172.

Addresses: Clemency Fisher, Curator of Birds & Mammals, Liverpool Museum, National Museums &
Galleries on Merseyside, William Brown Street, Liverpool, L3 8EN; F. E. Warr, Assistant Librarian
(retired), Ornithology & Rothschild Libraries, Natural History Museum, Tring, Hertfordshire, HP23
6AP.

Footnotes

' Paradise Parrot letter, see draft and formal letter from Gould to Gilbert, in National Library of

Australia, Canberra.

Copy by Lord Derby of Gilbert’s letter: LCL 920 DER (13) 1/67/11.

Both are now in the collections of the Liverpool Museum, NMGM.

STAVE NED 89a

Gilbert’s diary in the Mitchell Library is in two parts, one of which is mislaid and at present only

available as a typescript copy. Original volume: ML A2586, typescript ML A2587.

6 ‘Great Auk — Miscellaneous Papers’, compiled by H. Barclay and later T. Parkin. NHM (Tring
Library).

7’ _NHM, Tring; the working copy of Sharpe’s Catalogue of birds in the BMNH is kept outside the

curators’ offices on the first floor of the bird collection building.

Eggs: Popham Collection 1943.7.471. H. L. Popham’s journals (Travel Diaries in 7 volumes) are

kept in the Library at NHM Tring.

° Female Curlew Sandpiper skin, NHM 1938.12.14.91 (collected July 3rd 1897, from the Yenisei
River, Popham’s collection number 500 [387]).

10 White-tailed Sea Eagle eggs: NMSZ 1991.111.

Diary in J. J. Dalgleish collection, National Museum of Scotland.

in)

~ John Gould Archive, Zoology Library, Natural History Museum, London.

5 LIVCM D.505g, died in the Knowsley aviaries in February 1848.

'4 Smalley’s Pigeon Studbook in 2 volumes, 1903-1913. NHM, Tring Library.

'S Impey Collection LIVCM 1999.36.2-5. These were once in the possession of the XIIIth Earl of
Derby, at Knowsley Hall. The Pink-headed Duck is numbered 1999.36.4.

Robins’s ‘The Natural History of Jamaica’ in seven volumes, Knowsley Hall Library, NH11 E13-
IY),

Knowsley Hall Library, near Liverpool. Painting by John Miller but pasted on page 12 of a bound
volume of paintings mainly by Thomas Davies, NH14 E9.

Raper Drawing No.72, Zoology Library, NHM South Kensington. George Raper was a midshipman
on the Sirius.

Painting no. 41 in a collection of original pictures in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington,
New Zealand

20 ~NMGM 1999.36.2.

>! NMGM 1999.36.5. It must have been painted between 1774 and 1783, the period the Impeys were
in India.

22 ‘Indian Birds Colourd’, plate 40, NHM Tring Library.

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

Rhys E. Green & Forn RP W. Scharlemann 165 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Egg and skin collections as a resource for
long-term ecological studies

by Rhys E. Green & Forn P W. Scharlemann

Summary

Well labelled and reliable series of bird skins and eggs collected over long time-spans
offer opportunities to determine environmentally induced changes in parameters of
ecological interest, such as geographical range, the age structure of populations, clutch-
size, and the timing of breeding and migration. They also reveal environmentally induced
changes in morphology related to pollution and a changing food base. Finally, they can be
used for various chemical analyses to determine the presence and effects of certain
environmental pollutants and even, through stable isotopes, the geographic origins of
particular birds and changes in their diets over time. The value of museum collections for
these purposes is sufficiently high for us to recommend the resumption of the systematic
accumulation of avian specimens for long-term ecological research, but this should only
be done if adverse effects on conservation status can be avoided. One example is the
long-term scheme to collect specimens of birds of prey found dead by the public in the
U.K., which has resulted in several valuable conservation-oriented applications.

Introduction

Museum collections have been used most frequently for research on taxonomy,
phylogeny and geographical distribution. However, avian museum collections contain
much information relevant to other areas of biological research, such as ecology,
behaviour and physiology (Ricklefs 1980). Of particular interest to ecologists are
the long series of specimens collected over 100—200 year spans which offer
opportunities to study long-term changes in morphology, phenology and chemical
composition, and in this paper we focus on the use of avian museum collections for
such long-term ecological studies.

Avian specimens are preserved in museum collections as skins, skeletons and as
whole specimens in alcohol or formalin, eggs and nests. Of these, usually only skins
and eggs are collected in large enough numbers to give sufficient material for
ecological long-term studies which require large data series. Natural history museums,
with their commitment to long-term preservation and documentation of specimens,
provide an excellent resource for ecologists. The value of a long-term ecological
study is difficult to predict in advance, so relatively few continue for decades. Museum
collections are a resource for retrospective long-term studies and especially for
monitoring and hypothesis testing.

We identify three ways in which ornithological collections can provide
information for long-term ecological studies. These are: the use of data from labels;
morphological measurements; and chemical analysis. We present examples of each
of these types of research and indicate technical difficulties and prospects for
progress.

Rhys E. Green & Forn R W. Scharlemann 166 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Distribution, life history and phenology from
collection label data

The data held on a specimen usually include information on species, collecting date
and approximate locality. Sometimes there is also information on age, sex, moult,
stage of development of gonads, skull ossification, clutch size, stage of development
of embryos, habitat and precise locality (latitude/longitude or national grid reference).
To obtain these data it may be necessary to examine the label attached to the specimen
or to consult accompanying registers, notebooks, data-cards or computerised
databases. Large amounts of data can be accumulated quickly. This information can
be used for studies of distribution, life history and phenology.

Distribution

Data from egg and skin collections can make a valuable contribution to establishing
the range of a bird species. The use of clutch and nest localities is preferable for
establishing the breeding range if there is a possibility of migration or dispersal.
Museum collections can reveal long-term changes in distribution, especially the
contraction of range. Evidence from museum specimens for the expansion of range
is likely to be less reliable because the earlier lack of specimens from an area might
reflect lack of collecting effort. Contraction of range can be checked by new survey
work.

Life-history studies

Some indication of long-term changes or geographical differences in the demographic
rates of birds may be available from museum collections. Proportions of skins
attributable to different age categories may reflect the balance of recruitment and
mortality in the sampled population. Snow (1956) used the proportion of first years
to adults in museum collections to estimate annual mortality rates of Blue Tits Parus
caeruleus in different parts of Europe. The colouration (green or blue) of the wing-
coverts allows one-year-old adults to be distinguished from older birds. Mortality
rates varied among seasons and regions within Europe. However, for some species,
the methods used to obtain specimens could influence the age distribution, so results
should be interpreted with caution.

Clutch sizes from museum egg collections can be used to investigate changes
over time. Rodgers (1990) showed that the clutch size of North American Wood
Storks Mycteria americana had not significantly declined from 1875 to the late
twentieth century. Therefore reduction in clutch size cannot account for the population
decline observed in Florida. In contrast, the clutch size of the Snail Kite Rostrhamus
sociabilis in the Florida Everglades decreased significantly over 100 years, during a
period of change in hydrology (Beissinger 1986).

A problem with the use of records of clutch size from museum collections is that
egg collectors were probably selective with respect to clutch size. Lack (1946) showed
for the European Robin Erithacus rubecula that clutches in collections were 0.52
eggs larger compared to field observations. The distribution of clutch size was skewed

Rhys E. Green & Jorn R W. Scharlemann 167 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

towards larger clutches for data from oological collections (Lack 1946). Some egg
collectors may have made up large false clutches to impress their fellow collectors,
but it is thought that these can usually be identified (see for example Beissinger
1986).

Phenology

Phenology investigates the timing of naturally recurring events and the relationship
of their timing with biotic and abiotic variables. Examples include arrival and
departure dates of migratory birds and the timing of egg-laying (Sparks & Crick
1999). One hypothesis is that the observed and recorded event is correlated with
climate.

Several recent field studies have shown that birds are laying eggs earlier in north
temperate areas than in the past (Crick et al. 1997) and that egg-laying dates are
correlated with spring temperature (McCleery & Perrins 1998, Crick & Sparks 1999)
and the North Atlantic Oscillation (Forchhammer et al. 1998). Most of these studies
are based on data from nest record cards from the British Trust for Ornithology,
which are available for only the last 30-50 years. Egg collections on the other hand
provide longer-term data, going back over 150 years. The oldest dated specimen in
the egg collection of the Natural History Museum, Tring, is a Great Bustard Otis
tarda from 1801 (N. J. Collar pers. comm.; see also Walters 1993), but large numbers
of specimens are available from 1850 onwards. Dates of collection of clutches can
easily be recorded from labels and long-term changes and relationships with climate
investigated. Egg-laying dates can be estimated if a record was made of the stage of
development of the embryos (McNair 1987), but this information was often not
recorded. Another problem is that the terminology used to describe development is
variable and specific to the collector. Although eggs containing large embryos often
have a large hole through which the egg contents were removed, the diameter of this
hole is not always a good indicator of incubation stage (Storer 1930; see McNair
1987).

Rodgers (1990) used data from museum labels from North American Wood Stork
eggs collected in Florida to study geographic and temporal variation in laying dates.
He showed that there is a significant north-south difference in the main period of
egg-laying. Storks in southern Florida lay eggs in October and December to June,
whereas birds in central Florida lay between February and May. Laying dates in
southern Florida changed from being concentrated in one month (January) in the
nineteenth century to a wide spread of laying months observed in the twentieth
century. It was suggested that this change might be caused by changes in the hydrology
of southern Florida.

Byrkjedal & Thompson (1998) used the results of an extensive compilation of
the dates and distribution of localities where museum skins of tundra-breeding plovers
Pluvialis were collected to describe the phenology of long-distance migration. This
approach is widely applicable to comparative studies of the timing of migration and
could be used to study changes in migration over time.

Rhys E. Green & Forn RP W. Scharlemann 168 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Problems with label data

Caution has to be taken when using data from labels. In addition to the problems
already mentioned, there is the possibility of accidental or deliberate inaccuracy.
Eggs may be especially likely to be associated with falsified data in countries where
egg collecting has been illegal in recent decades, because collectors fear prosecution
and therefore may falsify collection dates (review of legal aspects in Sutcliffe 1993).

Morphological measurements

Museum specimens represent an immense resource of morphological data for
comparative studies among regions and over long periods of time. The length and
breadth of eggs and the weight of the shell are commonly recorded for eggs in
museum collections. Other possible measurements include blowhole diameter, which
is useful for adjustment of shell weight for the missing piece of shell in calculation
of eggshell indices. Multiple measurements or photogrammetry can be used to
measure egg shape, and eggshell thickness can be measured directly using a modified
micrometer (see Green 1998). A variety of measurements of the bill, legs, wings and
feathers can be taken from skins.

Long-term changes in eggs associated with environmental pollution

The detection of eggshell thinning as an effect of contamination of birds of prey
with DDE (a metabolite of the insecticide DDT) relied heavily on the use of eggs in
museum collections (Newton 1979). The most frequently used method is to weigh
the eggshell and divide the weight by an index of the surface area of the egg calculated
from the length and breadth. By comparing recently taken eggs with older museum
specimens Ratcliffe (1970) showed that eggshell thinning in Peregrine Falcons Falco
peregrinus in Britain had begun at the same time as the first widespread use of DDT
in 1947 as a stepwise change. The correlation between introduction of DDT and
eggshell thinning was observed in several species of raptor and fish-eating bird in
Britain (Table 5 in Ratcliffe 1970) and around the world (Anderson & Hickey 1972,
Newton 1979, Risebrough 1986). The eggshell thickness of most species recovered,
once organochlorine pesticide use had been reduced or phased out (Newton 1986,
Risebrough 1986, Ratcliffe 1993).

A recent study by Green (1998) found that eggshell thickness of four species of
thrush has declined over the past 150 years. This decline was evidently not caused
by organochlorine pollution, because it began before the introduction of DDT and a
step-like decline is not observed. One possible hypothesis is that acid deposition has
caused a reduction in the availability of calcium and that this reduced the quality of
eggshells laid by thrushes. Such a mechanism is suggested by short-term experimental
work on Great Tits Parus major in the Netherlands (Graveland 1998).

The extent to which differences in the methods used to prepare and store eggs
might contribute to differences in indices or direct measurements of eggshell thickness
is still uncertain. The use by collectors of chemicals and different mechanical techniques
to remove egg contents, the application of preservatives and the accumulation of dust

Rhys E. Green & Férn P W. Scharlemann 169 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

might all affect the measurements. As with all museum material, the selection of eggs
on the basis of size, shape or other characters might also lead to bias.

Evolutionary changes in morphology
The detection of small changes in morphology resulting from natural selection is
rendered more feasible by the use of museum specimens because it extends the time
period over which they can be measured. Smith er al. (1995) showed that the bill
size of a Hawaiian honeycreeper, the liwi Vestaria coccinea, was different for museum
specimens collected before 1902 than for live birds measured in the 1990s. The
proportion of birds with the longest upper mandibles had declined, leading to a
reduction in mean length. The liwi formerly used its decurved bill to take nectar
from the long curved corollas of flowers of lobelioids, which have declined greatly
in abundance; the birds now feed mainly from flowers that do not have long tubular
corollas. Hence it may be that natural selection has caused the observed change in
bill length. The possibility that the apparent change might be caused by post-mortem
alterations in the bill morphology of the museum specimens was evaluated in several
ways. Smith et al. (1995) showed that bill measurements of a related species did not
change significantly and that, although post-mortem changes in bill shape occurred,
they could not account for the observed change in upper mandible length.
Tornberg et al. (1999) measured a large sample of museum specimens of Northern
Goshawk Accipiter gentilis from northern Finland to test the hypothesis that a long-
term decline in the abundance of grouse, one of their most important prey types,
would change the pattern of natural selection for body size. They suggested that
males, which are the smaller sex, should experience increased selection for small
size because grouse are at the upper end of the size range of their prey spectrum and
smaller prey have become relatively more important as the grouse declined.
Conversely, the much larger females should experience increased selection for large
size because their main alternative prey, mountain hare Lepus timidus, is larger than
grouse. Hence, males were predicted to become smaller and females larger during a
period in which grouse populations and their importance in the diet of Goshawks
were both declining. Both of these predictions were supported by a multivariate
analysis of 14 skin and skeletal characters. The fact that measurements of the two
sexes changed in opposite directions clearly (a) rules out spurious trends caused by
post-mortem changes and (b) renders implausible the possibility that the size of
full-grown birds might have changed in response to changes in prey availability at
the nestling stage.

Fluctuating asymmetry of morphological characters

Small random differences between the right and left sides in characters that are
approximately bilaterally symmetrical are referred to as fluctuating asymmetry (FA).
Variation among individuals in the degree of FA has genetic and environmental
components and may increase with decreasing genetic variability and deteriorating
environmental conditions. Comparative studies of FA may allow changes over time
in genetic variability and/or environmental stress to be monitored in populations.
Measurements of FA in museum specimens can extend the period of such studies.

Rhys E. Green & Férn RP W. Scharlemann 170 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Lens et al. (1999) studied FA in the tarsus length of forest passerines living in
fragments of cloud forest in Kenya. They compared FA of museum specimens
collected in 1938-1948 with that of birds mist-netted in 1996-1998. FA increased
substantially for five out of the six species studied in a small (50 ha) and recently
disturbed forest fragment, but showed no marked change over time for the same
species in a larger (220 ha), less disturbed fragment. Studies of this type could be
used more widely to identify the occurrence of environmental stress caused by habitat
loss or deterioration and the effects of loss of genetic diversity. Parallel studies of
changes in genetic diversity by DNA analysis from museum specimens, like that of
Groombridge et al. (2000), might be a valuable adjunct in disentangling the relative
importance of environmental stress and genetic diversity.

Changes in feather growth rates from ptilochronology

Some feathers show transverse markings consisting of alternating light and dark
bars. These bars represent daily increments in the length of the feather during growth
(Grubb 1989) and can be used after growth has ceased to measure the rate of extension
of the feather. The technique is called ptilochronology. Measurements of growth
bars can be made on feathers on museum skins, and changes in feather growth rates
can then be compared over long time periods or among regions. Since feather growth
may be affected by nutrition and environmental factors, such studies are of potential
value in assessing long-term changes in habitat quality.

Carlson (1998) measured growth bars on the rectrices of White-backed
Woodpeckers Dendrocopos leucotos from northern Europe. The growth bars on the
feathers of museum skins collected between 1832 and 1942 were significantly wider
than those of birds captured in Sweden during 1990-1992. It was also found that the
width of the growth bars of birds in the recent sample was positively correlated with
the density of dead trees. Since dead wood provides food for woodpeckers it seems
plausible that variation in growth-bar width reflects differences in nutritional status.
The difference between the growth bars of museum specimens and the recently
trapped birds might then suggest that habitat conditions were less favourable in
Sweden in the 1990s than they had been in the past.

Measurements of growth bars on museum skins appear to have potential value
in long-term studies. However, it may be important to account for age and sex
differences in feather growth rates and for differences in the areas in which specimens
were collected in different time periods. A further problem is that growth bars are
often indistinct and difficult to measure. Measurement methods could be improved
if the precise physical basis of the bars was better understood.

Problems with morphological measurements

Researchers should be aware of several problems with morphological measurements
of museum specimens. Shrinkage of various parts of bird skins occurs and may lead
to distortion of shape as well as changes in linear measurements. Experiments
conducted by Vaisénen (1969) indicated that measurements of eggs are unlikely to
be much affected by storage in museum collections. However, egg preparation
techniques might change over time, thin-shelled eggs could break selectively, or

Rhys E. Green & Forn RP W. Scharlemann 171 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

dust may accumulate on the specimens. More detailed investigations are required to
evaluate these problems.

The specimens in museum collections do not necessarily represent a random
sample. Egg collectors in particular are known to wish to include abnormally coloured
eggs in their collections (Lack 1958). Such eggs might also be atypical in other
respects. Changes in such biases over time might then lead to spurious trends in
measured parameters. This might invalidate Fisher’s (1937) conclusion that eggs of
abundant species are more variable in size than those of uncommon species. However,
this observation could also be explained by collecting habits, since collectors might
select for diversity in abundant species and keep all specimens of rare species.

Chemical analysis

Chemical analyses of museum specimens allow the tracking of changes in pollutants
and the determination of birds’ movements and diets. Museum specimens are ideal
for monitoring because long time series are available, acting as temporal controls
(i.e. specimens collected before the introduction of the pollutant) and spatial controls
(specimens from areas where the pollutant is absent). Most chemical analysis methods
require samples, such as feathers or pieces of eggshell, to be taken from the museum
specimens. However, recent advances in sampling techniques and analysis methods
require smaller sample amounts, which will reduce the impact on specimens in
museum collections and allow large-scale, long-term data collection. Sampling is
becoming less destructive, and more chemical analyses can be done. These advances
have opened up a new field of museum-based research.

Pollutants

Chemical analyses of avian specimens from museum collections have shed light on
many environmental problems. Birds accumulate heavy metals from their food and
secrete them into their growing feathers during moult. Measurement of heavy metal
concentrations in feather samples from live-trapped birds and museum specimens
offers a method for monitoring long-term changes and spatial variation in
contamination. Studies of mercury concentrations in seabird feathers provide an
example of this approach. The concentration of mercury in feathers is related to that
in the diet (Furness 1993). The mercury is stably bound to the feather keratin in
organic form (Applequist et al. 1984). The presence of inorganic mercury added by
post-mortem treatment of museum skins with inorganic mercury compounds as
preservatives can be evaluated and allowed for by analysing total mercury and organic
mercury concentrations separately (Monteiro & Furness 1997).

Analysis of contour feathers taken from live and museum specimens of four
species of seabirds from the north-east subtropical Atlantic Ocean revealed substantial
increases in mercury concentration over a period of more than 100 years (Monteiro
& Furness 1997). The rates of increase observed were in accord with those predicted
from knowledge of anthropogenic emissions of mercury. A potential complication
is that species of fish and marine invertebrates vary considerably in their mercury
concentration (Monteiro et al. 1998). Therefore, a change in diet could lead to a

Rhys E. Green & forn PR W. Scharlemann NZ, Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

change in the mercury concentration in feathers that might be misinterpreted as
reflecting a change in mercury contamination of the ecosystem.

The chemical analysis of pollutants in eggshell membranes was instrumental in
establishing the association between the widespread use of DDT and eggshell thinning
in raptors. Peakall (1974) used ether extraction to remove DDE residues from the
inner eggshell membrane without destroying the specimens. Eggs collected before
1947 did not contain any DDT, whereas later eggs had high levels of DDT in their
membranes.

More recent work has investigated the heavy metal concentration in eggshells
directly. Flores & Martins (1997) compared metals in eggs laid near coal-based
power plants to eggs laid 100 km away. Using graphite furnace atomic absorption
spectrometry they determined cadmium, lead and fluoride concentrations in the
eggshell and egg contents. The eggshells from polluted areas contained higher
concentrations of cadmium, lead and fluoride. The development of these methods,
combined with a newly developed laser ablation sampling technique, which requires
only minute samples (about 50um diameter), will facilitate large-scale sampling
from egg collections and might help to evaluate the effects of pollutants on breeding
birds and retrospectively assess long-term changes.

Tracing bird movements using stable isotopes

Most elements that occur in biological materials are found as at least two stable
isotopes (Hoefs 1980 in Schaffner & Swart 1991). Isotope ratios vary geographically
because of differences in geochemistry and various fractionation mechanisms during
element cycling. These differences are reflected in the tissues of animals. The
differences in isotope ratios in tissue can be used as natural ecological tracers,
providing information on the regional origins and movements of individuals.
However, isotope ratios, unlike ringing recoveries, cannot give very precise locations.
The stable isotope ratios in an animal’s tissues are correlated with the ratios in its
diet. Elements commonly used are carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen and strontium
taken up through the food web. Tissues available for sampling from museum
specimens of birds include bone, eggshell and feathers. Requirements for the size of
samples are becoming small.

Chamberlain et al. (1997) and Hobson & Wassenaar (1997) found that stable
isotope analysis of tissue from North American insectivorous songbirds could provide
information on their breeding or natal locations. Hobson & Wassenaar found that a
gradient in the relative abundance of deuterium in rainfall during the plant-growing
season across North America was reflected in the deuterium content of feathers
grown by birds at various sites. Hence, analysis of the deuterium content of feather
samples taken from birds trapped on migration or in their winter quarters could be
used to identify their origins. Chamberlain et al. (1997) similarly reported that
gradients in deuterium and °C could be used to identify the probable region of
origin of migratory warblers. They also found that bone samples varied in *’Sr content,
reflecting geographic variation in the abundance of this isotope among drainage
basins with different underlying rocks. Their results suggest that using the relative

Rhys E. Green & Forn P W. Scharlemann 173 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

abundances of several isotopes in a multivariate approach is likely to improve the
precision with which areas of origin can be located.

An important issue for the application of stable isotope methods to museum
specimens is the stability with which the element being studied is bound within the
tissue being sampled. A fraction of the hydrogen and deuterium in feathers can
exchange with the environment and so could be influenced by storage conditions.
Chamberlain et al. (1997) found that 13% of the hydrogen in songbird feathers
exchanged with that in the environment. Equilibration of feather samples with ambient
water with a known standard relative deuterium abundance allows this potential
problem to be overcome.

Monitoring changes and spatial differences in diet using stable isotopes
Stable isotope ratios in the tissues of animals are affected by the habitats they use
for feeding. For example the relative abundance of '8O in water and aquatic animals
differs between freshwater and oceanic systems. Using the isotope signatures of
eggshells, Schaffner & Swart (1991) showed that Western Grebes Aechmophorus
occidentalis feed in freshwater habitats whereas tropicbirds Phaethon are oceanic
feeders, having low 6'°O and high 6'%O respectively. In theory a long-term study
could determine changes in feeding patterns (from freshwater to saltwater) based on
isotope signatures of eggshells.

Isotope signatures in bird tissues are also affected by the trophic level of the
organisms they eat. Hence, changes in diet can be detected by the analysis of museum
specimens. Thompson et al. (1995) found that the relative abundance of '°N in feather
samples from Northern Fulmars Fulmarus glacialis in the north-east Atlantic declined
between the early and late nineteenth century. The relative abundance of '°N tends
to increase with increasing trophic level, so this change implies that Fulmars have
changed their diet to include a higher component of animals of low trophic level.
Thompson et al. suggested that this might be due to the cessation of commercial
whaling within range of the sampled colonies, although changes in the species or
age of fish eaten might also explain the change in isotope ratio.

Nitrogen isotope signatures of eggshells can also be used to determine the diet
of birds, as has been shown by feeding experiments (Hobson 1995). This technique
could be applied to eggshells in museum collections to determine changes in diet
over time. Emslie et al. (1998) suggested that eggshell fragments found in the
sediment of abandoned penguin colonies could be used to determine changes in the
prey items from different trophic levels (e.g. krill vs. squid vs. fish).

Limitations of museum collections in future ecological
long-term studies

For ecologists to make use of avian collections in long-term studies they require
information about available specimens. Ideally ecologists would have information
on the number of specimens, localities and date of collection. Currently only a few
readily available databases of avian collections exist. Examples include an inventory

Rhys E. Green & Férn P W. Scharlemann 174 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

of major egg collections in the United States (Kiff 1979, Kiff & Hough 1985), and
the online database of Manchester Museum (http://www.museum.man.ac.uk). Online
databases appear more flexible and allow easy access to large datasets. Databases
are needed to make ecologists aware of the potentially available data currently hidden
in museum collections.

Few avian museum collections have had new specimens added to them in recent
decades at rates that even approach those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries (Remsen 1995, Winker 1996). Hence, future studies of long-term change
will increasingly suffer from a gap in the data between the early spate of collecting
and recent material, most of which has been specially obtained for a specific study.
Indeed, for this reason many of the studies we have referred to above involve a
comparison of measurements or analyses of old museum specimens with recent
data from live-trapped birds. This problem obviously calls for careful storage and
use of existing material, but a case can also be made for a revival in the accumulation
of avian specimens as a resource for long-term ecological studies, provided that this
does not have a negative impact on the conservation status of the bird species.

In some cases representative samples could be collected for a limited set of species
at fixed intervals in time. This would involve a carefully coordinated collection
effort with detailed recording of ancillary data on every specimen and the preservation
of a range of tissues. An alternative or supplementary approach would be to encourage
members of the public and amateur ornithologists, in particular ringers and nest
recorders, to contribute dead birds and deserted and addled eggs they find incidentally
to museums to a much greater extent than they do at present. Although this approach
would not permit the use of stratified random sampling, it would have the advantage
that specimens from a wide range of species could be obtained. Our perception is
that this does not happen at present, at least in western Europe, because both the
public and amateur ornithologists are not aware that new specimens are useful for
research purposes or that museums are the places that can use them.

The potential of this latter approach is illustrated by the scheme to collect and
analyse carcasses of raptors administered by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology
in the U.K. Advertisements for carcasses were placed in bird journals. This resulted
in the collection of thousands of specimens over a period of more than thirty years,
even though the population sizes of the species concerned are not particularly large.
Although the primary objective was to obtain tissue samples for the analysis of
pesticide residues (e.g. Newton et al. 1993), the specimens have also been used for
long-term studies of population ecology (e.g. Newton ef al. 1999, Wyllie & Newton
1999). Hence, we suggest that availability of new specimens need not be an
impediment to the accumulation of a continuous series. A more pertinent question 1s
probably whether museums now have sufficient resources, especially of staff, to
prepare, document and store increased numbers of specimens.

Acknowledgements
We thank Ian Newton for refereeing the manuscript and making valuable comments.

Rhys E. Green & Jorn P W. Scharlemann 175 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

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Addresses: R. E. Green, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and Conservation Biology Group,
Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, UK; J. P.
W. Scharlemann, Bird Group, The Natural History Museum, Akeman Street, Tring, Hertfordshire
HP23 6AP, UK, and Conservation Biology Group, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge,
Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, UK

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

Andrew C. Kitchener & Robert Y. McGowan Loa Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Sudden large samples:
opportunities and problems

by Andrew C. Kitchener & Robert ¥. McGowan

SUMMARY

Oilspilis and other causes of mass mortalities in birds offer opportunities to study origins,
biometrics, condition, pathologies and mortality impacts in populations, using statistically
adequate samples; they also create problems of storage, availability of facilities and staff,
funding and, most critically, labelling and cross-referencing. Experience at the National
Museums of Scotland over 25 years, involving in particular divers, gulls, auks and buzzards,
shows that the first crucial step is to buy time—although an inevitable expense—by freezing
at least 20 specimens of each sex. If full study skins are too costly (or beyond the expertise
of available staff) to prepare, preservation of the skeleton, one wing and sometimes the
tail maximises opportunities for age, moult and other studies; but retaining the ‘best’
specimens may create biases. Preservation of muscle samples for later extraction of DNA
is highly recommended. Publication of results should not be neglected, irrespective of
time-lag since accession. Recommendations for procedures when processing oilspill
samples are appended.

Introduction

Although the world’s museums are filled with millions of bird skins, skeletons,
Spirit specimens and eggs, it is often difficult to find large enough samples to allow
for comparisons between closely related species, subspecies or populations within
species. Therefore, at a taxonomic level it can be almost impossible to determine
whether apparent discrete geographical variation is real or an artefact of small,
localised samples (Corbet 1970). It is also rarely possible to obtain information
from existing collections on pathology, mortality or other aspects of population
biology, which can be used to assist studies related to the management and
conservation of species today and in the future.

In recent years at the National Museums of Scotland (NMS) we have had
opportunities to study large samples of dead birds, many of which were subsequently
preserved in a variety of ways for future reference. Most of these birds were either
casualties of oilspills at sea or from natural ‘wrecks’ caused by extreme winter weather
at sea. We are aware that other museums have been involved in analysing oiled dead
seabirds, although few have placed an emphasis on specimen preparation as at NMS.
In other cases samples have been collected over a few years by other institutions for
Specific studies and then passed on to NMS for our own use, or they have been the
result of legal culls. In order to maximise the potential of these opportunistic samples,
we have collaborated widely with other institutions and organisations, and
consequently we have made samples available for a wide range of associated studies.
From these large samples of birds we have carried out studies on age, sex,
geographical variation/origins, hybridisation, pathology, diet, mortality, moult, etc.,
in collaboration with colleagues from the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and

Andrew C. Kitchener & Robert Y. McGowan 178 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Liverpool John Moores, and the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (now the Centre for
Ecology and Hydrology).

Although large samples create opportunities, they also create huge problems in
terms of storage of carcasses until needed, the availability of suitable facilities and
casual staff to process the birds, sufficient funding to cover staff costs and materials
and, most critically, the labelling and cross-referencing of multiple samples. We
cannot claim to have solved all of these problems, but we offer our experiences to
aid and warn others who might wish to embark on similar projects. In order to show
the kinds of information that can be obtained collaboratively, we also briefly review
the results of the various studies that have been carried out at NMS over the years on
large samples of birds that have been acquired opportunistically and often suddenly.

Opportunities and problems

Large samples of birds often offer unique opportunities to look at populations in
detail, which would not be possible under normal circumstances. Oilspills, in
particular, cause mortality on a scale which would be considered unethical to cause
intentionally for research purposes. By working with collaborators, it is possible to
maximise the research potential of these samples. We have worked closely with
veterinary pathologists from the University of Edinburgh to provide a greater insight
into the effects of 011 on seabirds and the frequencies of various natural diseases that
afflict bird populations. By combining basic information on age, sex, moult and
condition with pathological observations, we have been able to look at how pathology
and mortality affect different segments of populations. We have also supplied fresh
tissue samples for analyses of the concentrations of organochlorines and heavy metals,
and for molecular studies.

In dealing with large samples, there are a number of logistical problems to
overcome. Assuming that others have organised the collection of, for example, oiled
seabirds and frozen them for future analysis, there are still the problems of finding
sufficient funding to carry out a full analysis, suitable facilities where the preliminary
processing of large numbers of birds can be carried out, and sufficient knowledgeable
casual staff to work through the birds and prepare them. We were fortunate that in
dealing with the dead seabirds from the Braer oilspill at Garths Ness, Shetland, in
January 1993, Scottish Natural Heritage made a small grant available to finance the
employment of a small number of experienced people for the preparation of voucher
specimens. Local companies also gave materials generously for use at very short
notice. In the case of the Sea Empress oilspill near Milford Haven in February 1996
we were contracted by the Countryside Council for Wales to work on the dead oiled
seabirds, excluding the Black Scoters Melanitta nigra. However, in both cases the
level of funding was less than ideal, and NMS covered much of the cost of recording
and analysing data, preparing specimens and writing reports from its own resources.
Our other studies on large samples (e.g. Common Buzzards Buteo buteo and Northern
Fulmars Fulmarus glacialis) are being carried out over longer periods of time as
staff and volunteer time become available. In all cases it has been absolutely essential

Andrew C. Kitchener & RobertY. McGowan 179 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

that all the material is frozen, so that time can be taken to plan the work ahead and
contact potential collaborators, who might need fresh tissue samples. Also, smaller
batches can then be thawed out to be worked on, thereby preventing deterioration of
the whole sample. This systematic approach ensures the maximum research benefit
in terms of multiple uses of each specimen.

Suitable facilities for the sorting, measuring and sampling of birds are difficult
to find. By collaborating with the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, we
were able to use their excellent pathology laboratories which have ample space for
several people and good facilities for storage of specimens, washing down benches,
etc., and disposal of unwanted material. In recent years we have used our own (similar
but smaller) specimen processing and maceration facilities at our West Granton
Research Centre.

We have found casual staff through a network of interested ornithologists,
otherwise unemployed, and some students. Ideally, processing is delayed until student
holiday periods, so that an abundance of willing workers can be found. This requires
freezing of the carcasses for several months, which may be difficult. We have used
commercial cold stores for this, which creates additional expense. We should also
caution that disposal of oily/detergent water from cleaning specimens should be
done by a responsible specialist contractor, so that other fauna are not affected by
liquid waste that would otherwise have been disposed of down drains. Again this
can create an additional and significant cost.

One of the key factors in the analysis of large samples is to preserve statistically
adequate samples of skins and/or skeletons for later research; a minimum of 20
adults of each sex is essential, but many more would be desirable. However, resource
constraints often severely limit how many specimens can be prepared. These samples
provide good data on the extent of shrinkage of skin measurements, which allow for
comparison between other published studies of living birds. In checking preserved
samples, we also found that inevitably a few mistakes had been made in the fresh
measurements, but voucher specimens ensured that these mistakes could be corrected.
Moreover, in the heat of the moment it is easy to miss the significance of certain
characters or impossible to take additional measurements or record moult, etc.,
especially if birds are badly oiled.

The preparation of full study skins can be very time-consuming and is a specialist
skill. Therefore, particularly in recent years, we have preserved many specimens as
skeletons, but have retained one complete wing for ageing, moult and measurements.
For some species, complete tails were also preserved, where these aided ageing
(e.g. Common Buzzard). The preparation of this type of specimen requires relatively
unskilled staff and is much quicker than the production of conventional study skins.
The total number of specimens for large samples prepared since 1978 (and mostly
since 1993) is shown in Table 1.

One of the biggest problems after completion of studies like the ones described
below is finding sufficient time to prepare papers for publication. We have been
moderately successful at this (see References), but we are all too aware that many

Andrew C. Kitchener & Robert Y. McGowan 180 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

TABLE 1
Numbers of specimens of bird species prepared by NMS from oilspills and other sources since 1978.

Species Esso Bernicia Braer Sea Empress Other sources
1978/79 1993 1996 1978-1998

Gavia stellata 20

Gavia immer 68 11 2

Podiceps cristatus 25)

Fulmarus glacialis 16 40

Phalacrocorax aristotelis TA

Somateria mollissima 68

Clangula hyemalis 108

Melanitta nigra 18

Oxyura jJamaicensis 47

Buteo buteo 180+

Larus argentatus 12

Larus fuscus p15)

Larus marinus 20

Larus glaucoides 13

Rissa tridactyla 90 100+

Alle alle 3

Alca torda 5) 4 20

Uria aalge 51 7 114

Cepphus grylle 119 126

data still need to be analysed and several papers await completion, e.g. on Red-
throated Divers Gavia stellata and Black Guillemots Cepphus grylle. It is vitally
important to not only preserve specimens for future research use, but also to publish
the results in the scientific literature.

Finally, the success of projects like the ones described in this paper often rests
on the enthusiasm and determination of particular individuals. We have been most
fortunate that the late Douglas Weir dedicated a great deal of his time, often for very
poor remuneration, to driving forward our efforts on many of the projects described
below. His considerable ornithological expertise and his fearlessness in the face of
large piles of dead birds were essential to our success in recent years.

Oiled seabirds

NMS has been involved in studies on seabirds from three oilspills, the Esso Bernicia
in 1979, the Braer in 1993 and the Sea Empress in 1996. The latter two spills involved
the Pathology Department of the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies in
pathological examinations of large series of seabirds. Several other collaborators
were supplied with samples at the time or subsequently. The separate species accounts
below summarise briefly the significant results of a wide variety of investigations.

Andrew C. Kitchener & Robert Y. McGowan 181 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Divers Gavia

NMS has prepared nearly 100 Great Northern Divers Gavia immer, mostly from the
Esso Bernicia (1978-1979 at Sullom Voe) and Braer (1993) oilspills in Shetland.
Wing measurements indicated origins of the Esso Bernicia oilspill birds by
comparison with measurements from known breeding birds. Wintering Great
Northern Divers off Shetland consisted of approximately 45% birds from Iceland,
45% from Greenland and 10% from Canada (Heubeck et al. 1993, Weir et al. 1996a).
From the estimated total number of Great Northern Divers that died in this spill, it
was estimated that 10% of breeding females from Iceland were killed, which
represents a serious level of mortality in this long-lived, slow-breeding bird (Weir et
al. 1996a).

We radiographed many carcasses in 1980 to detect lead shot, but in particular
noted from skeletons from the Braer oilspill that many had non-fatal gunshot wounds,
i.e. holes that were healing that had been created by bullets or shot. Because the
carcasses of many of the Esso Bernicia birds had been retained, it was also possible
to prepare their skeletons and check for similar damage. About 34% of birds had
non-fatal gunshot wounds and, because we knew of the birds’ origins, it was possible
to observe some regional differences in the use of ammunition. The skeletons of
birds that had probably originated in Canada invariably had holes made by .22 rifle
bullets, but Icelandic birds had been damaged by shotgun pellets.

Auks Alcidae

The origins of about 200 Guillemots Uria aalge and Razorbills Alca torda were
investigated from the Sea Empress oilspill. Wing and culmen measurements revealed
that these were from local breeding populations. It was estimated that mortality
would be insignificant (<5%), as was shown in the subsequent breeding season (Weir
et al. 1997).

Gulls Laridae

About 50 Kittiwakes Rissa tridactyla killed by the Braer spill were determined as of
high-latitude origin from wing measurements (Weir et al. 1996b) and hence their
mortality had no impact on breeding populations in Shetland. This large sample of
winter birds provided valuable new information on the moult cycle of the Kittiwake
(J. Conner pers. comm.), and allowed the testing of a morphometric method for
determining sex (McGowan & Zonfrillo 1995).

The Braer spill coincided with an apparent invasion of Iceland Gulls Larus
glaucoides. Most were nominate glaucoides, but two were of the form kumilieni,
which had varying amounts of wing-tip melanism. These observations inspired a
review of Iceland Gull records in Britain (Weir et al. 1995), showing an apparent
increase in the proportion of kumlieni in invasions since the nineteenth century. We
also recently completed a taxonomic review of Iceland Gulls which demonstrates
that L. g. glaucoides has been replaced by L. g. thayeri in the Canadian Arctic and

Andrew C. Kitchener & Robert Y. McGowan 182 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

that a variable hybrid (called kumlieni) appears to be spreading eastwards from Baffin
Island (Weir et al. 2000).

Wrecks

Wrecks of dead seabirds occur regularly during the winter, although only in a minority
of cases are the corpses utilised to their fullest potential. It would be valuable to
study these in detail to see how in composition, pathology, etc., they differ from
birds killed by oilspills. This could give a greater insight into which segments of
populations of different species are vulnerable to these major causes of mortality. In
1997 a sample of 40 Northern Fulmars was collected from a localised wreck on the
Northumberland coast. This large sample is currently the subject of a study of
biometrics, origins and diet.

A sample of more than 130 wrecked Kittiwakes has also been collected recently
from the Northumberland coast, which will complement origin, moult and other
studies carried out on the Braer oilspill sample.

Samples collected by others

Common Buzzard Buteo buteo

We obtained more than 180 Common Buzzards from the Royal Society for the
Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the Scottish Agricultural Science Agency (SASA).
These had been collected over a number of years before being passed to us, thereby
providing another opportunity for a combined morphometric and pathological
approach. Scottish Natural Heritage kindly provided a small grant, which allowed
the bulk of this study to be completed.

Preliminary findings have been published on a smaller sample of more than 60
birds, relating pathological findings to age and sex (Redrobe et al. 1997), and a
paper on the full sample is currently in preparation. Most birds (55%) died from
trauma or collision and starvation (23%). Poisoning was confirmed in 5% of birds
(75% of those tested), although only suspicious deaths were investigated owing to
the high costs of analysis. Gunshot wounds, not necessarily fatal, were present in
13% of birds. Most birds (73%) were subadults and most (74%) were male. This
was thought to reflect the male offspring being driven out of parental territories and
males participating more than females in aggressive territorial behaviour (for which
see Weir & Picozzi 1975). These males have to survive in suboptimal habitats and
consequently have a higher risk of death through, for example, foraging for carrion
at roadsides. Diet was mostly small mammals (40%) and insects (17%). Parasites
were recorded in 16% of birds, including only the second reported case in the species
of the nematode Cyathostoma, which occurs in the orbital cavity.

Ruddy Duck Oxyura jamaicensis

Forty-seven cabinet skins were prepared from recently culled specimens of this duck
from the British population. We feel it is important that a statistically adequate sample

Andrew C. Kitchener & Robert Y. McGowan 183 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

is taken for this introduced species, in order to determine any morphological changes
that have occurred through local adaptation and also as a record of the species, if it
is eventually exterminated.

Conclusion

Large samples provide excellent opportunities for gathering large amounts of data
for a wide variety of studies. However, logistically and in terms of resources needed,
they can be very difficult to carry out. We have been fortunate in that we do have
facilities for specimen preparation and we have found enthusiastic collaborators,
small grants and sponsorship-in-kind to assist our efforts. The reward has been to
initiate many different research projects, which have made maximum use of each
specimen, and which have resulted in statistically adequate samples of data-rich
skins, skeletons and wings for our collections.

There is potentially plenty of material out there. What we all lack are the resources
to access the abundance of data that could benefit environmental and conservation
biology. We would like to see a contingency fund established by the oil companies
to provide immediate support for detailed investigations like those described above.
Ideally all available specimens would be preserved; we are concerned that
preservation of the ‘best’ specimens may be biasing samples and unduly influencing
our observations. These sudden large samples provide excellent opportunities for
collaboration between museums and other research institutions, in order to maximise
the potential for research and preservation of specimens. We would welcome further
discussion and dialogue with our museum colleagues about how this can best be
achieved.

Acknowledgement
We gratefully acknowledge the thoughts and suggestions of an anonymous referee.

References:

Corbet, G. B. 1970. Patterns of subspecific variation. Symposium of the Zoological Society of London
26: 105-116.

Heubeck, M., Richardson, M. G, Lyster, I. H. J. & McGowan, R. Y. 1993. Post-mortem examination of
great northern divers Gavia immer killed by oil pollution in Shetland, 1979. Seabird 15: 53-59.
McGowan, R. Y. & Zonfrillo, B. 1995. Pitfalls in sexing kittiwakes Rissa tridactyla on head + bill

length. Ringing & Migration 16: 124-126.

Redrobe, S., Weir, D. N., McGowan, R. Y. & Kitchener, A. C. 1997. Pathological conditions and cause
of death relating to age and sex in Eurasian buzzards (Buteo buteo) in Scotland. Pp.181-187, Proc.
Fourth Conference of the European Committee of the Association of Avian Veterinarians. ISSN
1028-1169.

Weir, D. N. & Picozzi, N. 1975. Aspects of social behaviour in the buzzard. Brit. Birds 68: 125-141.

Weir, D. N., McGowan, R. Y., Kitchener, A. C. McOrist, S., Zonfrillo, B. & Heubeck, M. 1995. Iceland
Gulls from the “Braer’ disaster, Shetland 1993. Brit. Birds 88: 15-25.

Weir, D. N., McGowan, R. Y., Kitchener, A.C., McOrist, S. & Heubeck, M. 1996a. Effect of oil spills
and shooting on great northern divers which winter in Scotland. Dansk. Orn. Foren. Tidsskr. 90: 29-
318),

Andrew C. Kitchener & Robert Y. McGowan 184 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Weir, D. N., Kitchener, A. C. & McGowan, R. Y. 1996b. Biometrics of kittiwakes Rissa tridactyla
wrecked in Shetland in 1993. Seabird 18: 5-9.

Weir, D. N., Kitchener, A. C., McGowan, R. Y., Kinder A. & Zonfrillo, B. 1997. Origins, population
structure, pathology and diet of samples of diver and auk casualties of the Sea Empress oil spill.
CCW Contract Science Report 242.

Weir, D. N., Kitchener, A. C. & McGowan, R.Y. 2000. Hybridization and changes in the distribution of
Iceland gulls (Larus glaucoides/kumlieni/thayeri). J. Zoology London 252: 517-530.

Addresses: Andrew C. Kitchener & Robert Y. McGowan, Department of Geology and Zoology, National
Museums of Scotland, Chambers Street, Edinburgh EH1 1JF, UK. E-mails: a.kitchener@nms.ac.uk.
b.mcgowan @nms.ac.uk

Appendix

Recommendations for the processing of dead bird specimens
from oilspills

Plan the processing of the bird specimens well. It saves much time and effort, and ensures that data are
not inadvertently lost. Ensure that all procedures and processes requiring COSSH* and risk assessments
are considered prior to starting work. Ensure that all temporary staff are fully briefed, trained and have
read the appropriate COSSH and risk assessments prior to starting work.

1. Recording data: Standard data sheets are recommended, in order to ensure that all data are recorded.
We found that it was more effective having one person writing down the data recorded from one or
more persons, because of the considerable mess caused by the oil. This limited contamination of
data sheets by oil and facilitated the detection of anomalous data or measuring errors.

2. Labelling: \t is essential that good labelling is used to prevent loss of data from specimens, especially
while going through a variety of processes. We have used embossing tape (e.g. Dymo), aluminium
tape or tags imprinted with numbered metal punches, and plastic plant tags with indelible ink. The
latter are least successful as the ink may not quite survive the skeletonisation process. All parts of a
specimen must be labelled, e.g. wing, skeleton, skin, etc.

3. Samples: The preservation of a muscle sample (e.g. pectoral muscle) for later extraction of DNA is
highly recommended. NMS stores these deep frozen at “-40°C, although “-70 °C is recommended
for long-term storage. Alternatively, thin slices of muscle can be preserved in 75% ethanol (not IMS
[industrial methylated spirit] or formalin) at room temperature. Other kinds of samples may be
required for other studies (e.g. for PCBs, heavy metals etc.). Have plenty of self-sealing sample
bags available, on which informaton can be written. It is often useful to place labels in the bags in
case the writing becomes obscured. It is vital to ensure that all samples are correctly labelled for
later cross-referencing with other data and specimens.

4. Measuring: We recommend using plastic dial calipers for bill and tarsus measurements, as these
can be cleaned more easily. As sand and oil are damaging to the calipers, they should be regulary
checked for accuracy. Also, they are relatively low cost if they have to be disposed of. For wing
measurements we recommend standard end-stopped rules (or similar) set into larger measuring
boards. To ensure consistency, one individual was generally responsible for measuring.

5. Protective clothing: We have used paper boiler suits with disposable polythene aprons and huge
numbers of latex gloves. Wellington boots are recommended as footwear.

Andrew C. Kitchener & RobertY. McGowan 185 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

10.

ig

Sorting: Although it is preferable to sample all specimens, this may not be practical owing to very
large numbers, limited time and high cost. Inevitably, most effort is concentrated on specimens in
good condition (even if heavily oiled), so that age and sex are most likely to be recordable. Badly
decaying specimens may not be sexable and may pre-date the oilspill. Be aware that selecting the
birds in best condition may inadvertently introduce a sampling bias, especially if males and females
of a species arrive at a location at different times, or if body size and/or condition affect rate of
decay.

Measurements and external examination: We record appropriate standard measurements from wing,
tail, tarsus and bill. It is often not practical to measure body mass, because of oil, sand and water-
logged plumage. Colouration of the irides and soft parts (bill, face and legs) are recorded if possible
and appropriate. Relevant plumage characters are noted for ageing, etc.

Internal examination: A selected sample of the birds should be examined by an experienced avian
pathologist. However, there may be some conditions that can be identified by most recorders with
some training, e.g. aspergillosis. Crop contents are stored in 70% ethanol or deep frozen for later
examination. Measurements of gonads (using dial calipers) involve length and width of testes and
diameter of the largest ovarian follicle. We have attempted to get recorders to measure the bursa of
Fabricius, but this was often difficult owing to heavy oil contamination and/or internal trauma
caused by carcasses being crushed at the bottom of heavy storage sacks. The preparation of skeletons
allows for later examination of skull ossification, but birds prepared for skins should have their
skull ossifcation recorded at the time of preparation. Subcutaneous and internal fat deposits are
recorded subjectively on a four-point scale from 0 to 3. As birds begin to decay rapidly once thawed,
it is important not to thaw out too many birds for a daily examination otherwise valuable data may
be lost.

Removing the oil from specimens: We have used petrol, paraffin and powerful detergents to remove
oil from plumage. Appropriate COSSH and risk assessments need to be carried out for all processes
prior to working on the dead seabirds.

Preparing skeletons: We have used autoclave bags in order to keep skeletons separate during
maceration at 60°C. We have generally preserved one wing from each skeletonised bird, so that
wing length, moult and other plumage features can be recorded. This allows for later examination
and also for the measurement of wing shrinkage to facilitate a suitable correction factor.

Clearing up: All animal waste should be bagged in appropriate polythene sacks, labelled with a
description of the contents and the address of the institution they have come from, before being
incinerated. Note that plastic waste and latex gloves may have to be incinerated separately and
should be bagged and labelled separately. Waste oily water should be left to settle in plastic drums,
so that the oil can be decanted off for disposal by a specialist company.

*Control of Substances Hazardous to Health

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

A. Townsend Peterson et al. 186 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

A global distributed biodiversity information
network: building the world museum

by A. Townsend Peterson, David A. Vieglais,
Adolfo G. Navarro Sigtienza & Marcos Silva

SUMMARY

Biodiversity information is not presently managed in a manner that enables or encourages
broad, efficient, or novel uses. New technologies that permit integration of biodiversity
information stored at institutions worldwide into a single biodiversity information facility,
however, have the potential to change this situation. Information integrated from diverse
institutions and available in quantity greatly empowers a diversity of novel products that
amply demonstrate the importance of the information resource. We discuss the promise
and the opportunity, as well as the impediments to assembling a global distributed
biodiversity information network—effectively a “world museum’, built from the world’s
biodiversity and available to all freely and openly.

Introduction

This paper serves to present a major initiative to share biodiversity information on a
global scale. This effort takes the form of a distributed data network implemented
over the Internet, permitting full access to biodiversity information to all. The network
can be seen as a move towards open collaboration by biodiversity scientists, and
simultaneously as repatriation of information about biodiversity from the countries
holding that information to the countries where that biodiversity exists in nature.
The first element of this network was made openly available for worldwide access
and use in April 1999—called Species Analyst—and is accessible at http://
speciesanalyst.net/. It is a project that has grown out of the perception of the need
for much-improved information services in the biodiversity world, and has been
adopted and driven forward by a number of institutions around the world. The purpose
of this paper is to outline the dimensions of the data network, stimulate discussion
about its implementation, and promote participation by institutions across Europe.

History

Biodiversity exploration has seen many biases and imbalances geographically. The
vast storehouse of biodiversity—species diversity and unique taxa—is in the tropics.
The storehouses of biodiversity information and collections, however, are in the
Northern Hemisphere, principally in the United States and Europe.

The scientific exploration and documentation of biodiversity began in earnest in
the 1700s. The early explorations were initiated by Europeans, later joined by
investigators from the United States. These explorations were often carried out
without participation of scientists from the host countries, and information was often
not returned to or shared with scientists in those countries. Lack of collaboration
with, or training of, scientists in biodiversity-rich countries further widened the gap

A. Townsend Peterson et al. 187 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

in information and expertise. Hence, specimens and scientific literature important
to understanding world biodiversity became concentrated in countries where
relatively little diversity was actually present.

The present

Biodiversity data are currently available in a dispersed system based on institutional
and national boundaries. Most members of the community of data caretakers (curators
in natural history museums and herbaria) are more than willing to provide
information; nevertheless, the system is simply inefficient and difficult to access.
For this reason, biodiversity studies have not taken full advantage of the information
in existence.

Most biodiversity information is stored in the form of scientific collections in
museums and universities across North America and Europe. This information is
often not computerised, and is considered the property of individual institutions.
Hence, access to each collection must be handled on a one-by-one basis, making
access to the totality of information in existence a laborious task.

When assistance or access to data is requested, most biodiversity information
caretakers make information and specimens readily available (Navarro-Sigtienza et
al. 2002). Requests are accepted by mail or by electronic mail, or visitors are received
in most collections; in some cases, data are made available freely over the Internet
(Soberon 1999), but some voices still speak strongly against this idea (Graves 2000).
The distributed nature of the collections, with important specimen holdings in 10—
20 countries for most regions of interest, makes such communications or travel
difficult or even prohibitive for most biodiversity information users, particularly
those from where the information originated.

To illustrate the importance of complete biodiversity information, reference can
be made to the avian dataset for Mexico under preparation as the Atlas of the
distribution of Mexican birds (Peterson et al. 1998). Here, the contents of 43 scientific
collections were assembled in a centralised database, totalling more than 300,000
specimen records for the country. The largest single collection held only 16% of the
total, so the emergent properties of the large dataset were not realised until the contents
of numerous collections were aggregated. Since its assembly, however, this dataset
has been instrumental in advances both in conservation and in basic biology regarding
Mexican birds (Peterson et al. 1999, Navarro-Sigtienza & Peterson 2000, Navarro-
Sigtienza et al. 2002, Peterson et al. 2002a).

In recent years, several programmes aimed at improving the state of biodiversity
informatics have emerged. Species2000 (http://www.sp2000.org.) and the Integrated
Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) (http://www.itis.usda.gov/plantproj/itis) aim
to produce a catalogue of all named species in the world, but manage only information
related to the names of the species, not to their distributions, occurrences or ecology.
At present, four Internet-based facilities provide a novel form of ‘distributed’ access
to biodiversity data: databases located at the institutions that ‘own’ the data (and the
Specimens most often associated with them) are probed by Internet-based search

A. Townsend Peterson et al. 188 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

algorithms. These facilities include The Species Analyst, as well as Red Mundial
para la Informacion de la Biodiversidad (REMIB) (http://www.conabio.gob.mx),
the Virtual Australian Herbarium (http://www.rbgsyd.gov.au/HISCOM/Virtualherb/
virtualherbarium.html) and the European Natural History Specimen Information
Network (ENHSIN) (http://www.nhm.ac.uk/science/rco/enhsin) all provide broad
access to such primary data. Most recently, the Global Biodiversity Information
Facility (GBIF) was formed to seek means of integrating biodiversity information
on a global scale, and has adopted much of the distributed model as the basis for its
work.

At present, the information services in the world of biodiversity information is
woefully inefficient. Data exist in impressive quantities for many taxonomic groups,
yet this information is too often difficult to access. Because of the numerous
impediments to access, biodiversity data are too frequently not included in studies
and reports that would benefit immensely from their inclusion. This information
gap leads both to an information undernourishment in many policy decisions, and a
lack of appreciation of the immense value of biodiversity information held in, for
example, natural history museums. Large-scale biodiversity conservation studies,
although focusing on exactly the information in question, are often based only
minimally, or secondarily, on biodiversity data. For this reason, such studies lack
analytical power and information completeness, and the results often reflect this
failing. For these reasons, we propose the expansion of the worldwide distributed
biodiversity information network to include a broad sampling of European
institutions, thus uniting data sources in North America and Europe.

The Species Analyst

Technology

The most complete representation of global biodiversity can be found in the world’s
natural history museums. Although records for museum collections are increasingly
maintained in electronic format, their use has been hindered by the lack of standard
methods for search and retrieval from disparate databases. Using ANSI/NISO Z39.50,
a standard for information retrieval that has proved successful in the bibliographic
and geospatial domains, and a newer information transfer protocol called XML, it is
now possible to search and retrieve information from biological collections connected
by the Internet.

The Species Analyst is a set of software extensions that enable Z39.50 searches
from a web interface, as well as from applications such as Microsoft Excel and
ESRI’s ArcView GIS. Users may query multiple collection databases simultaneously
and, in a matter of seconds, obtain information directly into a client application in a
form suitable for further analysis. This suite of capabilities provides an infrastructure
that allows seamless search, retrieval and analysis of a wealth of biodiversity data
that has hitherto been impossible. Although at present data are served ‘as is’ —that
is, names are provided as the owner institution has them, and are not at present

A. Townsend Peterson et al. 189 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

integrated, translated or otherwise standardised; eventually, connections with efforts
designed to assemble up-to-the-minute names catalogues will provide this next
generation of data access.

The Species Analyst currently provides seamless access to more than 50 million
specimens in 84 datasets housed at 65 institutions. Committed to participation are
an additional 69 institutions with datasets principally focused on mammals, reptiles
and amphibians. Hence, the total of biodiversity data now committed to participation
is well over 130 institutions and approximately 55 million species-occurrence records.
Additional millions of species-occurrence records are served via REMIB, Virtual
Australian Herbarium, and ENHSIN, making for a substantial quantity of biodiversity
information available worldwide to all users, and most vouched by specimens in
scientific collections. The customary figure cited for total specimens in world natural
history museums is about three billion, and best calculations are that about 5% of
those specimens are now computerised (Krishtalka & Humphrey 2000); by this
reasoning, about 150 million specimen records exist in electronic form, about 30%
of which are served or slated to be served by The Species Analyst.

Applications of the distributed biodiversity network

The present situation of compartmentalised data and inefficient access constitutes a
critical bottleneck in biodiversity applications. Once data are united in large, inclusive
sets, many new possibilities open up for analysis, leading to new dimensions of
understanding. These new possibilities can be referred to as ‘emergent properties’
of large biodiversity datasets, and further underline the need to enable the information
currently present in natural history museums, as well as to continue building natural
history museum collections. Three examples focused in the area of biodiversity
conservation are presented below.

Endangered and poorly Rnown species

In contrast to endangered species in many developed countries (Godown & Peterson
2000), many species of conservation concern are so poorly known or so rare that
basic distributional information is unavailable. This problem is even more frequent
in taxonomic groups less well known than birds. These species clearly present a
most difficult challenge for biodiversity conservation, given that even the most basic
information is often lacking.

An excellent example of a poorly known bird species is the Slaty Finch Haplospiza
rustica of tropical America. Although more frequently encountered in the South
American portion of its distribution, its known occurrences in Mexico and northern
Central America are vanishingly few (Howell & Webb 1995). Populations are so
poorly known that study and documentation of their taxonomic status, ecological
characteristics and conservation status are essentially impossible.

Among scientific specimens of Slaty Finches, two Mexican point localities are
available (Jalapa, Veracruz, in the 1860s; Volcan Tacana, Chiapas, in the 1950s)

A. Townsend Peterson et al. 190 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

from Mexico. Modelling the ecological requirements of the species using GARP
(Stockwell & Noble 1992, Stockwell 1999, Stockwell & Peters 1999, Peterson et al.
2002b), a map of potential distributional areas for the species can be developed
(Fig. 1). Although this map is very general, and probably overly inclusive given a
possible connection with stands of bamboo, it provides a useful first step in outlining
areas for search and inventory for the species in field efforts. In this particular case,
a recent record (G. Escalona-Segura unpubl. data.) coincided exactly with one
predicted potential distributional area (see arrow, Fig. 1). Using better-known species,
these predictive methodologies have been put to more rigorous, statistical tests
(Peterson et al. 2002b), providing convincing evidence that distributional models
can be developed for many rare and poorly-known species.

Conservation prioritisation

Once the possibility exists of predicting geographic distributions of species with
precision, a clear next step is that of predicting distributions of suites of species of

Figure |. Distributional prediction (grey shading) for Slaty Finches Haplospiza rustica in Mexico based
on two known specimen localities (black stars), showing third site discovered in 1995 (arrow).

A. Townsend Peterson et al. 191 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Figure 2. Richness of 16 species endemic to western Mexican tropical dry forests, showing increasing
species richness as darker shades of grey. Locations of two biosphere reserves are shown with stars,
coinciding with primary concentration of 12 species; the arrow indicates a secondary concentration, in
which all four remaining species are represented.

special interest, and taking their joint distribution as conservation priorities. For
instance, one might model the distributions of all endangered or endemic species in
a region, and then identify resulting foci of species co-occurrence as priority areas.
This approach has important advantages over past approaches (e.g. Bojorquez-Tapia
et al. 1995), in that individual species’ distributions are the input into the decision-
making process, allowing the design of truly inclusive reserve systems, perhaps
using algorithms aimed at maximising complementarity among areas (Peterson et
al. 2000).

As an example of these possibilities, Kluza & Peterson (unpublished) modelled
the geographic distributions of all 16 bird species endemic to the dry tropical forests
of south-western Mexico. Individual species’ distributions were overlaid, and a map
of endemic species richness was created (Fig. 2). One area on this map in northern
Guerrero (labelled “A’) represented a peak of species richness, including 12 of the
16 species; this area coincided well with two existing biosphere reserves. The
remaining four species, however, were not protected by any biosphere reserves, and
co-occurred in north-western Oaxaca. This area, in particular if avian patterns are
coincident with those in other taxonomic groups, could be taken as a clear priority
area for conservation action (Kluza & Peterson unpublished).

A. Townsend Peterson et al. 192 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Global climate change and conservation planning

As a further demonstration of the flexibility and promise of the data and analytical
approaches described herein, a final level of complexity can be added, taking into
account the influence of global climate change on species’ geographic distributions.
Global climate change, rather than being simply ‘global warming’, rather represents
a series of reorganisations of climatic processes, and therefore requires a series of
complex modelling efforts. This work provides a first step towards a robust
methodology.

In the GARP modelling process employed above, distributional predictions are
derived from models of distribution in ecological dimensions, effectively a model
of the ecological niche of the species (Peterson et al. 2002b). To the extent that
ecological niches present stable sets of constraints on species’ distributions over
moderate periods of time (e.g. Peterson ef al. 1999), distributions of species in a
changing environment may be taken as the distributions of their ecological niches
through those changes. Projections of these niche models to modeled future climates
provide estimates of future potential distributions of species (Peterson et al. 2001,
Peterson et al. 2002a).

As an illustration, we have modelled the potential future distribution of West
Mexican Chachalaca Ortalis poliocephala under two scenarios of change in the
Hadley simulation (Pope et al. 2002) of global climate change (50 yr of 0.5—1.0%/
yr CO, increase, with and without sulphate aerosol forcing). The present geographic
distribution (Fig. 3) is more or less continuous along the western coast of Mexico.
Through the simulated scenario of climate change, however, although coastal portions
of the species’s modelled distribution remain intact, the interior portions of Mexico
become largely uninhabitable for the species. Of species that we have modelled
similarly (Peterson et al. 2001, 2002a), we see a diversity of responses, including
extinction, fragmentation and expansion. The conservation prioritisations presented
above, then, would have to be adjusted to take into account these modified
expectations of species’ distributions over very short horizons of time.

The proposal

The goal

The principal objective of the Species Analyst and related efforts to build a global
distributed biodiversity information system is to spark collaboration and cooperation
among biodiversity scientists via open access to biodiversity data. The project will
effectively end the present compartmentalised system, in which access to information
is On an institution-by-institution basis, and move the field towards worldwide
integration—a virtual ‘world museum’, in which barriers to information access
disappear. Information taken from countries over several centuries will become
openly accessible to all, effectively constituting repatriation of biodiversity data.
Matching improved access to information with open sharing of expertise and software

A. Townsend Peterson et al. 193 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Figure 3. Projected effects of global climate change on the geographic distribution of the West Mexican
Chachalaca Ortalis poliocephala: present distribution is shown in grey and black, and projected post-
change distribution is in black; specimen-based distributional points are shown as dotted circles.

will lead to a qualitative leap forward in ability to use biodiversity information
effectively.

Whereas most North American institutions are participating, at least in part, in
The Species Analyst, few European institutions are currently linked to the network.
Although European distributed data initiatives are beginning (e.g. ENHSIN), they
lag behind the American efforts in serving a major portion of the biodiversity
information stored in European institutions. Clearly, this difference derives from a
variety of reasons. However, prominent among them is the fact that very few European
natural history museum collections are at present computerised, obviously making
serving data impossible. (Of course, it should be pointed out that several important
American bird collections are also not computerised—e.g. American Museum of
Natural History—or are only partially computerised—e.g. U.S. National Museum
of Natural History—so the contrast is not entirely black versus white!)

A. Townsend Peterson et al. 194 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

An action plan

For each European institution potentially interested in participating, the procedure
for integrating data via the distributed database systems is quite simple. Basic
requirements are (1) electronic data, (2) Internet connectivity, and (3) the institutional
‘will’ to share data. In particular, it will be necessary to identify collections that
have been computerised to a degree that participation is possible.

Institutions wishing to participate and holding appropriate datasets will need to
fulfil three conditions. First, data must exist in electronic format. Second, the data
must be on a computer with a reasonably fast Internet connection (i.e. not based on
a phone modem connection) (in cases in which fast Internet connections are available
at other institutions nearby, it may be possible to deposit copies of collections
databases for serving from those institutions). Finally, the data must be in a database
management system that accepts SQL (Standardised Query Language) queries,
permitting a base level of access to the information.

The actual connection process 1s relatively simple. For the present, consultation
with technicians working for one of the distributed data networks is necessary.
Generally in an afternoon or so of consultation, the appropriate software can be
installed, and data are connected in short order. These software packages are still in
phases of development, and for that reason the process still requires some technical
expertise; soon, however, the connection process should be considerably simpler,
with software installed and configured in a point-and-click environment.

Future view

The Internet, through developments such as The Species Analyst, offers for the first
time the possibility of widespread integration of information in existence worldwide
about biological diversity. These advances make possible a rapid shift from the
previous situation (closed institutional resources) to an exciting new one—
information can be integrated across regional, national, taxonomic and institutional
boundaries to provide a resource never before possible. Already, this improved access
to information has been instrumental in stimulating novel approaches to predicting
species invasions (Peterson & Vieglais 2001), design of endangered species
conservation efforts (Godown & Peterson 2000), design of efforts to combat
agricultural pests (SAnchez-Cordero & Martinez-Meyer 2000), understanding
ecological niche evolution (Peterson et al. 1999), and predicting the effects of global
climate change on species distributions (Peterson et al. 2001, 2002a), etc. In this
way, the totality of biodiversity information can be applied to critical questions,
such as biodiversity conservation, natural resource management, land use planning,
and others.

These steps remove a critical impediment—that of access to information—and
allows scientists and decision-makers worldwide to proceed to new levels of
understanding. Data served over the distributed network can be improved via iterative
Sweeps of standardisation, adding value, and error detection, which can serve to

A. Townsend Peterson et al. 195 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

improve the information resource markedly. We expect these shifts in how
biodiversity science is ‘done’ to make possible large-scale improvements in the quality
of information products and scientific studies based on biodiversity information. In
the shorter term, these new tools can provide the medium for cooperation among
many institutions, uniting scientific efforts in North America and Europe with similar
efforts elsewhere.

Significance

The basic principle of the Species Analyst data network 1s that of free and open
access to data and technology. The development of the network has depended on
combining this philosophy with careful political negotiations and innovative
technologies. The result is a network that has grown rapidly to serve a significant
portion of existing data in natural history museum collections worldwide. Taxa in
the data network include mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, butterflies and
other insects, and plants. The network is growing rapidly, and is on track to become
an all-taxon, worldwide distributed biodiversity data network. In this paper, we have
illustrated some of the possibilities that open up to investigators once data are shared
openly and integrated with modern tools. In the field that we chose for illustration
(biodiversity conservation), synthetic models were developed that greatly exceed
present capabilities for most regions. Moreover, because of the open-frame approach
of the data network, these possibilities exist for almost any region and taxon on
earth, without great investment of time and resources to obtain data for analysis.

As a postscript to this contribution, the original manuscript was prepared in 1999,
in the midst of a period of rapid development, in both technology and politics of
biodiversity information. On the technological side, many important advances have
been made in making the software solutions broadly applicable, stable, fast and
reliable. Several distributed biodiversity information networks now exist, and many
are collaborating on a next-generation technology that should allow integration of
all of the networks into a single global distributed biodiversity information network.
On the political side, some aspects have changed dramatically, and others have not
changed dramatically. On the side of change, the initiation of the Global Biodiversity
Information Facility has emphasised the need for participation in data-sharing efforts
within each member country, and has sparked many exciting steps forward in the
assembly of efficient biodiversity information services around the world. On the
side of no change, some workers in the field—including curators at important and
large natural history museums—continue to resist the idea of bringing natural history
museums into the information age. One can only hope that these persons and their
ideas can evolve as the idea of global sharing of such important information becomes
more and more the rule, and no longer the exception.

References:

Boj6rquez-Tapia, L. A., Azuara, I., Ezcurra, E. and Flores V., O. A. 1995. Identifying conservation
priorities in Mexico through geographic information systems and modeling. Ecological Applications
38 ZANS23) le

A. Townsend Peterson et al. 196 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Godown, M. E. & Peterson, A. T. 2000. Preliminary distributional analysis of U.S. endangered bird
species. Biodiversity and Conservation 9: 1313-1322.

Graves, G. R. 2000. Costs and benefits of Web access to museum data. Trends in Ecology and Evolution
15: 374.

Howell, S. N. G & Webb, S. 1995. A guide to the birds of Mexico and northern Central America.
Oxford Univ. Press.

Krishtalka, L. & Humphrey, P. S. 2000. Can natural history museums capture the future? BioScience 50:
611-617.

Navarro-Sigiienza, A. G. & Peterson, A. T. 2000. Western Mexico: a significant center of avian endemism
and challenge for conservation action. Cotinga 14: 42-46.

Navarro-Sigiienza, A. G, Peterson, A. T. & Gordillo-Martinez, A. 2002. A Mexican case study on a
centralised database from world natural history museums. CODATA Journal 1: 45-53.

Peterson, A. T., Egbert, S. L., Sanchez-Cordero, V. & Price, K. P. 2000. Geographic analysis of
conservation priorities using distributional modelling and complementarity: endemic birds and
mammals in Veracruz, Mexico. Biol. Conserv. 93: 85-94.

Peterson, A. T., Navarro-Sigiienza, A. G. & Benitez-Diaz, H. 1998. The need for continued scientific
collecting: a geographic analysis of Mexican bird specimens. /bis 140: 288-294.

Peterson, A. T., Ortega-Huerta, M. A., Bartley, J., Sanchez-Cordero, V., Sober6n, J., Buddemeier, R. H.
& Stockwell, D. R. B. 2002a. Future projections for Mexican faunas under global climate change
scenarios. Nature 416: 626-629.

Peterson, A. T., Sanchez-Cordero, V., Sober6n, J., Bartley, J., Buddemeier, R. H. & Navarro-Sigiienza,
A. G. 2001. Effects of global climate change on geographic distributions of Mexican Cracidae.
Ecological Modelling 144: 21-30.

Peterson, A. T., Soberon, J. & Sanchez-Cordero, V. 1999. Conservatism of ecological niches in
evolutionary time. Science 285: 1265-1267.

Peterson, A. T., Stockwell, D. R. B. & Kluza, D. A. 2002b. Distributional prediction based on ecological
niche modeling of primary occurrence data. Pp.617-623 in. Scott, J. M., Heglund, P. J. & Morrison,
M. L. (eds.) Predicting species occurrences: issues of scale and accuracy. Island Press, Washington,
DIE

Peterson, A. T. and Vieglais, D. A. 2001. Predicting species invasions using ecological niche modeling.
BioScience 51: 363-371.

Pope, V. D., Gallani, M. L., Rowntree, V. J. & Stratton, R. A. 2002. The impact of new physical
parametrizations in the Hadley Centre climate model - HadAM3. Hadley Centre for Climate
Prediction and Research, Bracknell, Berks, U.K.

Sanchez-Cordero, V. and Martinez-Meyer, E. 2000. Museum specimen data predict crop damage by
tropical rodents. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 97: 7074-7077.

Soberon, J. 1999. Linking biodiversity information sources. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 14: 291.

Stockwell, D. R. B. 1999. Genetic algorithms II. Pp.123-144 in Fielding, A. H. (ed.) Machine learning
methods for ecological applications. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston.

Stockwell, D. R. B. & Noble, I. R. 1992. Induction of sets of rules from animal distribution data: a
robust and informative method of analysis. Mathematics and Computers in Simulation 33: 385-
390.

Stockwell, D. R. B. & Peters, D. P. 1999. The GARP modelling system: problems and solutions to
automated spatial prediction. Internatn. J. Geographic Information Systems 13: 143-158.

Addresses: A. Townsend Peterson, Natural History Museum, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas
66045 U.S.A.; David A. Vieglais, Natural History Museum, The University of Kansas, Lawrence,
Kansas 66045 U.S.A.; Adolfo G. Navarro Sigtienza, Museo de Zoologia, Facultad de Ciencias,
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, Apartado Postal 70-399, México, D.F. 04510 Mexico:
Marcos Silva, North American Biodiversity Information Network, Commission for Environmental
Cooperation, 393 Saint-Jacques Street, Suite 200, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H2Y 1N9

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

Anthony S. Cheke 197 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Treasure Island—the rise and decline of a small
tropical museum, the Mauritius Institute

by Anthony S. Cheke

SUMMARY

In early nineteenth century Mauritius—the Indian Ocean island famous for the Dodo—
Julien Desjardins and other local naturalists made collections of Mascarene biota, much
of which is now extinct. This material formed the basis of a museum opened to the public
in 1842. It was moved, together with a new public library, to the purpose-built Mauritius
Institute in 1885. Throughout its first 140 years the collections, including many rare,
unique and often irreplaceable specimens, were expanded and generally well looked after,
until the early 1980s when cumulative underfunding and seriously inappropriate
management led to a very disturbing deterioration of the collections, with specimens
being lost and destroyed. Remedial action to stabilise what remains is technically simple
but less straightforward socio-politically. As similar problems exist in many parts of the
world, a “Red List’ of endangered collections should be compiled to provide a basis for
prioritised action, and twinning museums at risk with well-endowed ones might also prove
useful. [As the text was written in 1999, a postscript on recent remedial action to late
2002 is added. |

Introduction

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when museums were young and
preservation techniques rudimentary, it was standard practice to throw out decayed
specimens and replace them with new. Such a clear-out is popularly supposed to
have taken place at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum in 1755, when the unique but
decaying stuffed Dodo Raphus cucullatus is said to have been consigned, with other
specimens, to be destroyed (MacGregor 1983). “By a lucky accident ... the head and
one of the feet were saved from the flames” (Strickland & Melville 1848)'.

We would not, however, expect this kind of thing to happen today, and yet I
regret to say that the same story in fact applies to the recent history of the Mauritius
Institute, the museum in the very land from which those Dodos came—one of the
oldest museums in the Southern Hemisphere and one whose collections are literally,
like the Dodos, irreplaceable.

Mauritius is an isolated volcanic island of some 1,865 km2, situated in the Indian
Ocean at 20°S, 840 km east of Madagascar. Together with Réunion (164 km south-
west) and Rodrigues (574 km east), it forms part of the group known as the Mascarene
Islands (Montaggioni & Nativel 1988, Strahm 1996), which although rather far-
flung have a strongly coherent biota, and are famous for their distinct (and largely
extinct) endemic fauna (Cheke 1987a,b, Quammen 1996). This highly endemic
wildlife survived into historical times because the islands escaped the attentions of
human colonists until the late sixteenth century.

The histories of Mauritian and Mascarene wildlife, ornithology and museums
have been intertwined since the beginning. The very first public museum in Britain,

Anthony S. Cheke 198 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

John Tradescant’s ‘Ark’ in Lambeth (founded around 1630, and later absorbed into
Elias Ashmole’s museum in Oxford) contained what were then unusual objects of
preservation, stuffed birds: among them was a Mauritian Dodo, one of a number to
reach England in the 1620s/1630s (MacGregor 1983, Cheke 1987a). Its head and
foot remain to this day the oldest surviving example of a bird skin. A specimen of an
extinct Réunion tortoise was brought alive to Paris in 1671, and its carapace, the
type of Testudo indica, survives there (Austin et al. 2002). Rodrigues, in 1690, was
the scene of the first recorded account of territoriality in birds—Leguat’s observations
on the soon-to-be-extinct Solitaire Pezophaps solitarius (Armstrong 1953, Cheke
1987a). Birds from Réunion formed an important part of the Cabinet du Roi in Paris
described by Brisson in 1760, and that decade also saw, on both Mauritius and
Réunion, the first known example of biological control: Common Mynas Acridotheres
tristis were introduced in 1767 to control locusts, and were given legal protection
(another first) to ensure success (Cheke 1987a). French naturalists based on the
islands corresponded with Buffon and others in Paris, and a number of scientific
expeditions made collections in the 1700s and early 1800s (Cheke 1987a).

Origins of the natural history museum in Mauritius

By the early 1800s a number of naturalists were active in Mauritius and making
collections. These included Charles Telfair, polymath, ex-ship’s doctor, sometime
Colonial Secretary for the island and sugar planter (Michel 1935), who had the ear
of the new British administration. His own material, given to the Zoological Society
of London, was dispersed and largely lost when the Society’s collections were sold
in 1855 (Wheeler 1997). In 1826 Telfair prompted two local collectors, zoologist
Julien Desjardins and botanist Louis Bouton, to offer their material to the state, in
the form of the British Governor Sir Lowry Cole, to form the core of a proposed
‘colonial museum’. This generous offer met with no response from the Governor,
however, so in 1829 Telfair invited Bouton, Desjardins and other local naturalists,
notably botanist/explorer Wenceslas Bojer and seafaring zoophile Francois Liénard
(all names very familiar to anyone who knows the Mascarene lizard fauna), to a
meeting at which the Société d’Histoire Naturelle de l’Ile Maurice was founded
(Ly-Tio-Fane 1972). Desjardins, who had meanwhile set up a museum privately in
his own house on his estate at Argy ( Flacq district; Bouton 1877), went to Paris in
1839 to write a natural history of the island, but died there prematurely in 1840. His
widow, determined that the collection should remain in Mauritius to honour her
husband’s dedication, presented his collections to the Society (Bouton 1842). Bouton
added his plants, and together with Adrien d’Epinay’s library (also recently left to
the Society), the ensemble was finally opened to the public in 1842 as the Muséum
Desjardins, in a wing of the Royal College in Port Louis, with Bojer as curator (Pike
1873, Ly-Tio-Fane 1972). This time the government provided the space and also
half of the salary of the curator and his taxidermist (Ly-Tio-Fane 1972). Bouton
(1851) reported that 4,278 people visited the museum in its first five years; at the
time only some 10,000 of the island’s population (the white ruling class and some of

Anthony S. Cheke 199 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

the creoles: Toussaint 1972) would have been allowed access to the Royal College
and had sufficient education to be interested in a museum.

Visitors from abroad often commented on the collection. Mouat (1852) called it
an ‘excellent museum ... worthy of his [Bojer’s] great and widely established
reputation’. By contrast in 1862, Edward Newton, colonial official and ornithologist,
wrote disparagingly to his brother Alfred (soon to be professor of zoology at
Cambridge) that “it is quite disheartening [to have] anything to do with the museum,
there is not a soul who cares or knows about ornithology in the island, though perhaps
some of them would be most offended at my saying so’ (MS letter book in the Alfred
Newton papers, Cambridge University Library). Although Newton was later president
of the Society in the 1870s (Trans. Royal Society of Arts and Sciences of Mauritius,
passim), he never contributed any collections to the museum. Nicholas Pike (1973),
American consul, naturalist and raconteur, was more upbeat: ‘The natural history
collections of the Society in their museum are fine and rare, but not extensive. Besides
the fauna of Mauritius, that of Madagascar, southern Africa and the neighbouring
islands is well represented.’

Despite the initial goodwill, the new museum was seriously underfunded. Bojer
died discouraged in 1856; the indefatigable Bouton took over, but it was not until
1863, with the arrival of Sir Humphry Barkly as Governor, that things began to
improve (Bouton 1877). Finally, in 1877, Governor Sir Arthur Phayre made proposals
for a purpose-built museum, and accepted a report from the Society (by now the
Royal Society of Arts and Sciences of Mauritius [RSAS]) recommending that a new
institution be set up to comprise the museum and a public library, and to have in
addition a dedicated educational function (RSAS 1878), to be fully funded by the
government. Ordinance No.19 of 1880 (see Mauritius Almanac for 1881) provided
for ‘the erection, establishment and regulation of a Mauritius Institute, a Public
Museum and Public Library’ to promote ‘the general study and cultivation of the
various branches and departments of arts, science, literature and philosophy, and for
the instruction and recreation of the people’. The Governor was authorised in the
Ordinance to vote funds to ‘erect within the town of Port Louis a building’ to house
the Institute; the result was the construction of a fine new edifice in a very prominent
central site in the capital, which was bought and cleared of existing buildings
(Macmillan 1914). Work began promptly, and the new Mauritius Institute was
formally opened (two governors later) in December 1884 for a colonial exhibition,
with the museum and library moving there in January 1885 (Daruty 1885, Koenig
1939, Ly-Tio-Fane 1979). They are in the same building today, although the Institute
now also controls two other smaller museums containing historical, artistic and other
material (Tirvengadum 1980).

The importance of the collections

One might imagine that a small museum in a small country would contain little of
international importance, but with the Mauritius Institute this is very far from the
case. I do not propose to list all its treasures, and indeed I do not know what unique

Anthony S. Cheke 200 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

invertebrates it may still contain, but any one of the following would justify a special
place on a world level of collections. The museum contains (Cheke & Jones 1987,
Cowles 1987, Staub 1993) the only extant skeletons of the large extinct flightless
rail Aphanapteryx bonasia and the extinct giant skink Leiolopisma (=Didosaurus)
mauritiana; one (the last individual ever recorded) of only three specimens of the
extinct endemic Pigeon Hollandais Alectroenas nitidissima; a Réunion Starling
Fregilupus varius (extinct and one of only 18 or so surviving specimens); one of the
very few specimens of the probably extinct monotypic endemic burrowing boa
Bolyeria multicarinata from Round Island; two good Dodo skeletons (including the
only one articulated solely from a single individual) and a general collection of
extant endemic vertebrate fauna which 1s not particularly well represented in any
other museum. The pigeon and starling come from Desjardins’s original collection;
one Dodo from Théodore Sauzier’s excavations in 1891—1892; the other, with the
rail and the skink, from Mauritian barber Etienne Thirioux’s spare-time excavations
around the turn of the century and first exhibited in 1903 (d’Emmerez de Charmoy
IOS sKoemied939):

The birds held in the museum were enumerated by Rountree et al. (1952) and
again (data collected 1974-1983) by Cheke & Jones (1987); it would be interesting
to repeat the census today. In addition there are extensive collections of insects,
marine invertebrates and fish, although the highly endemic land-snail fauna, of which
many representatives are already extinct (Griffiths 1997), is under-represented (pers.
obs.). The herbarium (originally Bouton’s) was removed to Pamplemousses Gardens
in 1868—where it was disastrously curated and almost ruined in 1899 when thrown
into rat-infested outhouses to make way for a temporary isolation hospital—and
only returned to the Institute in the mid-1930s after having been rescued and sorted
by Reginald Vaughan (Vaughan 1969). In 1960 it was combined with two other
collections as the Mauritius Herbarium, under Vaughan as curator, and installed in
air-conditioned premises at the Mauritius Sugar Industry Research Institute (MSIRD)
at Le Réduit (Vaughan 1969).

Recent history of the Mauritius Institute

When first established in the 1880s the museum was under a Board of Directors
with quasi-independent status under the Colonial Secretary. In 1929 a proposal by
the Board to become a formal Government Department (Ingrams et al. 1929) was
not acted on, though the public displays were re-worked (Koenig 1939). In 1940 a
new ordinance restructured the Board and its functions (Michel 1980). However, in
1957 the museum was attached to the Ministry of Education and Culture, and in
1967, the year before Mauritius became independent, a Public Service Commission
was established which relieved the board of its ability to choose staff (Michel 1980,
Tirvengadum 1980). Apart from a hiatus from 1913 to 1941 during which W. E.
Hart, followed by his son the poet Robert Edward Hart (literary figures without any
knowledge of natural history) were in charge (Tirvengadum 1980), the curatorship
has always been given to a notable local biologist or naturalist (who also oversaw

Anthony S. Cheke 201 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

the library). Nonetheless, during the Harts’ curatorship, local naturalists were very
actively involved in the running of the natural history collections (Ingrams 1929,
Koenig 1939). In 1946, following the 1940 ordinance, the new senior post of director
was established, under whom served the curator and a librarian. The first incumbent
was Dr Reginald Vaughan, founder of plant ecological studies in Mauritius, followed
by Jean Vinson, an entomologist and herpetologist who did much to draw attention
to the uniqueness of and threats to Round Island, and then by marine biologist Claude
Michel, who has devoted a lifetime to science education in Mauritius. Unfortunately
when Claude Michel, already curator, succeeded to the directorship, it then took the
Public Service Commission 12 years to appoint a new curator! (Michel 1980).

On the occasion of the Institute’s centenary in 1980 the then director, botanist
Deva D. Tirvengadum, reminded fellow Mauritians that one of the Institute’s
functions was ‘the preservation, enrichment and systematic study of all its precious
collections’, and that the ‘functions of conservation, research and education are tied
to the good curation of collections’. He continued prophetically: ‘...the essential
task is to protect the collections from all forms of deterioration and the various
attacks from men or the elements to which they could be victim’ (Tirvengadum
1980; my translation and italics). Emphasising the need to understand the real value
of the collections, he complained that the staffing was ‘primordial’, and that it was
essential to restructure the concept of museums in Mauritius, have proper technical
consultative back-up, and apply for funds from UNESCO and other international
bodies.

Tirvengadum’s article was an outburst from a discouraged successor to Bojer;
he left shortly afterwards for pastures abroad, his clear call for remedial restructuring
ignored. The dire result of depriving the Board of Directors of appointing powers
was then made all too evident with the failure of the Public Service Commission to
find and appoint a new director. The then curator, R.Gajeelee, a zoology graduate
but without training in museum or library management, was left in charge as acting
director, a position he continued to occupy for nearly 20 years.

In 1982, faced with deteriorating conditions and losses of priceless books, the
Royal Society of Arts and Sciences of Mauritius, which had been so instrumental in
founding the Institute, removed its library to new secure air-conditioned premises
adjacent to the Herbarium, provided by the MSIRI (RSAS 1983). I visited the Institute
in 1985 to consult a manuscript and was struck by the disarray in its archival
collection. By the time of my next visit in 1996, some major improvements had
been made in parts of the public display area and one of Andrew Kitchener’s thin
Dodo models acquired. However, stories from local naturalists alleged that the
museum’s reserve collections were being totally neglected, and that specimens of
rare endemic species were being thrown away because they were supposedly ‘moth-
eaten’. The Mauritius Institute Bulletin, a reputable vehicle for local faunal and
biological studies since 1937, edited by the director, had not appeared since 1984;
Gajeelee had published only one issue. In 1997 and 1998 two senior visiting British
museum curators confirmed the lamentable conditions. One reported to me that

Anthony S. Cheke 202 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

museum staff proposed to throw away an alcohol specimen of the extinct endemic
snake Bolyeria multicarinata (one of about 6 in the world) because the head broke
off when the brittle specimen was removed from its bottle. Clearly the museum had
lost curatorial perspective.

This situation has had direct and negative repercussions for Mauritian science.
Since 1973 there has been a pro-active international wildlife conservation project in
place on the island (Jones & Hartley 1995), coinciding with the beginning with the
British Ornithologists’ Union Mascarene Islands Expedition (Diamond 1987).
Initially there was active collaboration with the museum (pers. obs. 1973-1975, C.
G. Jones pers. comm.) but during Gajeelee’s tenure, the project, currently under the
umbrella of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, became increasingly wary of
involvement with the museum, and took to sending all valuable specimens abroad.
Such specimens, and those deriving from captive-breeding projects at Jersey Zoo,
still technically belong to the Mauritius Government (Cooper et al. 1998). Meanwhile,
in total contrast, the now properly curated Mauritius Herbarium, under the auspices
of the MSIRI, thrives, and has played a pivotal part in the compilation of a major
new Mascarenes flora, the Flore des Mascareignes (Bosser et al. 1976-—), in
collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the U.K. and ORSTOM in
France. No equivalent faunal collaboration would be possible under recently
prevailing conditions, whereas in neighbouring Réunion the equivalent (and almost
equally valuable) Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle under Sonia Ribes and [in 1999]
Mathieu Le Corre is actively involved in projects with overseas institutions.

I returned to Mauritius in early June 1999 to work on a book project with a
colleague. We went with some trepidation to the museum, only to discover that the
acting director had died in post a fortnight earlier; he had allegedly been physically
and mentally unfit for some years, but had nonetheless been allowed to remain in
office. The Commission moved quickly to appoint a successor, S. Abdoolrahaman,
who was thought to be in line for the permanent job. In my conversations with him
in June 1999 it was clear that he was fully aware of the museum’s plight and well
disposed to receiving foreign aid to help get the museum back on its feet.

The museum in Réunion has been recently renovated (1995-1996), exploiting
regional assistance money available in Paris for such projects (pers. obs. 1973-
1999; S. Ribes pers. comm.). This is of course easier in an overseas département of
France than for independent Mauritius, but it provides a model for what could be
done in the Mauritius Institute. I have no doubt that funds for such a project could be
found in the EC, UNESCO or the Commonwealth—the only stumbling block being
that the request for the aid must come from the Mauritius Government. In fact,
Mauritius did commission the University of Texas to report on the future of the
museum in around 1996 (S. Abdoolrahaman, pers. comm., June 1999), but the
recommendations have been neither disclosed nor implemented. A French-funded
consultant, Emmanuel Richon, has been working with the Mauritius Institute’s three
museums for the last two or three years reorganising the public displays in a more
‘modern’ idiom; at the time of writing [November 1999] he had not reached the

Anthony S. Cheke 203 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

natural history section, although he has been instrumental in getting the main building
re-roofed (it had been leaking for years). However, his brief was with educational
displays, and he did not have much to do with the reserve collections.

Constraints and solutions

Many people in Mauritius were long aware of the problem with the museum, but
felt unable to act. One reason is its system of governance, since the lack of executive
power placed the Board of Directors, however well-intentioned, in an impossible
situation. It is also the case that, as in many other parts of the world, those working
with or in government are reluctant to jeopardise their projects or jobs by raising the
issue of the museum, however bad they may personally feel about it. Moreover,
there is an understandable cultural difficulty resulting from the numerical and political
dominance of a community originating from immigrants from India. Many feel
stronger historical ties to the subcontinent than to the European colonial history of
an island whose endemic fauna and flora was largely destroyed by western colonists
long before the period of Indian immigration began (1830s: Toussaint 1972, Addison
& Hazareesingh 1993). Recent governments have given higher priority toa museum
and institute commemorating Mahatma Gandhi, though he only visited the island
once, briefly, in 1901 (Addison & Hazareesingh 1993). Low official interest in the
lost native biota may also be unconsciously related to the fact that average Mauritians
(of whatever ethnic origin) see so little of it in their daily lives. Every familiar flower,
tree, snail, insect, mammal or bird—bar a few butterflies, one bird and a couple of
bats and palms—is an exotic, and has been since their great-great-grandparents’
lifetimes. What they think of as typically Mauritian plants and animals are the
everyday tropical species they meet in their gardens and countryside, whereas the
endemics seen in the museum are as foreign to them as kangaroos or ostriches.

Is the museum more important to Westerners than it is to Mauritians? The West
should perhaps overtly acknowledge its central role in the destruction of Mauritian
wildlife, and its enduring interest in preserving the lost remnants of that biota in the
museum. The natural history museum in Mauritius is in essence a European cultural
and historical legacy, and perhaps it lies with Westerners to help maintain it, as has
already been implicitly accepted in the international conservation programmes
devoted to protecting the surviving native wildlife. In reality, of course, there are
many Mauritians who fully understand and support the museum, and some sort of
partnership must therefore be possible. Perhaps a way forward might be for the
concerned museum fraternity to compile a kind of ‘Red List’ of underfunded and
endangered museums and collections. It should be emphasised that these are by no
means all in developing countries— in seeking an old Mauritian specimen I well
recall the dismal plight of the Hancock Museum in Newcastle, U.K., in the 1970s?
(see also Jessop 1999). This list could then be used to offer assistance to places
housing such collections, in much the same way as wildlife conservation projects
are often initiated and run. “Twinning’ a well-appointed museum with a less favoured

Anthony S. Cheke 204 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

one, as is often done between towns, might also provide benefits and a useful
interchange of personnel and ideas.

Postscript, October 2002

With minor adjustments, the above account remains more or less as it was written in
1999, as trying to update it within the text would have resulted in a loss of the
immediacy that formed an important part of its message when given as a talk at the
conference. However, things have moved on, and the following postscript brings
the situation up to date, bearing out the more optimistic outlook immediately evident
following the appointment of Mr Abdoolrahaman.

Following the leak of a draft of this paper to the Mauritian press in May 2000,
prompting a critical article by Maryléne Frang¢ois in Weekend on 4 June, the Acting
Director wrote me a pained letter asking for specific details, which I supplied. This
exchange triggered, or at least accelerated, action to rectify the 20 years of dereliction.
The Netherlands was already funding archaeological work under Dr Peter Floore on
seventeenth-century Dutch settlement sites; bird and mammal bones were turning
up in their middens, and it was a natural extension to look towards the subfossil
bones kept in the Port Louis museum. At Mr Abdoolrahaman’s invitation, the project
funded Julian Hume of the U.K. Natural History Museum (Tring), who was already
working on the Dutch bird bones, and was the colleague who had visited the museum
with me in 1999, to make a rapid survey in June 2001 of the reserve collections to
assess their status and make recommendations for their proper curation. Hume’s
brief report (Hume 2001) reveals that while some of the missing items (e.g. bird
skeletons) had simply been hidden in an inaccessible attic, other specimens were
indeed in a deplorable state: butterflies and some mounted skins were ruined by
damp and pests, and the spirit collection, containing much lizard type material (Vinson
& Vinson 1969, Cheke 1975), had completely dried out. Some progress had already
been made in rescuing skin and insect specimens and treating them with insecticide.
There was no time then to make an inventory (so allegedly missing bird skins were
not checked), but a Dutch member of Dr Floore’s team is currently at work in the
museum (J. Hume pers. comm.), and hopefully the new enthusiasm and international
collaboration will result in the restoration of the museum’s reputation and its central
place in Mauritian biology.

It has also recently been announced (Maureemootoo 2002) that the Mauritius
Institute Bulletin is to be re-launched in early 2003, reviving after nearly 20 years’
absence this important local vehicle for faunistic and floristic studies.

Footnotes

1. Although widely disseminated and believed this story is not actually true. Ovenell (1992) has
documented through archival records the real version, in which new curator William Huddesford
was doing his duty in preserving what could be preserved of deteriorating specimens, in the Dodo’s
case the head and foot; effective preservation techniques had yet to be discovered. There was no
fire—this was a colourful invention of Strickland’s. In the early 1700s there were two other stuffed

Anthony S. Cheke 205 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Dodos in Oxford, in the Anatomy School (MacGregor 1983)—these did indeed disappear without
trace (A. V. Simcock, pers. comm.).

2. Marmaduke Tunstall, whose collections formed the basis of the Hancock Museum, had a live
Mauritius Fody Foudia rubra in his aviaries in the mid-1700s, later preserved as a mounted specimen,
when it was illustrated by Peter Brown (1776). The skin was there in 1827 (Fox 1827), but had long
vanished (together with most of the rest of Tunstall’s birds) by 1977 when I looked for it. To bring
this insectivorous bird alive to England at the time was a remarkable feat—it was the first Mauritian
passerine to reach Europe.

References:

Addison, J. & Hazareesingh, K. 1993. A new history of Mauritius. Rev. ed. Editions de l’ Océan Indien.
Rose Hill, Mauritius.

Armstrong, E. A. 1953. Territory and birds. A concept which originated from the study of an extinct
species. Discovery [July 1953]: 223-4.

Austin, J. J., Arnold, E. N. & Bour, R. 2002. The provenance of type specimens of extinct Mascarene
giant tortoises (Cylindraspis) revealed by ancient mitochondrial DNA sequences. J. Herpetol. 36:
280-285.

Bosser, J. et al. (eds.). 1976-[continuing]. Flore des Mascareignes: La Réunion, Maurice, Rodrigues.
ORSTOM, Paris; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, & Mauritius Sugar Industry Research Institute,
Réduit, Mauritius. [Many fascicles].

Brown, P. 1776. New illustrations of zoology. B. White, London.

Bouton, L. 1842. /2e Rapport Annuel des Travaux de la Société de |’ Histoire Naturelle de I’ Ile Maurice.
Société de |’ Histoire Naturelle de l’Ile Maurice, Port Louis, Mauritius.

Bouton, L. 1851. Rapport Annuel des travaux de la Société Royale des Arts et des Sciences de Maurice.
Royal Society of Arts & Sciences of Mauritius, Port Louis, Mauritius.

Bouton, L. 1877. (1883). The museum. Trans. Royal Society of Arts & Sciences of Mauritius NS 11: 43-
48.

Cheke, A. S. 1975. An undescribed gecko from Agalega, Phelsuma agalegae sp.nov. Bull. Mauritius
Inst. 8: 33-48.

Cheke, A. S. 1987a. An ecological history of the Mascarene Islands, with particular reference to extinctions
and introductions of land vertebrates. Pp. 5-89 in Diamond, A. W. (ed.). Studies of Mascarene
island birds. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Cheke, A. S. 1987b. The ecology of the smaller land-birds of Mauritius. Pp. 151-207 in Diamond, A.W.
(ed.). Studies of Mascarene island birds. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Cheke, A. S. & Jones, C. G 1987. Measurements and weights of the surviving endemic birds of the
Mascarenes and their eggs. Pp. 403-422 in Diamond, A. W. (ed.). Studies of Mascarene island
birds. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Cooper, J. E., Dutton, C. J. & Allchurch, A. F. 1998. Reference collections: their importance and relevance
to modern zoo management and conservation biology. Dodo 34: 159-166.

Cowles, G. S. 1987. The fossil record. Pp. 90-100 in Diamond, A. W. (ed.). Studies of Mascarene island
birds. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Daruty [de Grandpré], A. 1885 (1886). Rapport annuel du Secrétaire, 10 septembre 1885. Trans. Royal
Society of Arts & Sciences of Mauritius NS 18: 190-205 [see also pp. 16-17, 33-36, reports of
proceedings].

Diamond, A. W. (ed.). 1987. Studies of Mascarene island birds. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Emmerez de Charmoy, D. d’. 1903. Rapport sur la faune ornithologique éteinte de I’ Ile Maurice. Mauritius
Institute, Port Louis, Mauritius.

Fox, G. T. 1827. Synopsis of the Newcastle Museum, late the Allan, formerly the Tunstall or Wycliffe
Museum. The Museum, Newcastle.

Griffiths, O. 1997 (‘1996’). Summary of the land snails of the Mascarene islands, with notes on their
status. Proc. Royal Society of Arts & Sciences of Mauritius 6: 37-48.

Hume, J. P. 2001. Report on the collections housed in the Mauritius Institute in June 2001. Unpubl
report to the Maurirtius Institute.

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Ingrams, W. H. et al. 1929. Report of the Museum Reorganisation Committee. Mauritius Institute, Port
Louis, Mauritius.

Jessop, L. 1999. The fate of Marmaduke Tunstall’s collections. Arch. Nat. Hist. 26: 33-49.

Jones, C. G & Hartley, J. 1995. A conservation project in Mauritius and Rodrigues: an overview and
bibliography. Dodo 31: 40-65.

Koenig, P. 1939. Le Muséum Desjardins. Trans. Royal Society of Arts & Sciences of Mauritius C 8: 39-
Il.

Ly-Tio-Fane, M. 1972. Programme des sociétées savantes de |’ Ile Maurice. Pp.iii-xxii (introduction) in
Ly-Tio-Fane, M. (ed.) Société d'Histoire Naturelle de l’Ile Maurice. Rapports Annuels 1830-1834.
Royal Society of Arts & Sciences of Mauritius, Port Louis, Mauritius.

Ly-Tio-Fane, M. 1979. Notice historique. Pp. 1-27 in Cent-cinquantenaire de la Société Royale des Arts
et des Sciences de I’Ile Maurice 1829-1979. Royal Society of Arts & Sciences of Mauritius, Port
Louis, Mauritius.

MacGregor, A. (ed.). 1983. Tradescant’s rarities. Essays on the foundation of the Ashmolean Museum
1683, with a catalogue of the surviving collections. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Maureemootoo, J. 2002. MWF Plants and Associated Projects News, July-August [email newsletter of
Mauritian Wildlife Foundation , 4 October].

Michel, C. 1980. The Mauritius Institute 1957-1977. Bull. Mauritius Inst. 9: xix-xxxv.

Michel, L. 1935. Conference sur Charles Telfair. Trans. Royal Society of Arts & Sciences of Mauritius C
3 :19-48.

Montaggioni, L. & Nativel, P. 1988. La Réunion/Ile Maurice. Géologie et apercus biologiques. Masson,
Paris.

Mouat, F. J. 1852. Rough notes of a trip to Réunion, Mauritius and Ceylon. Thacker, Sprink & Co,
Calcutta. [reprinted 1997, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services]

Ovenell, R. F. 1992. The Tradescant Dodo. Arch. Nat. Hist. 19: 145-152.

Pike, N. 1973. Subtropical rambles in the land of Aphanapteryx. Personal experiences, adventures &
wanderings in and around the island of Mauritius. Sampson Low, Martston, Low & Searle, London.

Quammen, D. 1996. Song of the Dodo. Random House (Hutchinson), London.

Rountree, F. R. G et al. 1952. Catalogue of the birds of Mauritius. Bull. Mauritius Inst. 3: 155-217.

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RSAS. 1983. Procés-verbaux des séances. Proc. Royal Society of Arts & Sciences of Mauritius 4(A):
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Staub, F. 1993. Fauna of Mauritius and associated flora. Published by the author, Port Louis, Mauritius.

Strickland, H. E. & Melville, A. G. The dodo and its kindred. Reeve, Benham & Reeve, London.

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Toussaint, A. 1972. Histoire des Iles Mascareignes. Berger-Levrault, Paris.

Vaughan, R. E. 1969. The Mauritius Herbarium. Mauritius Sugar Industry Research Institute Ann.
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Address: A. S. Cheke, 139 Hurst Street, Oxford OX4 1HE, UK.

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. 207 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Museums working together:
the atlas of the birds of Mexico

by Adolfo G. Navarro S., A. Townsend Peterson &
Alejandro Gordillo-Martinez

SUMMARY

The present contribution is a case study of the application of data from world scientific
collections to understanding the distribution, systematics and conservation of Mexican
birds. Information was gathered on specimens from Mexico housed in 58 scientific
collections in Mexico, the United States, Canada and Europe. This information was
compiled in a centralised data base, and GIS programs used to visualise general geographic
patterns and address historical patterns of ornithological investigations. We used the
‘Genetic Algorithm for Rule-set Prediction’ to predict current and potential distributional
areas of species, patterns of species richness, endemism and seasonality, and conservation
applications. The avifaunal inventory of Mexico is impressively thorough, but many areas
are poorly represented in collections. Now, however, quantitative approaches to inferring
into undersampled areas are available and offer many new insights into the biogeography
of the region. These results suggest the possibility of developing new research products
based on point-occurrence data from natural history museum collections.

RESUMEN

La presente contribuci6n representa un estudio de caso de la aplicacion de la informacion
obtenida de colecciones ornitolégicas de todo el mundo, para entender la distribuci6n,
sistematica y conservacion de las aves de México. Se recopil6 informacion sobre ejemplares
mexicanos alojados en 58 colecciones cientificas en México, Estados Unidos, Canada y
Europa. Esta informacion se conjunt6 en una base de datos centralizada, la cual fue
georreferenciada y se realizaron diversos andalisis en SIG para visualizar los patrones
geograficos generales y patrones hist6ricos de la investigacion ornitol6gica en México.
Se uso el algoritmo GARP que, basado en los puntos de ocurrencia, permite realizar
modelos predictivos de la distribuci6n de las especies que involucran la construccion y
descripcion de las areas de distribucién actuales y potenciales de las especies, asi como el
estudio de los patrones de riqueza, endemismo, estacionalidad y aplicaciones en
conservacion. El inventario de la avifauna mexicana esta muy avanzado, pero muchas
zonas estan poco representadas en las colecciones. Estos resultados sugieren la posibilidad
de desarrollar nuevas investigaciones basadas en los datos de puntos de ocurrencias alojados
en ejemplares de las colecciones.

Introduction

Mexico holds an astonishing biological diversity, ranking among the so-called
megadiversity countries (Mittermeier et al. 1997). This richness originates in the
geographic location of the country between two major biogeographic regions,
Nearctic and Neotropical, that intergrade broadly in the area. Perhaps more
importantly, the complex topography—coastal plains, mountain ranges, high plateaus,
and islands—and geological history of the region produce a wide array of ecological
conditions and favour the development of isolated populations and the action of in

Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. 208 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

situ evolutionary processes. Thus, a high proportion of the biota of the country is
endemic (Ramamoorthy et al. 1993).

In recent years, interest in surveying the biological resources of the country has
increased greatly, with the goal of creating a national strategy to preserve biodiversity.
Inventories and analyses of geographic, ecological, taxonomic and genetic diversity
are key issues towards this goal (Sober6n et al. 1996). Birds form important
components of ecosystems, and are widely used as examples of what biodiversity
studies could achieve because they are excellent ecological indicators and are well
known taxonomically and distributionally.

To achieve these goals, the enormous quantity of information scattered across
the world in the scientific literature and scientific collections must be assembled.
Our main goal was to create a database aggregating data from Mexican bird specimens
worldwide, and to develop analyses that illustrate the potential increase in
understanding of biogeography, systematics and conservation of the birds of Mexico.
We see this effort as a prototype for even broader efforts, eventually encompassing
the entire world and numerous taxa, developed by the entire community of systematic
biologists and biodiversity scientists in a massive collaborative effort.

The ornithological framework

Mexico is favoured with great bird diversity. Avian species richness, under the
biological species concept, is estimated at 1,074, 107 of which are endemic to the
country (Escalante et al. 1993, AOU 1998). Recent taxonomic revision, however,
using alternative species concepts, has raised the number to 1,250 species, 229 of
which are endemic (Peterson & Navarro 1999). Some of the endemic forms belong
to 10 endemic genera (Philortyx, Rhynchopsitta, Deltarhynchus, Rhodothraupis,
Ridgwayia, Mimodes, Euptilotis, Hylorchilus, Calothorax and Xenospiza), as well
as genera recognised by some taxonomists, such as Neochloe, Aechmolophus and
Amaurospizopsis (Friedmann et al. 1950, Miller et al. 1957). This richness is
distributed in the country in very interesting patterns (Peterson et al. 1992, Escalante
et al. 1993, Peterson et al. 1998): whereas highest species richness is concentrated
in tropical regions in the south-east, endemism is highest in the islands, south-western
tropical dry lowlands, and the mountains (Peterson & Navarro 1999).

Several species, both endemic and non-endemic, are considered globally
threatened (BirdLife International 2000). Such taxa are often highly restricted
geographically (e.g. Short-crested Coquette Lophornis brachylopha), inhabit highly
endangered habitats (e.g. Horned Guan Oreophasis derbianus), or are threatened by
hunting or illegal trade (e.g. Military Macaw Ara militaris). Six Mexican bird species
are considered globally Endangered (Socorro Mockingbird Mimodes graysoni,
Bearded Wood-partridge Dendrortyx barbatus, Short-crested Coquette Lophornis
brachylopha, Guadalupe Junco Junco insularis, Black-capped Vireo Vireo atricapillus
and Dwarf Jay Cyanolyca nana: BirdLife International 2000). An additional 13
species are listed as Vulnerable (e.g. Socorro Parakeet Aratinga brevipes, Maroon-
fronted Parrot Rhynchopsitta terrisi, Nava’s Wren Hylorchilus navai: BirdLife

Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. 209 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

International 2000). To date, extinctions include the Slender-billed Grackle Ouiscalus
palustris (Dickerman 1965), Guadalupe Caracara Caracara lutosus (Greenway 1967,
Inigo-Elias 2000a), and San Benito House Finch Carpodacus ‘mexicanus’ mcgregori
(Jehl 1971). The Guadalupe Storm-petrel Oceanodroma macrodactyla and Imperial
Woodpecker Campephilus imperialis are considered Critically Endangered (BirdLife
International 2000) but are almost certainly extinct (Ceballos & Marquez 2000);
and the Socorro Dove Zenaida graysoni is extinct in the wild. The Red-throated
Caracara [bycter americanus (Inigo-Elias 2000b) and California Condor Gymnogyps
californianus (Koford 1953) have been extirpated in Mexico (Ceballos & Marquez
2000, Rios-Munioz in press).

How do we know all this?

All of this information, constituting a basic resource for innumerable applications
to wildlife conservation, is scattered across a multitude of sources (Peterson et al.
1998). Moreover, it is often unavailable to researchers, especially those in developing
countries. Scientists and conservationists require information, including geographic
locations of species’ occurrences, ecological characteristics and conservation status,
in order to develop research. The scientific literature is an important source, although
biased by the fact that most formal publications on Mexican birds have appeared in
foreign journals and in non-native languages, especially English, French and German
(Rodriguez- Yanez et al. 1994). A second and more widely distributed resource is
that of field guides; these, however, are also generally in English and only provide
generalities of the geographic range and ecology of species. Third, observations by
birdwatchers and ornithologists would provide a rich resource, but are seldom
published, organised, or made available in a useful fashion.

The most important sources of information regarding biodiversity are scientific
collections (Peterson et al. 1998). The specimens that have accumulated through
decades in many institutions worldwide constitute a critical baseline dataset for
biodiversity studies. Indeed, the role of museums as caretakers and disseminators of
this information, too often overlooked or underestimated recently, is gaining
importance for several reasons. One is that the specimen record was obtained across
diverse ecological and historical conditions, providing a rich record of past and
present biodiversity phenomena. These specimens hold information relevant to
identification, geographic location and historical distribution that can be verified by
subsequent researchers. This basic reference and historical material for studies in
avian systematics, ecology, evolution, genetics, biogeography, biodiversity, and
conservation research and planning, thus have an enormous potential for diverse
applications.

A bit of history

The history of ornithological investigations in Mexico was reviewed by Navarro
(1989) and Escalante et al. (1993), and is summarised briefly here. Knowledge of
the Mexican avifauna started with the indigenous cultures that inhabited the country.

Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. 210 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

At the time of the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, most of the diversity of
Mexican birds had been discovered by the people of different regions in Mexico,
because birds played important roles in their daily activities, foods and religion.
Monks and scientists from Spain, such as Fray Bernardino de Sahagitin and Francisco
Hernandez, compiled indigenous knowledge on Mexico’s natural resources (Alvarez
del Toro 1985).

Further expeditions were made by the Spanish in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and by French, German, British and Italian naturalists in the nineteenth
century. On these trips, specimens were accumulated (as were field notes and paintings)
that are now housed in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Bremen, Cambridge, Turin, Madrid and
elsewhere. The end of the nineteenth century saw the beginning of intensive exploration
of Mexican biodiversity, particularly by English and U.S. scientists. Osbert Salvin and
Frederic DuCane Godman coordinated the Biologia Centrali-Americana, a multi-
volume description of Central American flora and fauna, of which four volumes were
dedicated to birds (Salvin & Godman 1879-1904). The collections amassed were the
product of fieldwork by themselves and by many collectors that they hired in the
region, as well as by purchases of collections. Most of these specimens are now housed
at the Natural History Museum in the United Kingdom.

Edward Nelson and Edward Goldman, from the United States National Museum
in Washington, D.C., explored Mexico’s natural resources as part of the United States
Biological Survey. Thousands of bird specimens were accumulated, and updated
information on ecology and biogeography of the species and communities was
assembled (Goldman 1951). Their work sparked intense interest in the Mexican
avifauna in the first half of the twentieth century. In this period, several professional
collectors (e.g. Chester Lamb, Wilmot W. Brown, Mario del Toro Avilés) and
researchers from many institutions in the United States and Canada visited different
regions within the country and made important collections. The most important
collections are those at the Moore Laboratory of Zoology, American Museum of
Natural History, Field Museum of Natural History, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology,
Museum of Comparative Zoology, University of Michigan and Louisiana State
University.

More recently, several Mexican or Mexico-based researchers, particularly at the
National Autonomous University (UNAM), further improved the knowledge of
Mexican birds (e.g. Allan R. Phillips, Rafael Martin del Campo). Today, a young
and active ornithological community is developing at many institutions, adding to
the ecological, systematic and geographical knowledge of Mexican birds. Centres
of ornithological research with important collections are located in Mexico City
(UNAM and Instituto Politécnico Nacional), Monterrey (Universidad de Nuevo
Le6én), Morelia (Universidad Michoacana), and Chetumal and Tuxtla Gutiérrez
(ECOSUR and Instituto de Historia Natural), among others. Given this history, the
scattered and locally unavailable nature of information about Mexican birds is very
clear; yet the need for such information is enormous, as many conservation-related
initiatives are taking place in Mexico as part of regional and international efforts, as
well as for basic research.

Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. Pala Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Methods

Data were obtained from 58 scientific collections in Mexico, United States, Canada
and Europe (Table 1) with the generous assistance of curators at each institution,
often by direct visits; of these datasets, information from 40 has been cleaned,
standardised and incorporated into a single data resource (Fig. 1). Data were obtained
in different forms, depending on the collection. We were able to obtain electronic
copies of the holdings of 21 collection databases that were already computerised in
various formats (Dbase, Excel, ACCESS or ASCII files). In very large and
uncomputerised collections, we consulted the original collection catalogues and
checked data against the actual specimens. A few collections were surveyed through
the scientific literature, especially those for which catalogues of extinct, type or all
specimens had been published. Most commonly, however, we captured data directly
from the specimens, allowing checks of identification, locality, sex and age of the
specimens. This capture and updating of data is an ongoing job, and several Mexican
(e.g. ECOSUR) and foreign collections (e.g. Russian Academy of Sciences) are
waiting to be included in the main database.

Records from scientific literature were obtained from an exhaustive survey of
some 4,000 references on Mexican birds produced between 1825 and 1999
(Rodriguez-Y afiez et al. 1994). Specific occurrence records were drawn from 312
recent references (1986-1999) that updated the distributional information on many
Species, especially in poorly known areas (e.g. islands in the Gulf of California),
and performed by observers that we deemed experts (e.g. E. Mellink, H. Gomez de
Silva). This literature survey accounted for 8,900 individual georeferenced records
(3.4% of the total records used for this contribution). A relational database was
constructed that contained basic fields available from most specimens and
bibliographic records (Fig. 2). For each record, taxonomy was updated to a recent
version of the biological species concept (AOU 1998), as well as to a new treatment
based on the phylogenetic/evolutionary species concepts (Peterson & Navarro 1998).

TABLE 1
Summary of 58 natural history museums contributing Mexican bird specimen records to the database
described in this paper. Note that numbers reported represent the number of records in the Aflas
database, and do not necessarily represent the total of specimens in the institution. Museums included
in the analyses presented in this paper are indicated with asterisks (*) and n/a indicates information
not available yet.

Institution country Species specimens
Moore Laboratory of Zoology, Occidental College* USA 806 43,297
Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University* USA 958 21,261
Instituto de Biologia, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México Mexico n/a 24,000
Natural History Museum, Tring* UK 889 19,386
Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science* USA 949 17,808
Delaware Museum of Natural History* USA 891 16,711
American Museum of Natural History* USA 907 15,803

University of Michigan Museum of Zoology USA 800 Beg

Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. Zw. Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology* USA 858 12597
Field Museum of Natural History* USA 889 12,067
Bell Museum of Natural History, University of Minnesota * USA 734 11,636
Museo de Zoologia, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM* Mexico 672 10,431
Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California* USA 314 O22
University of Kansas Museum of Natural History* USA 762 8,504
United States National Museum of Natural History* USA 672 8,296
Universidad Michoacana San Nicolas de Hidalgo * Mexico 413 8,296
Carnegie Museum of Natural History * USA 783 8,192
California Academy of Sciences USA 611 6,655
San Diego Natural History Museum* USA 451 6,518
University of California, Los Angeles* USA 459 5,560
Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology USA 657 5,068
Canadian Museum of Nature * Canada 534 4,643
Peabody Museum, Yale University* USA 654 4,298
Muséum Nationale d’ Histoire Naturelle, Paris* France 633 4,016
Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History* USA 633 3,364
Southwestern College, Winfield, Kansas * USA a5) 2,549
Florida Museum of Natural History USA 535 2,326
Royal Ontario Museum* Canada 551! 2,188
Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia* USA 547 2,084
University of British Columbia Museum of Zoology* Canada 267 2,016
University of Arizona* USA 450 L657,
Texas Cooperative Wildlife Collections * USA 324 1,347
Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, Frankfurt Germany n/a E339
Museum fiir Naturkunde, Berlin Germany 463 1,320
Museo de la Biodiversidad Maya, Campeche Mexico 180 1,024
Ubersee-Museum, Bremen Germany 300 957
Denver Museum of Natural History* USA 166 675
Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali, Torino Italy n/a 632
Burke Museum, University of Washington, Seattle USA 218 548
Staatliches Museum fur Naturkunde, Sttutgart Germany n/a 484
Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Madrid Spain 186 470
Natuurhistorische Museum, Leiden* Holland 13% 327
Muséum Nationale d’ Histoire Naturelle, Genéve Switzerland n/a 307
Museum Koenig, Bonn Germany n/a 267
Museo La Specola, Universita di Firenze Italy n/a 22
Zoologische Staatssammlung, Munich Germany n/a 210
Museo di Storia Naturale, Genova Italy n/a 206
Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg Russia n/a 196
University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge UK 112 148
Fort Hays State College, Kansas* USA 75 120
Manchester Museum, Manchester UK n/a 87
Nebraska State Museum* USA 55) 87
Museo Civico di Storia Naturale, Milano Italy 18 2
Iowa State University, Ames* USA 9 22
Moscow State University Museum Russia M7 17
Darwin Museum, Moscow Russia 9 9

Museo Federico Craveri, Bra Italy n/a n/a

Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. 2B) Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A
| | |
REQ CURATION OTHER VARIOUS
el APPLICATIONS QUERIES |
CLEAN
DATABASE
“ATLAS”
TAXONOMIC GEOGRAPHIC
UPDATE UPDATE
TAXONOMIC
AUTHORITY FILE GAZETEER
CENTRALIZED
DATABASE

DATABASE

FORMAT

UPDATES

| | |
BIBLIOGRAPHIC ites irae COLLECTIONS | COLLECTIONS |
RECORD CATALOGS SPECIMENS
various formats | |

Figure 1. Sources and information flux in the Atlas database: raw data input is shown at the bottom, and
updated and edit ascending in the middle; the resulting clean database and applications are shown at the

top.

coleczi07
CHR AOR

REVISGRQUE
movh-etaxan
SLB=SPECIE

a ID_LOCALIDAD
FETASCCL
CIA CoOL

{ID_ESTaDO
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|NOMBR=_ESTAD
GESCRVACIONES

EOEMPLAPR.
REFZIR=INC*4

ZdMEXIID
sougc
END-40U96

PRESENCIA_IVEAICO

JID CL-UINICG
ID COLECTOR

VELA

“PD CIOVFLAR |

Figure 2. Relational structure of the Atlas database.

KOM_COLEC

fafisluwa

{[dAUTOR

14 ITORES
ais

|TITULC PRUESA

IERO

Jove rics
“Q21TULC LIB27
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Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. 214 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

fe b
| |
c d
le f |
g

Figure 3. Geographical distribution of specimen data from selected scientific collections. (a) Muséum
Nationale d’ Histoire Naturelle, Paris; (b) American Museum of Natural History, New York; (c) Natural
History Museum, Tring; (d) Moore Laboratory of Zoology, California; (e) Museo de Zoologia, Facultad
de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico; (f) Universidad Michoacana, Morelia, Mexico; (g) sum of locality data
from 40 institutions in the Atlas database.

Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. 215 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Once records were captured, an extract of unique localities was performed to
obtain a gazetteer or geographic authority file. This file included all unique
combinations of state, locality and elevation. Latitude and longitude data (as decimal
degrees) for each unique locality were obtained using 1:250,000 maps of the country
(INEGI 1988). Correct locations of localities for which multiple sites had the same
name in a state were determined with the help of published gazetteers (e.g. Paynter
1955) or original field notes. Of an initial total of more thyan 36,600 unique localities,
94% were successfully georeferenced.

Once the database was constructed, 248,000 of 250,000 records were selected.
Those for which (1) identification and locality was not doubtful from 40 museums
and (2) data had already been incorporated into the centralised database were used
to develop the analyses that follow. To visualise general geographic patterns we
used ArcView (ESRI 1999). Digital cartography was made available by the Comision
Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (CONABIO). Analyses
involving predictive distributional areas were performed using the Genetic Algorithm
for Rule-set Prediction (GARP: Peterson et al. 2003, this volume).

Results

Representativeness of collections

How well represented are the birds of Mexico in each scientific collection?
Biodiversity analyses require abundant information that is rarely available from a
single data source. Particular collections specialise on a particular state (e.g.
Universidad Michoacana), or have broader coverage (e.g. Moore Collection, Fig.
3), and indeed no single collection contains sufficient geographic or taxonomic
representation to develop a full analysis (Peterson et al. 1998). However,
accumulation of localities across the 40 data sets included in our studies leaves few
major areas unsampled, providing much more complete ornithological information.
Now, with increasing quantity and availability of observational information, visual
records can complement the specimen record to provide further detail (Fig. 4).

Although this analysis may suggest that the avifaunal inventory of Mexico is
satisfactorily complete, we plotted localities for which more than 100 specimens .
(an arbitrary measure) are available (Fig. 5). The resulting pattern is interesting
because the gaps are much wider, and many areas of Mexico are clearly still poorly
represented in collections. The database also provides a valuable resource for guiding
systematic studies. For example, specimens of the different forms of Common Bush-
tanager Chlorospingus ophthalmicus (Sanchez-Gonzalez 1999) are scattered widely
among institutions (Fig. 6). Using an information resource such as the one we have
developed, a researcher may easily detect key specimens for a particular study, thereby
maximising efficiency.

Distributional patterns

Georeferenced specimen occurrence data can easily be retrieved into geographic
information systems applications, permitting association of biological data with

Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. 216 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Fig. 4. Comparison of different sources of locality data, for a suite of aquatic birds (Procellariiformes,
Gaviiformes and Pelecaniformes). Circles indicate specimen records, whereas triangles indicate visual
records from selected literature sources.

Figure 5. Localities from which more than 100 specimens have been collected, with different sizes of
circles indicating increasing numbers of specimens (100 to 4,800).

| Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. 217 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

geographic and ecological information available in digital formats. This analytical
format offers a series of opportunities for understanding basic distributional
phenomena, particularly with regard to predicting geographic distributions. For
example, correlating known occurrence points of species with ecoregions (CONABIO
1999) provides a first idea of potential geographic distributional areas (Fig. 7).

More complex methodologies for estimating distributional areas from occurrence
data vary widely (Udvardy 1969), both in approach and in results. Fig. 8 illustrates
the application of two different methods to the same dataset for two species (Garcia-
Trejo et al. 1999). Most methods (e.g. Fig. 8b) depend overmuch on dense point
coverage of known distributions for reconstructing areas. Given the paucity of records
available for most species (Peterson et al. 1998), alternative methods that allow
predictions of distributions based on incomplete knowledge are needed.

A powerful tool for extrapolating potential distributional areas from primary
point occurrences has been developed by D. R. B. Stockwell (Stockwell & Noble
1992, Stockwell & Peters 1999), and is called the Genetic Algorithm for Rule-set
Prediction (GARP). GARP uses an artificial intelligence approach (the genetic
algorithm) to produce an abstraction of the ecological niche of a species, based on

Figure 6. Localities of Common Bush Tanagers Chlorospingus ophthalmicus in Mexico. Labels indicate
scientific collections in which selected specimens are housed. LSUMZ, Louisiana State University;
DMNH, Delaware Museum; MZFC, Museo de Zoologia, Facultad de Ciencias UNAM; USNM, United
States National Museum. Shading represents the predicted distribution of the species modeled in GARP.

Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. 218 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Bosques Mesofilos
* de Montafia de
os Veracruz

Bosques Mesofilos
de Montaiia del
4) norte de Oaxaca a

Figure 7. (a) Point locality data (black stars) for the endemic Bearded Wood Partridge Dendrortyx barbatus
in Mexico, superimposed on a map of terrestrial ecoregions (CONABIO 1999). Areas highlighted are
those holding cloud forest or humid pine-oak forest. (b) Map showing the Ecoregions (grey) (CONABIO
1999) in which the Stripe-headed Sparrow Arremonops rufivirgatus occurs according to distributional
point data (white circles).

Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. 219 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Figure 8. Models of the geographic distribution of an endemic Mexican species, the Stripe-headed Brush-
finch Buarremon virenticeps: (a) primary point data drawn from the Aflas database; (b) removal of test
points from the state of Jalisco; (c) GARP prediction of distributional area (predictive model built with
data from Jalisco removed); and (d) close-up of state of Jalisco, showing correspondence between
prediction and test dataset (stars).

physical and ecological attributes available in digital formats. An example is provided
in Fig. 9, in which known occurrences of a species endemic to Mexico (Buarremon
virenticeps) are used to predict its geographic distribution. Extensive testing of the
predictive accuracy of models developed using this approach have amply
demonstrated its utility (Peterson & Cohoon 1999, Peterson et al. 1999, 2002a,b,
Peterson 2001, Peterson & Vieglais 2001, Anderson et al. 2002a,b, in press, Feria &
Peterson 2002, Stockwell & Peterson 2002a,b).

Species richness, endemism and conservation

There are many potential applications of this information resource and technology
to the conservation of biodiversity. For single-species prioritisations, Fig. 10 provides
an illustration of the geographic situation of the Oaxaca Sparrow Aimophila

Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. 220 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

_- mexicanus ;
go!ldmani

intermedius
sallaei

occidentalis

soconuscensis wa SS ee

vicinior

Figure 9. Use of primary data points for construction and evaluation of distributional areas: (a) data
points for Thicket Tinamou Crypturellus cinnamomeus, sensu AOU 1998) from the Atlas dataset; (b)
distribution based on ecoregions highlighted by point data; (c) buffer zones (10 km intervals) for estimating
continuity of areas; (d,e) GARP predictions for the two phylogenetic species (sensu Navarro & Peterson
submitted), Western Tinamou C. occidentalis and the eastern populations (C. mexicanus); and (f)
distributions of northern subspecies (Friedmann ef al. 1950).

notosticta, a species of conservation concern in Mexico. Indeed, modelling its
geographic distribution only amplifies the concern for this species in Mexico, as the
Species proves to be left out of present conservation efforts entirely.

Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. 3) Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

The predictive approaches of GARP can be applied to more complex challenges,
combining results for suites of species. For example, Fig. 11 illustrates an overlay
of the distributional areas of quail species endemic to western Mexico. Here, peaks
and valleys in richness of endemic species can be detected, and can be incorporated
in conservation planning; use of complementarity algorithms permits the development
of quantitative conservation strategies (Gordillo-Martinez 2000).

Discussion

The principal source of information on the systematics and distribution of the Mexican
avifauna as a whole are Friedmann ef al. (1950) and Miller et al. (1957). Although a
recent publication (Howell & Webb 1995) updates the distributional overview, it is
in an extended field-guide format and does not provide detailed geographic
information for most species. The vast dataset assembled in our work, including

Figure 10. Overlay of potential distributional areas of quail species in western Mexico. Different shades
of grey indicate high (black) to low (light grey) concentration of species. Data from Gordillo-Martinez
(2000).

Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. aD Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

VALLE DE TEHUACAN

aos
PRESA TEMASCAL
#| CERRO DE ORO

[p
rs

SIERRA NORTE

CERRO PIEDRA LARGA|

| SIERRA DE MIAHUATLAN|

Figure 11. Predicted distributional area (solid grey) of a range-restricted endemic species, the Oaxaca
Sparrow Aimophila notosticta. Polygons represent Important Bird Areas (IBAs) proposed for the region
(Arizmendi & Marquez 2000). Note that only the Valle de Tehuacan Reserve is an area protected officially.

specimens, bibliographic records and some field observational data, forms the basis
for our Atlas of Mexican birds, currently in preparation in collaboration with
specialists around the world. This publication is based on a modern taxonomic
treatment of the whole avifauna, and presents detailed analyses of the distribution
of each species, as well as summaries of general patterns of species diversity,
endemism, conservation status, and correlations with environmental and geographic
features of the country. This work will serve as a model of how the bases for national
biological surveys can be built from existing information held in the world’s natural
history museums, and will illustrate the many and varied potential uses of the
information.

As one reviewer of this paper stated, “the value of the kinds of work cited depends
on the availability of the (raw) data ... Publication of an atlas is all very well, but
hard copy data are only marginally more useful than no data at all’. We heartily
agree with this point of view. However, electronic ‘publication’ of the atlas database
is neither feasible nor particularly desirable. Problems with feasibility stem from
issues of permission to ‘serve’ data on specimens from a source that is not at the
institution owning the specimens—several curators are rightly concerned about the
implications for their institutions’ rights to ‘ownership’ of data. Moreover, serving

Adolfo G. Navarro S. et al. 223 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

such a centralised dataset is not desirable: centralised datasets suffer serious problems
with update—as collections databases are edited and corrected at the institutions
where specimens are housed, the corrections are not passed on to the centralised
data source. Hence, the best solution to the challenge of making these data—and
biodiversity data in general—broadly available is not to serve centralised datasets.
A much better solution is that of distributed access to diverse biodiversity datasets.
Here, centralisation is only achieved in a virtual sense. Rather, datasets are served
by each of the institutions that care for, curate and document the associated specimens,
and integrated virtually via the Internet. This design has the great advantage of keeping
the data at the institutions where the specimens are housed. Three prototype
distributed biodiversity networks now serve avian data: The Species Analyst (http:/
/speciesanalyst.net), REMIB (http://www.conabio.gob.mx), and ENHSIN (http://
www.nhm.ac.uk/science/rco/enhsin). A common technology that should unite these
three networks and others is now under development (the “DIGIR’ project).
Anticipated is a broad proposal to integrate many additional data sources (the
‘ORNIS’ [ORNithological Information System] Project!), which is in the process of
preparation for submission to the U.S. National Science Foundation for funding.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Robert Prys-Jones and the British Ornithologists’ Union for the invitation to AGNS and ATP
to attend the meeting and workshop, and to the World Bank for financial support. Useful comments to
the manuscript were obtained from Nigel Collar, Livia Le6n, Octavio Rojas and an anonymous reviewer.
We also thank the curators of the multiple institutions worldwide, listed in Table 1, that have supplied
data, access to collections, friendship and invaluable logistic support. We are deeply grateful for the
companionship and help of Claudia Abad, Rosa Salazar, Blanca Hernandez, Hesiquio Benitez, Elsa
Figueroa, Octavio Rojas, Fernando Puebla, Erick Garcia-Trejo, Luis Antonio Sanchez and many
colleagues and collaborators since 1994. Financial support for the construction of the Atlas, and the
development of analyses, has been obtained from the Comision Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso
de la Biodiversidad (CONABIO), National Science Foundation, Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y
Tecnologia (CONACyT), British Council (México), Comission for Environmental Cooperation, and
Direccion de Asuntos del Personal Académico (DGAPA-UNAM).

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Peterson, A. T., Soberon, J. & Sanchez-Cordero, V. 1999. Conservatism of ecological niches in
evolutionary time. Science 285: 1265-1267.

Peterson, A. T., Stockwell, D. R. B. & Kluza, D. A. 2002b. Distributional prediction based on ecological
niche modeling of primary occurrence data. Pp.617-623 in Scott, J. M., Heglund, P. J. & Morrison,
M. L. (eds.) Predicting species occurrences: issues of scale and accuracy. Island Press, Washington,
DC:

Peterson, A. T. & Vieglais, D. A. 2001. Predicting species invasions using ecological niche modeling.
BioScience 51: 363-371.

Ramamoorthy, T. P., Bye, R., Fa, J. & Lot, A. (eds.) 1993. Biological diversity in Mexico: origins and
distributions. Oxford Univ. Press, New York.

Rodriguez-Y afez, C., Villalon, R. & Navarro S., A. G. 1994. Bibliografia de las aves de México (1825-
1992). Publ. Esp. Mus. Zool. 4: 1-146.

Rzedowski, J. 1990. Vegetacion Potencial. IV.8.2. Atlas Nacional de México. Vol. II. Escala 1:4000,000.
Instituto de Geografia, UNAM. México.

Salvin, O. & Godman, F. D. 1879-1904. Biologia Centrali-Americana. Aves. Taylor & Francis, London.

Sanchez-Gonzalez, L. A. 1999. Variacion geografica en morfologia de las poblaciones mexicanas de
Chlorospingus ophthalmicus. Abstr. VI Neotrop. Ornithol. Congr. Monterrey, Nuevo Le6n, México.

Soberon, J., Llorente-Bousquets, J. & Benitez-Diaz, H. 1996. An international view of National Biological
Surveys. Annals Missouri Botanical Garden 83: 562-573.

Stockwell, D. R. B. & Noble, I. R. 1992. Induction of sets of rules from animal distribution data: a
robust and informative method of analysis. Mathematics and Computers in Simulation 33: 385-
390.

Stockwell, D. R. B. & Peters, D. P. 1999. The GARP modelling system: problems and solutions to
automated spatial prediction. Internatn. J. Geographic Information Systems 13: 143-158.

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J. M., Heglund, P. J. & Morrison, M. L. (eds.) Predicting species occurrences: issues of scale and
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Addresses: A. G. Navarro, Museo de Zoologia, Facultad de Ciencias,Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de
México. Apartado Postal 70-399, México D. F. 04510, México. e-mail: fevg01 @servidor.unam.mx:
A. T. Peterson, Natural History Museum, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66045, U.S.A.; A.
Gordillo-Martinez, Museo de Zoologia, Facultad de Ciencias,Universidad Nacional Autonoma de
México. Apartado Postal 70-399, México D. F. 04510, México

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

Martin Hromada et al. 226 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

The value of the bird collections and associated
data in regional museums: Lanius excubitor
specimens in Sarisské Museum,
Bardejov, Slovakia

by Martin Hromada, Lechofaw Kuczyiiski,
Maciej Skoracki, Marcin Antczak & Piotr Tryjanowski

Dedicated to the memory of PhMr. Tibor Weisz

SUMMARY

Current ornithology, when working on long-term studies of the ecology and conservation
of bird species, faces the problem of how to obtain relevant data. This challenge is
particularly acute in the case of rare or uncommon species. The importance of museum
collections of all sizes, and aspects of the use of collections for such studies, are the
subject of this paper. The Department of Natural History, Sari8ské Museum, Bardejoy,
Slovakia, holds the most extensive collection of Great Grey Shrikes in the world, totalling
665 skin and mount specimens, 600 sterna complexes, 207 ectoparasite samples, 7
endoparasite samples, 132 stomach contents and 9 clutches from north-eastern Slovakia,
taken in the period 1956-1983.

Introduction

The Great Grey Shrike Lanius excubitor, which has about a quarter of its entire
breeding range in Europe, has shown population declines over almost all its European
range in recent decades; this trend apparently results from habitat loss through
agricultural intensification (Tucker & Heath 1994), and low population densities
typify this species in most of Europe (Tryjanowski er al. 1999). Obtaining data on
long-term trends in the species’ population ecology is therefore increasingly
problematic. Consequently, most research on the species (e.g. taxonomy, morphology,
moult sequences, ecological problems, parasitology) has been based on relatively
small sample sizes. Larger datasets are nevertheless available, and occasionally used,
for such studies: taxonomy and morphology (Eck 1973, 1990a,b, 1994), ecology
and behaviour (Sch6én 1994a,b), and foraging and nesting biology (Lorek et al. 2000).

One solution to the current situation of scarcity of relevant field data is the use of
museum collections, where much relevant information awaits a number of novel
applications, in spite of the fact that the use of museum collections as an information
source is rather uncommon (Remsen 1995). Traditional bird collections generally
include study skins, spirit specimens, skeletons, nests, clutches of eggs, frozen tissues,
parasites and stomach contents (Mearns & Mearns 1998). Data on locality, date,
collector and measurements are generally associated with specimens, although more
detailed information, including circumstances of collection, habitat, behaviour,
additional measurements, and condition of the bird, are less commonly included on

Martin Hromada et al. Deh Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

labels. The importance of maximising information content related to specimens was
recently emphasised in the metadata concept in ecology and biology (Michener 1994).

Most museum-based studies have been carried out in large, well-known
collections (Peterson et al. 1998). Owing to exigencies of time and resources, most
researchers focus studies in larger collections rather than regional museums; but we
submit that the latter also often hold useful high-quality data. The aim of this paper
is to outline uses of series of Great Grey Shrikes in the Sari8ské Museum, Bardejov
(SMB), Slovakia, which holds what we believe to be the world’s largest sample of
this species.

Materials and methods

Study area

An important feature of the SMB collection is its orientation toward significant
series from a single geographic area. From 1957 to 1983, Great Grey Shrikes were
collected in north-eastern Slovakia (49°03 —49°27'N, 20°30 —21°47E) in the eastern
and western Carpathians, in the European temperate zone. This region, centered
around Bardejoy, is hilly, with elevations from 170 m in the lowest river basins to
1,157 m at the peaks of the Eergov Mountains.

Owing to its climatic and landscape features, this region mixes Mediterranean
(e.g. Bee-eater Merops orientalis) and boreal faunistic elements (e.g. Tengmalm’s
Owl Aegolius funereus, Pygmy Owl Glaucidium passerinum). Broad valleys running
approximately north-south provide corridors for fauna and flora from the warm
open plains of the Carpathian Basin and Great Pannonian Lowland. The region is
intensively farmed but presents a mosaic of agricultural fields in lower parts, forests
along creeks and rivers, and continuous forests on hilltops and mountainsides.

Collector

PhMr. Tibor Weisz (1928-1983), pharmacist, zoologist and phenomenal collector,
dealt with many animal groups, as is seen in the diversity of his specimen material.
He collected for the Hungarian Natural History Museum, Budapest (specimens
destroyed), and the Museum of the University of Forestry and Wood Industry, KoSice,
Slovakia. He was founder of two natural history museums, in PreSov and Bardejov,
both in Slovakia. The natural history collection at Bardejov alone holds about 700,000
specimens, including nearly 6,000 skins of almost 700 bird species, more than 3,500
sterna, approximately 800 clutches of eggs, etc.; Weisz’s principal interests were
with birds.

Documentation of birds in SMB

The main distinguishing feature of the SMB museum, established in 1956, lies in
the way the collections were documented. The data associated with most specimens
include much more in the way of measurements and notes than in other museums,
including information on length of both wings, condition (general health), size of

Martin Hromada et al. 228 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

gonads, relationships with other individuals (parent, nestling, sibling), and other
associated voucher material (sternum, stomach content, ecto- and endoparasites,
clutches, nests). An important component of data in the collection consists of detailed
notes on all activities of a collector during the day, notes on each collecting event,
and often cross-reference between specimens. Weisz was a pioneer of modern
ornithological and natural history methods in museum collections in Slovakia and
the Czech Republic. However, maybe because he was the only naturalist in the
museum for 20 years, and maybe because of his heavy preoccupation in fieldwork,
a small part of his collections lack one or more basic items of information, such as
locality, sex, etc. Moreover, the collector’s personal diaries, which contain detailed
descriptions of his daily activities, remain in the possession of his family, and are
accessible only with their permission.

Specimen collection

Many local shooters under the direction of Tibor Weisz collected the SMB Great
Grey Shrike series. All preparation steps were noted, and all specimens labelled
with a unique numeric identifier. Field notes included information on each bird
collected, frequently including habitat descriptions, behavioural observations, etc.
The birds were collected through the entire year, during single day trips or longer
expeditions, using cars or all-terrain vehicles to cover broader areas. The taxidermists
were members of a field team, so preparation and data collection were done
immediately, or shortly after obtaining the specimens.

Specimen preparation and processing

Specimens were prepared by means of traditional techniques for making study skins.
Arsenic was used as a preserving medium. Skilled taxidermists J. Trencsenyi, V.
Boruvka, and S. Trenéan were the principal preparators of the SMB bird collection.
All measurements were taken by T. Weisz on fresh birds, with body mass sometimes
noted by taxidermists. Measurements taken on most or all specimens were body
length, lengths of both wings (slightly flattened), lengths of longest and shortest
rectrices, tarsus length (measured as the distance between the sole side of the opened
foot, abutted on callipers at right angle and measured to the proximal point of the
tarsometatarsus), bill length measured to the anterior edge of the nostril and to first
feathering, and wing span. Sex was determined through dissection of gonads, and
age was noted, as well as description of colouration, wing-bars and other features.

Ectoparasites were collected by T. Weisz or the taxidermists from fresh birds by
direct inspection, without using special methods such as fumigation. Parasites were
preserved in 75% ethanol. Dissection out of endoparasites, when done, was
undertaken directly in the field by J. K. Macko (Parasitological Institute, SAS, Kosice,
Slovakia) and his co-workers. Material was preserved in fixative solutions specific
to particular helminth groups (e.g. nematodes in Barbagal solution, cestodes in
alcohol-formol-acetic acid). Stomach contents were collected and preserved in the
course of preparation, and stored in 70% ethanol, sometimes inside the actual stomach.

Martin Hromada et al. 229 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Sterna were preserved during preparation, and cleared with hydrogen peroxide;
complete sternal preparations include the sternum proper, furcula, coracoids and
scapulas.

The collection database is built on information recorded at several levels. The
collector’s first step was to note data in a field notebook. All of the following
information resources, such as cards and the database, are based on these notebooks.

Basic evidence on specimen acquisition

The Great Grey Shrike series was established in the course of other research and
collecting activities of the Department of Natural History of SMB. Members of the
collecting teams report no special preference for this species. We present the spatio-
temporal origin of samples on a seasonal and year-to-year basis (Fig. |, 2). Table |
outlines the data limitations on the specimen material relating to the sample in SMB.

The collection shows two peaks, i.e. in the early sixties and in the early seventies.
This gives an opportunity to stratify data into two groups and still have enough data
for statistical treatment, when e.g. splitting the samples around 1970.

Month of collection reveals seasonal variation in sampling. The peak in March
doubtless reflects the period with the highest probability of seeing birds. November
probably reflects the month in which the birds arrive in their winter territories. Both
peaks correspond with times of migration.

TABLE 1
Features of the Great Grey Shrike series in the SMB collection

N %
Total number of specimens 665 100
Number lacking date 4]
Number lacking locality information 57 9
Number not aged 3) 18
Number not sexed 146 22
Number with obvious measurement errors 16 2
Number of ectoparasite samples 207 dil
Number of endoparasite samples i
Number of stomach contents sampled 132 20
Number of sterna 600 90
Number of egg clutches 9 100
Number of clutches with known paternity >) 56

Taxonomic status of birds in the collection

The area sampled is situated at the southern edge of the continuous geographic
breeding range of the Great Grey Shrike. All the birds in SMB are currently identified
as Lanius excubitor excubitor, the nominate race (T. Weisz in Hudec 1983, Eck
1993, 1994), although several individuals appear to reflect characters of the south-
eastern subspecies L. e. homeyeri; the question has yet to be examined in detail.

Martin Hromada et al. 230 Bull. B:O.C. 2003 123A

80

No. of specimens
SS (o>)
[j@) (2)

NO
(=)

1963 1965 1967 1969 1971 1973 1975 1977 1979" 198i 18e3
Year
Fig. 1. Annual additions of Great Grey Shrikes to the SMB collection

() Lee Se See
ey IWS) Sey

No. of specimens

1°" 2. Bn M4 Rg gS "ere ore
Month

Fig. 2. Specimens of Great Grey Shrikes in SMB, by month of collection

Stomach contents

The 132 stomach content samples contained 608 prey items belonging to 82 animals
of 39 families and 17 orders (Hromada & Kristin 1996). Only small mammals, and
to a lesser degree carabid beetles, were found in food relatively regularly throughout
the year. Diversity of food items was highest in May and June, while evenness peaked

Martin Hromada et al. 231 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

in January and February. Hromada & Kristin (1996) discussed the occurrence of
necrophagous animals and difficulties with small prey items, as well as
methodological difficulties in estimating diets from stomach contents.

Parasites

At the time of collection, the birds were investigated for ectoparasites and a subset
also for endoparasites. In current research one secondary was examined to estimate
rates of infestation by syringophilid mites living in the feather quill, and a new
species, Syringophiloidus weiszii, was identified (Skoracki et al. 2001). In total, 508
Great Grey Shrikes were examined, of which 18 (3.54%) were infested by quill
mites. This low rate is probably due to the solitary nature of the shrikes and thus low
dispersal opportunities of these highly specific parasites (Skoracki et al. 2002).

Time series

The sample allows us to address temporal issues in two ways: (1) changes across the
entire period (26 years), and (2) within-year seasonal changes. An extended time
series helps avoid the biases that can plague shorter studies. Data can be integrated
with new datasets obtained by non-invasive methods, e.g. from blood, feather and
parasite sampling, etc. Temporally extended series can be used to evaluate the effects
of increasing human population and environmental damage. Data from the collection
enabled us to estimate a minimum density of Great Grey Shrikes in around Bardejov
in the 1960s (Kristin & Hromada 2002): breeding density at that time was at least
twice as high as it is at present.

Discussion

The role of regional museums is of growing importance at present. In spite of their
smaller overall holdings, regional museums often have the advantage of local
expertise, ability to respond quickly to local issues and collect significant conservation
data. Because collecting localities are often nearby, and staff are usually experts
regionally, a main focus is often on local community composition and conservation
issues (Davies 1995, 1996). Thus, regional museums should play a crucial role in
the long-term collecting related to questions of regional conservation, natural history,
Species composition, and community change. This focus of local expertise can offer
great advantages, particularly when work is developed in connection with major
museum collections that can provide expensive analytical capabilities and broader
contextual information for local faunas and floras.

The long-term maintenance of systematic collections, including smaller ones,
serves the important task of documenting the biodiversity of the earth (Backeljau er
al. 1995, Goethem et al. 1995, Shaffer et al. 1998). Use of this information resource
for studying diverse aspects of ecology, environmental biology and conservation is
relatively uncommon, in spite of the great potential that we have attempted to illustrate

Martin Hromada et al. 232 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

in this paper. Local and regional collections are, however, more vulnerable to loss,
given shifts in availability of economic resources and political upheavals.

The best way to realise the potential of these information resources is via co-
operation. Indeed, a recent commentary stated: “We find a picture of what the new
natural history museum world should look like: it will be collaborative....’ (Apt et
al. 1997). Networking and participating in internet-based data-sharing projects are
one avenue to pursue in this regard (Peterson et al. 1998).

The collections of SMB, despite the good use made of the Great Grey Shrike
material, are still relatively under-utilised. The principal problem is probably that
SMB has not yet issued its catalogue, so the collection remains relatively unknown.
Nevertheless, the preliminary results of our analysis of the extensive SMB Great
Grey Shrike series indicate exciting opportunities for more advanced studies, e.g.
ptilochronology, dynamics of infestation by parasites through season and time periods,
effect of population dynamics on evolution and genetics, physiological trade-offs,
SiC.

These examples illustrate the importance of broad-spectrum preservation of
information content by collectors. Almost none of the methods we are presently
using had been developed in the 1950s, when the SMB series was begun. Generally,
most information available can be used in the future in ways not currently appreciated.
Although the usual pressures exist for efficiency in work effort, it is impossible to
predict what may be useful in future studies (see, e.g., Remsen 1995). Today we are
reaping the rewards of the work of our predecessors, the collectors from decades or
more in the past, and we have to attempt to be equally shrewd and responsible with
respect to those that come after us.

Acknowledgements
We thank the Head of the Natural History Department of SMB, Tomas Jazsay, for his general help. Dana
Tulenkova prepared the computer database, Jan Kleban helped with working material up, and Dries van
Nieuwenhuyse encouraged us to study this fascinating collection. A. Townsend Peterson, Ivica Kral’ ova
and Nigel Collar critically read first versions of the manuscript and made corrections of our English.
Visits by M. Antezak, L. Kuczyfiski, M. Skoracki, and P. Tryjanowski to SMB were supported by a
special grant from the Faculty of Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University.

References:

Apt, J., Brown, E. H., Crane, P., Fri, R. W., Futter, E. V., Goldstein, K. L. & Hager, M. W. 1997. Toward
a natural history museum for the 21st Century. Museum News (American Association of Museums)
76 (Nov/Dec): 38.

Backeljau, T., van Goethem, J. & Wouters, K. 1995. New trends in systematics and taxonomy. Nouvelles
de la Sciences et des Technologies 13: 201-204.

Davis, P. 1995. Can small museums play a part in conserving biodiversity? NatHis. Newsletter (ICOM)
1

Davis, P. 1996. Small is still beautiful: provincial museum and biodiversity. Abstracts of Annual Meeting
of the NatHist International Committee, ICOM, ‘Saltillo 96’: 5.

Eck, S. 1973. Intraspezifische Ausformungen im Fliigel- und Schwanzbau bei Wiirger-Formenkreisen
der Gattung Lanius. Zool. Abh. Mus. Tierk. Dresden 32: 75-119.

Eck, S. 1990a. Uber Mae mitteleuropdischer Sperlingsvégel (Aves: Passeriformes). Zool. Abh. Mus.
Tierk. Dresden 46: 1-55.

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Eck, S. 1990b. Die systematische Stellung von Lanius excubitor meridionalis Temminck, 1820 (Aves,
Passeriformes: Lanidae). Zool. Abh. Mus. Tierk. Dresden 46: 57-62.

Eck, S. 1994. Uber die Formbildung bei den Raubwiirger-Arten (Lanius excubitor u.a.). Mitt. Ver. Sachs.
Orn. 7: 265-277.

van Goethem, J., Wouters, K. & Backeljau, T. 1995. The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural History
Sciences and the role of natural history collections in biodiversity research. Nouvelles de la Sciences
et des Technologies 13: 205-209.

Hromada, M. & Kristin, A. 1996. Changes in the food of the great grey shrike (Lanius excubitor) during
the year. Biologia, Bratislava 51: 227-233.

Hudec, K. (ed.) (1983) Fauna ESSR. Ptdci, 3. Academia Praha, Prague.

Kristin, A. & Hromada, M. 2002. Lanius excubitor. Pp.567-569. In Danko, S., Darolova, A., Kristin, A.
(eds.) Bird Distribution in Slovakia. VEDA, Bratislava.

Lorek, G., Tryjanowski, P. & Lorek, J. 2000. Birds as prey of the Great Grey Shrike (Lanius excubitor).
Ring 22: 37-44.

Mearns, B. & Mearns, R. 1998. The bird collectors. Academic Press, London.

Michener, W. K., Brunt, J. W., & Stafford, S. G. (eds.) 1994. Environmental information management
and analysis: ecosystem to global scales. Taylor and Francis, London.

Peterson, A. T., Navarro-Sigtienza, A. G. & Benitez-Diaz, H. 1998. The need for continued scientific
collecting: a geographic analysis of Mexican bird specimens. /bis 140: 288-294.

Schon, M. 1994a. Kennzeichen des Raubwiirgers (Lanius e. excubitor) Lebensraumes im Gebiet der
stidwestlichen Schwdbischen Alb: Jahreszeitliche Nutzung und Revier-Grosse, Strukturmerkmale
und Verdinderungen, Kleinstrukturen und Bewirtschaftung. Okol. Vogel 16: 253-495.

Schon, M. 1994b. Brutverhalten und Paarbindung des Raubwiirgers (Lanius e. excubitor): Paarbildung,
Brutverlauf und Familien-Auflosung im Gebiet der Siidwestlichen Schwabischen Alb. Okol. Vogel
16: 81-172.

Shaffer, H. B., Fisher, R. N. & Davidson, C. 1998. The role of natural history collections in documenting
species declines. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 13: 27-30.

Skoracki, M., Hromada, M. & Tryjanowski, P. 2001. Description of a new quill mite Syringophiloidus
weiszi sp.n. (Acari, Prostigma, Syringophilidae) from great grey shrike Lanius excubitor. Acta
Parasitologica 46: 30-34.

Skoracki, M., Tryjanowski, P. & Hromada, M. 2002. Two new species of the genus Syringophilopsis
Kethley, 1970 (Acari: Syringophilidae) parasitizing quills of true shrikes (Aves: Laniidae). Parasite
9: 11-16.

Remsen, J. V. 1995. The importance of continued collecting of bird specimens for ornithology and bird
conservation. Bird Conserv. Internatn. 5: 145-180.

Tryjanowski, P., Hromada, M. & Antczak, M. 1999. Breeding habitat selection in the Great Grey Shrike
Lanius excubitor—the importance of meadows and spring crops. Acta Orn. 34: 59-63.

Tucker, G. M. & Heath, M. F. 1994. Birds in Europe: their conservation status. BirdLife International,
Cambridge, U.K.

Addresses: Martin Hromada, Department of Natural History, Sarisské Museum, Radniéné nam. 13, SK-
085 01 Bardejov, Slovakia & Department of Zoology, University of South Bohemia, BraniSovska
31, CZ-370 05 Eeské Budijovice, Czech Republic. e-mail: martinhromada@iol.sk; Lechostaw
Kuczynski, Department of Animal Morphology, Institute of Environmental Biology, Adam
Mickiewicz University, 28 Czerwca 198, PL-61-485 Poznan, Poland. lechu@amu.edu.pl; Maciej
Skoracki, Department of Animal Morphology, Institute of Environmental Biology, Adam Mickiewicz
University, 28 Czerwca 198, PL-61-485 Poznan, Poland. skoracki@amu.edu.pl; Marcin Antczak,
Department of Zoology, University of South Bohemia, BraniSovsk4 31, CZ-370 05 Eeské Budijovice,
Czech Republic. antczak @tix.bf.jcu.cz; Piotr Tryjanowski, Department of Avian Biology & Ecology,
Adam Mickiewicz University, Fredry 10, PL-61-701 Poznan, Poland. e-mail: ptasiek @amu.edu.pl

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

Zlatozar Boev 234 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Specimens of extinct and threatened birds in the
collections of the National Museum of
Natural History in Sofia, Bulgaria

by Zlatozar Boev

Introduction

Over the last five decades a series of specimen catalogues of extinct and rare birds
in museum collections has been published. For Europe, such papers were made
available by the natural history museums in, e.g., Berlin (Stresemann 1954), Frankfurt
am Main (Mertens & Steinbacher 1955), Paris (Jouanin 1962), Exeter (Howes 1969),
Dresden (Eck 1970), Cambridge (Benson 1972), Moscow (Neufeldt 1978, Tomkovich
& Barisheva 1987), Liverpool (Fisher 1981), Milan, Genoa and Florence (Violani et
al. 1984), Saint Petersburg (Sokolov & II’ yashenko 1987), Tring (Knox & Walters
1994), and Lviv (Tsaryk 2000). Surveys of this kind are useful to outline the
whereabouts of rarities collected in the past throughout the world (Williams 1960).
Here such a catalogue is presented for the National Museum of Natural History in
Sofia (NMNHS) in Bulgaria.

The NMNHS was founded in 1889 by King Ferdinand I of Bulgaria. Its bird
collections were gradually built up by regular acquisition of local birds and zoo
specimens. Also, some larger collections were obtained, notably those of Amede
Alleon (1838-1904) from south-east Europe (including c.900 mounted specimens),
Emil Holub (1847-1903) from South Africa (c.300 mounted specimens), E. C. Stuart
Baker (1864-1944) from India and South-east Asia (152 mounted specimens), and
Pavel Patev (1889-1950) from Bulgaria (over 9,000 specimens, mostly preserved
as study skins) (Boev 1991). The oldest bird in the collection is an adult male Channel-
billed Toucan Ramphastos vitellinus shot in Brazil in 1860. At present, the collection
holds over 12,000 registered skins and mounts of birds, plus over 1,300 partial or
complete avian skeletons (Boev 1993). Some pre-1950 mounts are also present but
are not yet catalogued.

A catalogue of the bird collections of NMNHS was published over 90 years ago
(Anon. 1907). At the time this was a complete inventory, but considerable changes
have since occurred, largely owing to important acquisitions, but also because a part
of the collection was lost to fire in March 1944. Recent overviews of the bird contents
of NMNHS involved only parts of the collection, e.g. catalogues of all parrots
Psittaciformes (Boev 1990) and of the Stuart Baker material (Boev 1997a).

The present list provides data on the specimens of those species in NMNHS
listed in BirdLife International (1999) and on Appendix I of the Convention on
International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) (species listed on this appendix
are not necessarily threatened in the formal sense, but are regarded as highly
vulnerable to international trade and thus have the equivalence of a threatened species
under international law). All specimens are prepared as mounted birds or study skins.

Zlatozar Boev py) Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Material and methods

Systematics, and categories of the conservation status and CITES listing, follow del
Hoyo etal. (1992, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2002), with updated conservation
status based on BirdLife International (2000) (where species have been downlisted
since the completion of this review in 1999, this is noted but the entry is retained).
To facilitate comparison of species and the location of collecting site, modernised
species names and locality names are used (rather than those attaching to the specimen
itself), the latter according the most recent Times atlas or (when not in the latter)
with an indication of the nearest larger city. Square brackets around place names
indicate either (a) the former name of the locality as given on the original specimen
label, or (b) a known origin (e.g. New Zealand) or a known local provenance (e.g. a
ZOO) of the specimen in the absence of other data, or (c) extra information that helps
fix the given locality.

Each entry begins with the catalogue number. Ad = Adult, Juv = Juvenile, Subad
= Subadult. ‘Sofia Zoo’ is the Royal Zoological Gardens, Sofia. N = northern, S =
southern, E = eastern, W = western, C = central. Coll. = collected by; don. = donated
by.

In cases where specimens were in sufficiently good condition, (usually) six
standard measurements were taken: L = body length from the tip of the upper mandible
to the tip of the longest tail feathers (uppertail-coverts in males of Pavo); A = wing
length from the ulnar-carpometacarpal joint to the tip of the longest primary feather;
C = tail length from the pygostyle (or pygostyle area) to the tip of the longest tail
feathers; R = bill length (culmen length) from the middle of the front edge of the
cere to the tip of the upper jaw, 1.e. the bare horny part; T = tarsus length from the
joint between the third toe and the tarsometatarsal bone to the tibiotarsal-
tarsometatarsal joint, measured on the frontal surface; D = third toe length with the
claw from the proximal joint of the first phalanx of the third toe to the tip of the
claw. The measurements were taken in millimetres with calipers and a thin metric
ruler.

List of species

APTERYGIDAE
Little Spotted Kiwi Apteryx owenii. Vulnerable. One:
e 525 Ad [New Zealand]. L 505, A-—, C -, R 64.8, T 49, D 50.6.

SPHENISCIDAE

Jackass Penguin Spheniscus demersus. Vulnerable. Three, all from zoos:

e 195 Ad, bought alive on 29 May 1936 in Hamburg, died in Sofia Zoo on 10 April
IST. EOC), AN OS), (GOO, IX SS), 1P S59 1D Wk

e 196 Subad female [Plovdiv Zoo].

¢ 223 Ad male, died in Sofia Zoo in May 1974. L 635, A 196, C 65, R 66.7, T 48,
1D) i /o3).

Zlatozar Boev 236 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

PELECANIDAE

Dalmatian Pelican Pelecanus crispus. Conservation Dependent. CITES I. Three:

e 278 Ad, no further data. L 1,710, A 690, C 300, R 380, T 111, D 128.

e 279 Juv, 26 May 1956, Srebarna Lake near Silistra (N Bulgaria), coll. M. Daneva.
e 280 Ad female, 30 March 1904, Negovan Lake near Sofia (W Bulgaria).

PHALACROCORACIDAE

Pygmy Cormorant Phalacrocorax pygmeus. Insufficiently Known (now Near

Threatened). Eight:

e 2483 Ad, no further data. Bulgaria.

2484 Unsexed, 14 October 1908, Vranya near Sofia (W Bulgaria).

2485 Unsexed, 27 October 1896, Plovdiv (S-C Bulgaria).

2486 Ad male, 4 May 1904, Isktir River near Sofia (W Bulgaria).

2487 Ad male, 6 December 1896, Yarem-Bourgas (near Istanbul, Turkey), coll.

A. Alleon. L 540, A 220, C 148, R 31.9, T 29.7, D 50.7.

2488 Ad male, 5 September 1898, Iskiir River.

e 2489 Ad male, 27 November 1892, Yarem-Bourgas, coll. A. Alleon. L 560, A
AANer (SF MGds 18 Aoi, I BO, 1D) S75.

e 5183 Subad, January 1995, Durankulak Lake (NE Bulgaria). L 570, A 210, C
a2, IR 2sais IP 3y7/, DEO),

THRESKIORNITHIDAE

Northern Bald Ibis Geronticus eremita. Critically Endangered. CITES I. Two, both
from Sofia Zoo and probably originating from one of the Syrian colonies:

e 2147 Ad male, died 16 July 1911. L724, A 363, C 224, R 137.2, T 71.5, D 65.3.
e 2148 Ad female, died 30 August 1911. L705, A 367, C 173, R 136.8, T 68, D 63.9.

ANATIDAE

Lesser White-fronted Goose Anser erythropus. Vulnerable. Two:

e 106 Ad female, 22 March 1902, Negovan Marsh near Sofia (W Bulgaria), coll.
ibs Sil shumong IU S305 ANS Ss (C ILS, IR QOS, 1 D3), ID) Ss3.3

e 4624 Ad male, 15 March 1932, Musachevo [near Sofia], coll. V. Damyanov.

Red-breasted Goose Branta ruficollis. Vulnerable. Two:

e 5238 Ad male, January 1997, Durankulak Lake (NE Bulgaria), coll. P. Dimitrov.
ID (Wd), IN DOS, (C W255 I Ht), SZ, 1D) 3257/6

e 5170 Ad, December 1993, Durankulak Lake, coll. P. Dimitrov.

Ferruginous Duck Aythya nyroca. Vulnerable (in Collar et al. 1994), now Near
Threatened. One:

e 2680 Ad male, 10 January 1896, Makrikéy (10 km WSW of C Istanbul, Turkey),
coll. A. Alleon. L—, A 189, C 90, R 43.6, T 32.1, D 57.2.

White-headed Duck Oxyura leucocephala. Endangered. Thirteen:
e 73 Juv, no further data.
° 78,79 & 2717 Male, female, and male, 9 March 1890, Burgas (E Bulgaria).

Zlatozar Boev Dey) Bull. BOLGS 20031234

80 Unsexed, 1893, Pazardzhik (S-C Bulgaria).

2710 No data.

2711 Ad female, March 1882, Constanta (E Romania), coll. A. Alleon.

2712 & 2714 Females, ‘Mediterranean’, coll. A. Alleon.

2713 & 2715 Juv and ad male, April 1883, Constanta, coll. A. Alleon.

2716 Female, ‘Mediterranean’, coll. A. Alleon. L 427, A 60, C 82, R 41.7, T
43.0, D 65.

e 5154 15 January 1993, Poda near Burgas, coll. P. Dimitrov.

CATHARTIDAE

Californian Condor Gymnogyps californianus. Critically Endangered. CITES I. Two:

e 687 Ad female, 10 June 1902, Arroyo Grande (California, USA), coll. Arthur
Wilcox.

e [without catalogue number] Ad male. L 1,260, A 818, C 465, R 39, T 129, D 145.

Andean Condor Vultur gryphus. CITES I. One:
e 688 Ad male. L 1,315, A 835, C 375, R 44, T 127, D 152.

ACCIPITRIDAE

Cinereous (Black) Vulture Aegypius monachus. Vulnerable (now Near Threatened).
Four:

e 699 Ad, no further data. L 1,122, A 825, C 389, R 62, T 135, D 108.

e 700 Ad male, January 1893, Istanbul (Turkey), coll. A. Alleon.

e 2940 Juv, May 1881, Dobrogea (E Romania), coll. A. Alleon.

e 2946 Juv, December 1892, Istanbul, coll. A. Alleon.

White-tailed Sea Eagle Haliaeetus albicilla. Vulnerable (now Near Threatened).

cae I. Eight:
506 Ad female, 29 January 1897, Demirci (20 km N of C Istanbul, Turkey), coll.
A. Alleon.

¢ 507 Juv female, Burgas, died in Sofia Zoo 2 February 1897.

e 508 Ad male, died in Sofia Zoo 17 August 1893. L 820, A 520, C 250, R 51.8, T
Os Ds AO)

e 2920 Juv male, 7 December 1898, no locality, coll. A. Alleon.

e 2921 Ad male, 11 February 1894, San Stefano (15km WSW of C Istanbul, Turkey),
coll A. Alleon. L 940, A 608, C 291, R 53.0, T 93, D 102.

e 2934 Ad female, 29 January 1899, Demircikoy (20 km N of C Istanbul, Turkey),
coll. A. Alleon.

¢ 2935 Ad male, 23 December 1894, Demircikéy (as above), coll. A. Alleon.

¢ 2936 Juv, 7 November 1898, Demircikéy (as above), coll. A. Alleon.

Imperial Eagle Aquila heliaca. Vulnerable. CITES I. Thirty-nine:
¢ 500 Ad, 21 October 1890, Bulgaria.

e 501 Ad female, no further data.

° 504 Juv, 12 June 1916, Vranya near Sofia (W Bulgaria).

Zlatozar Boev 238 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

505 Juv, 18 November 1930, Sgledintsi near Sofia.

2837 Juv, June 1882, Rumelia [former region, = S Bulgaria].

2838 Juv male, 3 June 1902, Sofia.

2848 Ad, 19 October 1898, “Sent George’ [untraced; no further data].

2849 Ad female, 16 March 1894, Bosporus (Turkey), coll. A. Alleon. L 855, A
6127 S10 3R44 Ss, TOD Yo:

2850 Ad, Bulgaria. L 950, A 640, C 303, R 44,5, T 100, D 110.

2851 Juv male, 28 March 1899, Makrikoy (10 km WSW of C Istanbul, Turkey),
coll, A: Allleon: L 850;.A 597, C 305; R41-4. f 90, D983:

2813 Ad female, 20 April 1893, Yarem-Bourgas (near Istanbul, Turkey), coll. A.
Alleon. L 883, A 626, C 293, R 41.8, T 93, D 100.

2910 Ad, 2 December 1892, Tsaribrod (= Dimitrovgrad in present-day
Yugoslavia).

2918 Juv female, 3 March 1898, MakrikGy (see above), coll. A. Alleon.

2931 & 2932 Juvs, no further data.

4773 Unsexed, 30 January 1895, Tarnovo-Seymen [now Simeonovgrad, SE
Bulgaria], coll. Starikov.

4774 Juv male, died Sofia Zoo 5 July 1903.

4775 Juv female, 11 March 1904, Krichim (SW Bulgaria).

4776 & 4777 Ad and juv, Bulgaria.

4778 Juv female, 25 July 1894, Bulgaria.

4779 & 4783 Juv female and juv male, 17 February 1902, Sofia.

4780 Ad female, 9 February 1902, Sofia.

4781 Ad female, 15 September 1894, Pancharevo (Bulgaria).

4782 Juv female, 1 April [year unspecified], Sofia.

4784 Juv, 1896, Plovdiv (S-C Bulgaria).

4785 Unsexed, 10 October 1911, Sofia.

4786 Juv male, died in Sofia Zoo on 12 April 1885.

4787 Juv male, 17 November 1906, Sofia.

4788 Juv male, 27 September 1893, Belitsa (SW Bulgaria).

4789 Ad male, 9 February 1895, Tarnovo [now Veliko Tarnovo, CN Bulgaria].
4790 Ad male, 12 June 1911, Sofia.

4791 & 4793 Juvs, 18 and 17 February 1929, Euxinograd [near Varna, NE
Bulgaria].

4792 & 4794 Ad female and ad unsexed, 7 May 1898, Plovdiv.

4795 Ad male, 16 February 1917, Pleven district (N Bulgaria).

Greater Spotted Eagle Aquila clanga. Vulnerable. Thirteen:

493 Ad female, 15 November 1932, Burgas (E Bulgaria), coll. V. Yulius. L 695,
A SIGn€ 280" R34. P00 SO:

494 Juv female, 8 July 1904, Sofia (W Bulgaria).

495 Ad male, 24 April 1895, Plovdiv (S-C Bulgaria).

2925 Ad male, 21 April 1890, Banya near Kostenets (SW Bulgaria).

Zlatozar Boev 239 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

2926 Juv male, September 1899, Marmara (an island in the Sea of Marmara,
Turkey), coll. A. Alleon.

2927 Ad male, 7 May 1894, Bosporus (Turkey), coll. A. Alleon. L 735, A 564, C
290, R 36.4, T 90, D 83.

2929 Juv, June 1882, Dobrogea (E Romania), coll. A. Alleon.

4759 Ad male, 17 June 1911, Krichim (SW Bulgaria).

4760 & 4761 Ad females, 11 April 1918 and 27 May 1907, Krichim.

4762 Ad female, 28 March 1894, Kumanitsa near Sofia (W Bulgaria).

4772 Unsexed, 1 August 1947, Samokov (SW Bulgaria).

5091 Ad male, died in Sofia Zoo in February 1984, coll. A. Prostov.

FALCONIDAE
Lesser Kestrel: Falco naumanni. Vulnerable. Fifteen:

486 Ad female, Bulgaria. L 355, A 250, C 155, R 14.1, T 31, D 40.

487 Ad male, Plovdiv (S-C Bulgaria).

3059 Juv male, 26 August 1894, no locality, coll. A. Alleon.

3060 & 3061 Ad males, 30 March 1899 and 22 April 1895, San Stefano (15km
WSW of C Istanbul, Turkey), coll. A. Alleon.

3062 Ad male, Bulgaria.

3063 Ad female, 4 August 1919, Krichim (SW Bulgaria).

3064 Ad female, 29 April 1890, Plovdiv (S-C Bulgaria), coll. A. Alleon.

3065 & 3067 Ad female and ad male, 4 April 1890, Plovdiv, coll. A. Alleon.
3066 Juv female, 28 September 1895, Demirci (20 km N of C Istanbul, Turkey),
coll. A. Alleon.

3068 Juv female, 20 August 1894, Makrikoy (10 km WSW of C Istanbul, Turkey),
coll. A. Alleon. L 323, A 223, C 144, R 12.7, T 26.4, D 30.

3069 Ad female, April 1892, Makrik6y (as above), coll. A. Alleon.

3070 & 3071 Unsexed juvs, June 1892, Rumelia (former region, = S Bulgaria),
coll. A. Alleon.

Peregrine Falcon Falco peregrinus. CITES I. Eleven:

463 Ad male, 14 January 1894, Cekmece (20 km W of Istanbul, Turkey), coll. A.
Alleon.

464, 3111 & 3117 Juv female and two juv males, 14 November 1898, 23 October
1898, and 8 October 1893, respectively, Makrik6y (10 km WSW of C Istanbul,
Turkey), coll. A. Alleon.)

3109 Juv female, 6 December 1897, Cekmece (see above), coll. A. Alleon. L
ASO SOC D (5a Ro), AAT SD 80:

3110 Ad male, 2 October 1897, Demirci (20 km N of C Istanbul, Turkey), coll.
A. Alleon. L 465, A 318, C 170, R 19.5, T 40.7, D 69.

3112 Juv female, 11 August 1893, Bulgaria.

3113 Ad female, January 1893, Makrikéy (see above), coll. A. Alleon.

3115 Ad male, 12 March 1901, Plovdiv (S-C Bulgaria).

3118 Ad female, Bulgaria.

Zlatozar Boev 240 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

e 3121 Ad female, 14 January 1899, Makrikéy (see above), coll. A. Alleon. L 440,
A378€ iS ROS 4 46s DS:

CRACIDAE

Alagoas Curassow Mitu mitu. Critically Endangered. CITES I. One:

¢ 620 Unsexed, received alive in Sofia Zoo on 20 May 1924 and died 9 February
1938. This specimen shows most but not all the characters of Mitu mitu as opposed
to Razor-billed Curassow M. tuberosa. L 900, C 330, T 120, A 398, R (tip to
gape) 59.6, (tip to forehead over culmen) 66 (Boev 1997b).

PHASIANIDAE

Cabot’s Tragopan Tragopan caboti. Vulnerable. Two, both from Sofia Zoo:

e 607 Ad male, died 6 February 1898. L 500, A 242, C 200, R 21.4, T-, D 87.
e 3954 Ad male, died 7 February 1898.

Himalayan Monal Lophophorus impejanus. CITES I. Eight, all from Sofia Zoo:

¢ 621 Female, died 5 September 1897. L 600, A 285, C 188, R 34.5, T 60, D 64.
e 622 Juv female, died 3 September 1900.

e 623 Male, died 14 February 1906. L 652, A 288, C 196, R 42.2, T 69, D 69.7.
¢ 3890 & 3891 Ad males, died 6 October 1900 and 24 November 1901.

e 3894 Juv male, died 11 September 1897.

e 3892 & 3895 Ad male and ad female.

Siamese Fireback Lophura diardi. Vulnerable (now Near Threatened). Two, both
from Sofia Zoo:

e 626 Ad male, died 10 April 1903. L 690, A 251, C 370, R 28.3, T 87, D 49.3.

¢ 627 Ad female, died 31 March 1899. L 520, A 220, C 220, R 26.1, 1 75.0; D 42.

Crested Fireback Lophura ignita. Vulnerable (now Near Threatened). Four, all from

Sofia Zoo:

¢ 609 Ad male, ssp. rufa, died 25 November 1898. L 670, A 295, C 260, R 34.4, T
109, D 58.6.

¢ 610Ad female, ssp. rufa, died 4 November 1897. L 490, A 225, C 174, R 25.9, T
14, D395.

e 651 Ad male, ssp. nobilis, died 17 October 1899. L 640, A 300, C 270, R 30, T
DDG ED

¢ 653 Ad female, ssp. nobilis, died 27 January 1903. L 535, A 290, C 198, R 25, T
74. DSS.

Swinhoe’s Pheasant Lophura swinhoei. Vulnerable (now Near Threatened). CITES
I. Eight, all from Sofia Zoo:

¢ 614Ad male, died 21 February 1899. L 592, A 272, C 241, R 31.4, T 81, D 60.6.
615 Juv female, died 1 September 1901.

616 Ad female, died 31 March 1908. L 550, A 242, C 250, R 24.5, T 73, D 52.
619 No data

Zlatozar Boev 241 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

e 3791, 3809, 3810, 3783 Juv males, died 15 April 1898, 12 August 1901, 6
November 1899, and 18 August 1900, respectively.

Reeves’s Pheasant Syrmaticus reevesii. Vulnerable. Thirteen, many of these from a

feral population living in the woods near Krichim (SW Bulgaria, near Plovdiv):

e 595 Ad male, Krichim, 4 March 1920, shot by H M Tsar Boris III. L 1,980, A
D505 E 1-610-R 31.2, 1:88; D 65.4.

e 597 Ad female, 24 January 1912 [Krichim]. L 730, A 232, C 383, R 25.4,T 57, D
Sete

e 2183 Ad male, 27 October 1909, Krichim, coll. H M Boris III.

e 2484 Ad female, 27 January 1912 [Krichim].

e 2185, 2187 & 2188 Ad males, 3 November 1914, 23 January 1914, and 17
November 1917 [Krichim].

e 2186 Ad male, 27 January 1914 [Krichim], coll. Princess Nadezhda.

e 2189,2190 & 5189 Ad males, died in Sofia Zoo 10 October 1899, 18 June 1898
and 20 October 1994.

¢ 4000 Ad female, no further data.

¢ 4014 Ad female, died in Sofia Zoo 15 June 1898.

Elliot’s Pheasant Syrmaticus ellioti. Vulnerable. CITES I. Five, all from Sofia Zoo:

e 601 Ad male, died 10 November 1899. L 760, A 236, C 432, R 29.9, T 67, D
5)5eo)-

¢ 602 Ad female, died 9 May 1899. L 440, A 210, C 177, R 23, T 60, D 48.4.

°¢ 3960 & 3965 Ad males, died 26 January 1897 and 29 October 1897.

e 3964 Ad female, died 21 March 1901.

Brown Eared-pheasant Crossoptilon mantchuricum. Vulnerable. CITES I. Three,
all from Sofia Zoo:

sos 0/Ad male, died March 1901 1 940) A310) (€ 520, R.32.2, 1105, D 73:5.

¢ 3927 No data.

e 3972 Ad male, died 19 March 1901.

Cheer Pheasant Catreus wallichii. Vulnerable. CITES I. Two, both from Sofia Zoo:

e 612 Ad female, died 26 July 1899. L 762, A 230, C 445, R 21, T 75, D51.8.

e 613 Ad male, died 30 November 1904. L 918, A 255, C 557, R 29.3, T 68, D
GL.

Green Peafowl Pavo muticus. Vulnerable. Two, both from Sofia Zoo:
e« 563 Ad male, died 13 April 1910. L 2,040, A 495, C —, R 46.4, T 155, D 103.
e 564 Ad female, died 12 December 1897.

GRUIDAE

Blue Crane Anthropoides paradisea. Vulnerable. One, from Sofia Zoo:

el Onsexeddicdal sy Seprember 1900 lal SZ 0n A ash C45, R72 220)
82.

Zlatozar Boev 242 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Red-crowned Crane Grus japonensis. Endangered. CITES I. One, from Sofia Zoo:
e 513 Ad male, died 18 October 1906. L 1,470, A 680, C 330, R 156, T 305, D
27

RALLIDAE

Corncrake Crex crex. Vulnerable. Three:

e 208 Ad male, died in Sofia Zoo 16 August 1893.

e 209 Ad male, 18 May 1894, Cekmece (20 km W of Istanbul, Turkey), coll. A.
Alleon: 263, A 40, @65, R210) i 332) D376:

e 210 Juv, Bulgaria.

OTIDIDAE

Great Bustard Otis tarda. Vulnerable. Five:

e 593 & 2497 Ad males, 10 January 1928, Euxinograd [near Varna, NE Bulgaria].

e 594 Ad male, 22 February 1940, Bozhurishte near Sofia (W Bulgaria). L -, A
6375 C. 65) INA Sal OSD aiie

e 2496 Ad female, January 1890, Central Market of Sofia. L915, A513, C 280,R
Sree, WSs ID STS).

e 2498 Ad female, 20 January 1896, Makrikéy (10 km WSW of C Istanbul, Turkey),
coll. A. Alleon.

SCOLOPACIDAE

Slender-billed Curlew Numenius tenuirostris. Critically Endangered. CITES I. Six:

e 406 Ad female, 31 March 1914, Sofia (W Bulgaria).

e 407 Ad male, 24 March 1899, Mramor [near Sofia].

e 408 Ad female, December 1892, Istanbul (Turkey), coll. A. Alleon.

e 2772 Ad male, 28 March 1890, Kumanitsa near Sofia.

e 2773 Ad female, 11 September 1895, Makrikéy (10 km WSW of C Istanbul,
Turkey), coll. A. Alleon. L 445, A 267, C 112, R 91, T 69, D 36.7.

e 2774 Ad male, received on 26 March 1899 from somewhere in Bulgaria. L 455,
A263; Gly, R 75, 1 64, D365.

COLUMBIDAE

Luzon Bleeding-heart Gallicolumba luzonica. CITES I. Four, all from Sofia Zoo:
¢ 707 Ad male, died 30 October 1898. L 295, A 165, C 115, R 17.8, T 33.6, D 32.8.
e 708 Ad male, died 10 October 1899.

e 709 Ad female, died 5 February 1899. L 272, A 150, C 98, R 15.7, 7 31.2; D 33.5.
e 710 Ad, no data.

Nicobar Pigeon Caloenas nicobarica. CITES I. Three, from Sofia Zoo:

e 773 Ad male, died 23 October 1911. L 345, A 290, C 115, R 23.8, T 45, D 34
(without claw).

e 774 Ad female, died 14 December 1898.

e 775 Juv male, died 23 September 1909. L 318, A 192, C 102, R 28.8, T 44, D
44.4.

Zlatozar Boev 243 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Western Crowned Pigeon Goura cristata. Vulnerable. Two, both from Sofia Zoo:
e 736 Ad female, died 12 December 1898. L770, A 345, C 265, R 37.0, T 92, D 68.
e 737 Ad female, died 26 September 1901. L670, A 350, C 220, R 30.8, T 83, D 63.

CACATUIDAE
Palm Cockatoo Probosciger aterrimus. CITES I. One:
e 1785 Ad, ex Nehrkorn Mus. L 780, A 395, C 274, R 107.8, T 31, D 75.

Yellow-crested Cockatoo Cacatua sulphurea, ssp. parvula. Critically Endangered.

One, from Sofia Zoo:

e 1843 Ad female [Timor], died 10 March 1895. Earlier Boev (1990) listed this
specimen as C. s. occidentalis, but Timor Island is inhabited by C. s. parvula
(del Hoyo et al. 1997). L 420, A 224, C 114, R 34.7, T 24, D 39.7.

Salmon-crested Cockatoo Cacatua moluccensis. Vulnerable. CITES I. One:
e 1847 Ad, no further data. L 660, A 355, C 196, R 50.2, T 32, D 68.4.

PSITTACIDAE
Swift Parrot Lathamus discolor. Endangered. One:
e 1893 Ad male. L 254, A 122, C 116, R 12.6, T 11.7, D 25.

Black-cheeked Lovebird A gapornis nigrigenis. Vulnerable. Three, all from Sofia Zoo:
weelsio Ad male; died 12 July 1923. L 157,A 96, C 57,R 14.4, © 11, ) 20.

e 1874 Ad male, died 30 June 1920.

weeks Subad temales died 1918: 1805 A 100, © 53, R 5.3; 7 11.7, D224.

Sangihe Hanging-parrot Loriculus catamene. Endangered. Two:
e 1852 Ad male, coll. Russ. L 130, A 81.2, C 40, R 10.4, T 9, D 12.6.
e 1853 Ad female, coll. Russ. L 141, A 83, C 44, R 9.4, T 11.4, D 17.6.

Lear’s Macaw Anodorhynchus leari. Critically Endangered. CITES I. One:
¢ 1783 No data (old specimen). L 800, A 413, C 360, R 76.8, T 27, D 92.

Hyacinth Macaw Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus. Endangered. CITES I. One:
e 1784 Ad, bought from Hagenbeck in Hamburg by Sofia Zoo on 7 April 1937,
died 30 January 1940. L 1080, A 332, C 600, R 88.8, T 45, D 105.

Golden-capped Conure Aratinga auricapilla. Vulnerable. Two:

e 1797 Ad male, died in Sofia Zoo on 31 August 1909. L 352, A 79, C 79, R 27.2,
IU 35 1D) BS

e 1798 Ad male, no further data.

Red-spectacled Amazon Amazona pretrei. Vulnerable. One:
¢ 5166 Ad male, Tucuman (Argentina), coll. by Carlos Berg, received from Denison
(London). L 310, A 201, C 111, R 24.9, T 23, D 40.

Yellow-shouldered Amazon Amazona barbadensis. Vulnerable. CITES I. One:
¢ 1824 Ad, no further data (old specimen). L 389, A 203, C 138, R 30.2, T 18, D 41.

Zlatozar Boev 244 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

White-headed Amazon Amazona leucocephala. CITES I. Three:

e 1826 Amazona leucocephala caymanensis Ad male. L 350, A 193, C 125, R
Dsdoy, 173), 1D) SO).

e¢ 1827 Amazona leucocephala leucocephala Ad female. L 351, A 189, C 126, R
2S lS DA,

¢ 5181 Amazona leucocephala caymanensis Unsexed, obtained from Expo Plovdiv,
1981. L324, A 192, C 119, R 22.8, T 18, D 48.

Yellow-crowned Amazon Amazona oratrix. Endangered. One:
e 1825 Ad|Mexico). 0435, A217, € 148) R404. 123, Dis2:

Carolina Parakeet Conuropsis carolinensis. Extinct (Fuller 1988). One:
e 1799 Ad male, died in Sofia Zoo on 21 June 1901. L 377, A 194, C 166, R 24.5,
T 16.5, D 34.

Kakapo Strigops habroptilus. Critically Endangered. CITES I. One:
e 1833 Ad [New Zealand], bought from E. Boubée Fils (Paris). L 640, A 268, C
DISS IN SOO ee DOO:

TROGONIDAE

Resplendent Quetzal Pharomachrus mocinno. CITES I. Two:

e 722 Ad male, 1903, Guatemala, don. M. de Voigts-Rhetz. L 1,053, A 200, C 850,
1S Ee 2esad Teel DY 8345

eo 7 23:Ad male: 780A 23. © G30 0R Ieee oor

FRINGILLIDAE

Red Siskin Carduelis cucullata. Endangered. CITES I. One:

e 1921 Venezuela, died 12 July 19101 Sofia Zoo. L108, A 585 © SG 5kese
11.9, D 9.0.

Acknowledgement
Improvements to this paper were kindly provided by the referee, C. S. Roselaar.

References:

Anon. [= Gretzer, H.] 1907. Collections du Musée d Histoire Naturelle de Son Altesse Royale Ferdinand
I Prince de Bulgarie. Impr. de Etat, Soffa.

Benson, C. W. 1972. Skins of extinct or nearly extinct birds in Cambridge. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 92: 59-58.

BirdLife International 2000. Threatened birds of the world. BirdLife International, Cambridge, U.K.

Boev, Z. 1990. Parrots (Order Psittaciformes) in the collection of the National Natural History Museum
Sofia. Hist. Nat. Bulg. 2: 3-6.

Boev, Z. 1991. [Ornithological collections of the National Museum of Natural History at the Bulgarian
Academy of Sciences.] Hist. Nat. Bulg. 3: 37-48. (In Bulgarian, English summary).

Boev, Z. 1993. [The osteological collections and their importance for ornithological studies.] Hist. Nat.
Bulg. 4: 3-9. (In Bulgarian, English summary).

Boev, Z. 1997a. Stuart Baker’s collection of birds in the National Museum of Natural History (Sofia).
Hist. Nat. Bulg. 7: 5-12.

Boev, Z. 1997b. The Alagoas (Eastern-Brazil Razor-Billed) Curassow Mitu mitu (L.)—a world rarity in
the collection of the National Museum of Natural History, Sofia. Hist. Nat. Bulg. 7: 105-108.

Zlatozar Boev 245 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Collar, N. J., Crosby, M. J. & Stattersfield, A. J. 1994. Birds to watch 2: the world list of threatened
birds. BirdLife International, Cambridge, U.K.

Eck, S. 1970. Die ausgestorbenen Vogel (Balge, Skelette, Eier) in den Sammlungen des Staatlichen
Museums fiir Tierkunde in Dresden. Zool. Abh. Staatl. Mus. Tierkde. Dresden 30: 131-134.

Fuller, E. 1988. Extinct birds. Facts On File Publications, New York & Oxford.

Fisher, C. T. 1981. Specimens of extinct, endangered or rare birds in the Merseyside County Museums,
Liverpool. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 101: 276-285.

Howes, C. A. 1969. A survey of extinct and nearly extinct birds in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum,
Exeter. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 89: 89-92.

del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A. & Sargatal, J. (eds.) 1992. Handbook of the birds of the world, \. Lynx Edicions,
Barcelona.

del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A. & Sargatal, J. (eds.) 1994. Handbook of the birds of the world, 2. Lynx Edicions,
Barcelona.

del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A. & Sargatal, J. (eds.) 1996. Handbook of the birds of the world, 3. Lynx Edicions,
Barcelona.

del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A. & Sargatal, J. (eds.) 1997. Handbook of the birds of the world, 4. Lynx Edicions,
Barcelona.

del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A. & Sargatal, J. (eds.) 1999. Handbook of the birds of the world, 5. Lynx Edicions,
Barcelona.

del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A. & Sargatal, J. (eds.) 2000. Handbook of the birds of the world, 6. Lynx Edicions,
Barcelona.

del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A. & Sargatal, J. (eds.) 2002. Handbook of the birds of the world, 7. Lynx Edicions,
Barcelona.

Jouanin, C. 1962. Inventaire des oiseaux éteints ou en voi d’extinction conservés au Muséum de Paris.
Terre et Vie 3: 257-301.

Knox, A. G. & Walters, M. P. 1994. Extinct and endangered birds in the collections of the Natural
History Museum. British Ornithologists’ Union, Tring.

Mertens, R. & Steinbacher, J. 1955. Die im Senckenberg Museum vorhandenen Arten ausgestorbener,
aussterbender oder seltener Vogel. Senckenbergiana Biol. 36: 241-265.

Neufeldt, I. A. 1978. [Extinct birds in the collection of the Zoological Institute of the Academy of
Sciences of the USSR. In: Systematics and biology of rare and less known birds.] Trudy Zool. Inst.
Akad. Nauk SSSR 76: 101-110. (In Russian.)

Sokolov, E. P. & Il’ yashenko, V. Yu. 1987. [Birds of the Red Data Book of Russian SFSR in the collection
of the Zoological Institute of the Academy of Sciences of USSR.] Pp.106-112 in [Problems of
conservation of the rare animals. Materials towards the Red Data Book.| Moscow: Nauk. (In
Russian.)

Stresemann, E. 1954. Ausgestorbene und aussterbende Vogelarten, vertreten in Zoologischen Museum
Berlin. Mitt. zool. Mus. Berlin 30: 38-53.

Tomkovich, P. S. & Barisheva, I. K. 1987. [Birds of the Red Data Book of Russian SFSR in the collection
of the Zoological Museum of the Moscow State University.] Pp.98-105 in [Problems of conservation
of the rare animals. Materials towards the Red Data Book.| Moscow: Nauk. (In Russian.)

Tsaryk, Y. V. (ed.) 2000. Catalogue of rare and red data book species of animals in the Zoological
Museum collections—Insecta, Pisces, Amphibia, Reptilia, Aves, Theria. Lviv: Zoological Museum,
Ivan Franko University.

Violani, C., Daturi, A. & Cagnolaro, L. 1984. Uccelli estinti e rari nei musei naturalistici di Milano,
Genova e Firenze. Riv. ital. Orn. 54: 105-178.

Williams, G R. 1960. Distribution of specimens of the Kakapo, Strigops habroptilus Gray, in some
museums throughout the world. Rec. Dominion Mus. 3: 219-227.

Address: Z. Boev, National Museum of Natural History, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1, blv. Tsar
Osvoboditel, 1000 Sofia, Bulgaria.

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

Andrew S. Richford 246 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Museums, books and costs:
public service vs private enterprise

by Andrew S. Richford

Museums house a variety of resources important for the research and preparation of
manuscripts and artwork for new book and journal publications. In particular, they
have collections of printed library materials and specimen collections of birds. In
this paper, I focus mainly on prepared skins as a reference material for authors and
artists, since these are by far the most heavily used non-library resources, although
the importance of collections of eggs, nests, skeletons and tissue samples can be
considerable for certain projects.

Authors preparing new books refer to skins for information on species
identification, to resolve taxonomic issues, and to obtain data to confirm the
geographic distribution of species and subspecies. In some cases their studies may
establish new syntheses, while in others it is only necessary to check previously
published results or resolve ambiguities in the published literature. Artists may also
collaborate in such research, but mainly refer to skins to prepare new illustrations,
usually combining measurements and information on plumage and form with data
collected from photographs and detailed personal observations of living birds,
whether wild or captive.

The growth of interest in birds and birdwatching has provided new information
on birds and their biology, distribution and identification, and has also generated a
growing market for new books on these subjects—field guides, reference handbooks,
and books on avian biology and ecology. A synergistic relationship between avian
scientists working in laboratory and field, museum workers, and professional and
amateur birdwatchers has brought our knowledge of birds, and the books published
on them, to a level of excellence scarcely conceived half a century ago when the
first volume of Witherby’s Handbook of British birds was published.

Many quality publishers have played their part in these advances, through careful
and conscientious production and publication of books to the highest standards of
the day. Each new book seeks to include the latest research and information, so
regular reference to museum specimens and libraries is a continuing need. For
example, while many different illustrations of, say, gulls or warblers have been
published over the years, each new generation of illustrators has been able to
incorporate new information on the plumage details of newly recognised taxonomic
groups or on the fine distinctions between the different age and sex classes. This all
advances our knowledge of species limits and field identification.

There will never be an end either to research on birds or to the need for new and
better illustrated books. Museums and their collections have a key role to play in
these advances, through the provision of resource material. In return, the work of
many authors and artists often helps curators to understand their collections better
and sometimes even to revise and refine the organisation and cataloguing of the
skins in their care.

Andrew S. Richford 247 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

The. natural history specimens assembled in the world’s museums represent a
heritage asset of outstanding importance. In a perfect world, this material would be
held as a free public resource, contributing to and benefitting from the work of scientists
and dedicated amateurs, as well as providing an educational resource for the wider
public. The material held in museum collections also has an international context. It
has commonly been gathered and donated by generations of fieldworkers, of many
nationalities, operating all over the world, often with the explicit requirement that this
material is for the use and edification of the public. Many specimens have been donated
by the great philanthropists of the past. These collections are precious, important and
in many cases simply irreplaceable—a historic and living treasure trove. In past
centuries the main purpose of natural history museums was to catalogue the world’s
Species; now they are also used to describe evolutionary change and the patterns of
biodiversity, and to inform our efforts at conservation in a changing world.

But a trend is appearing that threatens the traditional constructive synergies.
Increasingly, the funding necessary to maintain and curate museum collections is in
short supply. In the U.K. in particular, budgets are dwindling and museums are
being forced by their managers to find funds on their own account. A ‘user pays’
philosophy is starting to spread, leading to such things as entrance charges to the
public and ‘bench fees’ for any users of skin collections, including bird artists, who
are considered to be likely to benefit commercially as a consequence. Currently this
tendency appears to be rare in Europe and only in its infancy in the U.S.A.; artists
may be charged for actual expenses incurred in sorting or posting specimens, but
not for time spent working in the collections. In many museums in the U.K., however,
artists are now routinely charged for merely referring to skins at the museum bench.
Museum curators and managers seem generally unhappy with the need to make
such charges, but are left with little option in the face of reduced funding and
management pressure from above.

Publishers, meanwhile, are always squeezed on the one hand by costs and on the
other by market price resistance. A lavishly illustrated field guide often costs less
than one of a pair of training shoes, yet is certainly far more expensive to produce.
Publishing is a low-margin business. The list price charged for a book must cover
fees and royalties to authors and artists, direct costs of copy-editing, origination,
printing and binding, booksellers’ and agents’ discounts, and the publisher’s overheads
of staffing, marketing, warehousing and distribution as well as returning a working
profit. This is a huge claim on the price of an average field guide or reference
handbook. Bird books also ofen have large numbers of colour illustrations and are
relatively expensive to produce: printing costs are high, despite constant
improvements in the industry, and artists must of course be paid a living wage to
produce the copious original artwork that illustrates new and better books. Yet many
high-quality bird books are still quite specialist in nature, and print runs are relatively
modest when compared to high-street bestsellers. Hence the cost of producing them
must somehow be borne by a modest customer base.

Extra costs always increase the price of books. When bench fees are charged,
artists usually cannot afford to absorb them within their usual prices, and must pass

Andrew S. Richford 248 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

the charge on to the publishers, who must in turn pass these costs on to readers
through the book price. Hence the ‘user pays’ regime ultimately identifies the reader
as the user. Perhaps this is as it should be in a capitalist society; but in my view the
bench fee system engenders more evils than solutions. Although the fees that are
charged are currently moderate, and seem to be charged only to artists, not to authors,
they are a growing pressure on the costs of book preparation and hence book price.
But being small, how much do they really address the financial difficulties of
museums? How much of the charge is left after administration costs? It is easy to
think that they are more to do with the philosophy of museum funding and access
than the reality of solving the funding problem. But what if charging becomes more
widespread, or charges increase so as to really generate worthwhile income, or authors
are also charged for access to library and specimen resources? The impact on
publishing and the price of books would be considerable. Books would really rise in
price. Specialist books for smaller markets—arguably including some of the most
valuable to the research community—would not be published at all if the price to be
charged exceeds the publisher’s expectation of what the market can realistically
bear. Fewer, more expensive books will represent a loss to the scientific, museum
and lay communities alike. Alternatively, artists and publishers will be forced to
shun museums which make charges, to the detriment of the quality of the books they
produce. Some of these things are already happening. Field guide prices in
particular—books where the illustration costs are a major factor—are becoming
really quite expensive and some U.K. publishers no longer use the Natural History
Museum collections at Tring.

Ideology regarding the function of museums and the right of public access to
their resources comes head to head with economic reality, and each will have their
own attitude to the dilemma. I believe that museums should hold fast to the principle
that they are the guardians of a common world heritage as well as the providers of
the fruits of that heritage. Those who preside over the governance and funding of
museums should understand that the provision of free access to their collections is a
public and moral duty, that books produced with reference to museum collections
add to the common good, and that such books feed back directly into the work of
museum curators. By contrast, publishing runs to business rules and can only be
expected to work in this way. Competition will manage the problem of sensible
price maintainance if costs can be controlled. Publishers can help by continuing to
do good business by providing good books. They can help museums justify free
provision of resources by making fulsome acknowledgement of museum help, by
showing museum logos on title pages, and by providing a generous allowance of
complementary books for museum libraries. Museums would thereby gain kudos
and standing by participating in publishing projects as partners in an educational
and research activity—an extension of the service to the public which lies at the
heart of their guiding philosophy.

Address: Andrew S. Richford, 47 Overn Crescent, Buckingham MK18 1LY, UK

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

Martin W. Woodcock 249 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Some reflections on the use of skins in
bird illustration

by Martin W. Woodcock

The last fifty years have seen a huge increase in the use made by bird illustrators of
museum skin collections. This has been almost exclusively due to the proliferation
of textbooks and field guides to the birds of many parts of the world, using ever
more comprehensive illustration coverage. Illustrators are obliged to refer to study
skins for species they have never seen in the wild, and for information on intraspecific
plumage variation owing to racial differences, gender, age, moult and/or feather-
wear factors.

It is important for the artist using museum material to be aware of the information
he or she can actually glean from skins, for this avenue of research is by no means
the only one available, and indeed has to be amplified by other techniques (although
these are outside the scope of this paper).

Many large museum collections have a wide (if mostly not comprehensive) range
of species preserved as study skins. In some cases there are numerous examples of
each species, from which one may select birds of different ages and sexes, and those
collected in different geographical locations, showing subspecific variation. The
opportunity to lay out different examples of birds, side by side on the museum bench,
is of enormous value. Much present bird illustration would have been virtually
impossible in the absence of this ability. However advanced field techniques
become—1in the way of optical equipment, netting birds, electronic images and other
means—and however detailed a study can be made of an individual bird in the field,
only the museum collection can provide actual and close comparison between
different age groups, subspecies and so on.

Critical examination of skins can be used for information on exact plumage
colouration and markings (subject to drawbacks discussed below), on comparative
sizes and shapes of bill and feet, precise measurements of some features, and general
morphological aspects such as an idea (necessarily approximate owing to differing
styles of preservation) of body size, wing and tail shape and length. In a good
collection, this can be done to compare a series of skins both for subspecific
differences and for changes due to ageing, moult or feather wear. These factors
receive an increasing coverage in modern bird books but were, with a few important
exceptions, hardly covered at all in books published up to around the middle of the
twentieth century. It is worth noting that, with the advent of sophisticated optical
equipment and advanced field techniques, data observable on wild birds can be
confirmed on museum skins, and vice versa.

It will, of course, be clear to anyone contemplating referring to study skins in
order to make representations of live birds, that in no way can the skin give a
dependable idea of the appearance of a bird in life. This is particularly important to
acknowledge in terms of the phenomenon known as ‘jizz’, that is, such aspects as

Martin W. Woodcock 250 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

stance, usual positions of wings and tail, bulk or slenderness, and so forth. However,
there are many other problems which arise from using museum material of which
the illustrator has to be aware. Most obviously, a skin cannot be pulled around in
order, for instance, to stretch the wings out (in some museums this particular problem
has been addressed by preparing a skin with one wing outstretched, but this has
serious implications for storage). The ability or opportunity to handle freshly dead
birds immediately shows the disadvantage of a cabinet skin in this respect.

To continue with comparisons with a freshly dead bird, the cabinet skin, in the
process of being made up, inevitably loses some of the natural lay of the feathers,
and this can present quite specific problems in trying to assess how complicated
plumage patterns, such as those on nightjars, Caprimulgidae, and gamebirds,
Galliformes, appear in life. Also, techniques of preparation vary, and in some cases,
in order to achieve a neat skin, some feathering (such as on the sides of the body)
can be concealed. Features which may be very apparent in life, especially in small
birds, can easily be lost entirely or to an important degree. Furthermore, the dried
and shrunken legs and feet on a skin give very little idea of these features in life.
Where it occurs, bare skin colour around the eye may be a feature in the field, but
mostly fades in the skin, and colours of bill, legs and feet usually undergo major
post-mortem change. These colours, together with that of the iris, are sometimes
recorded on the collector’s label, but older skins usually lack this information, and
the terms used to describe colours are evidently subjective, so that one may be left
having to interpret such names as ‘plum’, ‘amethyst’ and ‘lake-red’ (see below re
colour guides).

A more insidious problem derives from post-mortem changes in plumage
colouration, which can result from various causes. Fading occurs over a period of
time, and foxing, where green or olive hues tend to go brown or even reddish-brown,
may be apparent when a skin is compared with fresh material. This subject was
discussed by Wagstaffe & Williamson (1947) when they drew attention to noticeable
disparities in colouration in a range of species—including Ringed Plover Charadrius
hiaticula, Hooded Crow Corvus (corone) cornix, Song Thrush Turdus philomelos
and Bullfinch Pyrrhula pyrrhula—depending on whether they were freshly dead or
conserved as skins over long periods. In old skins of the Chough Pyrrhocorax
pyrrhocorax, for instance, the purple in the body plumage intensifies substantially;
illustrations made from such skins may be misleading as a result, and this obviously
has a bearing on illustrations purporting to show subtle variation in plumages of
similar taxa. Other factors affecting colouration include prolonged exposure of fresh
skins to sunlight, and chemicals used in skin preparation. Mercuric chloride, for
instance, stains white feathers black, a phenomenon I have noted around the feet of
a sandgrouse specimen. The problem is compounded by the fact that even in closely
related species fading, for instance of yellow, may occur in one species but not in
the other.

This whole problem highlights the lack of a reliable and easy-to-use colour guide,
with a consistent nomenclature, which would be immensely useful in making

Martin W Woodcock Dn Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

definitive descriptions of plumage and soft-part colours in trapped or freshly collected
birds. Such guides as have been attempted, going back to John Gould in 1839, are
unsatisfactory for various reasons. In Ridgway’s (1912) Color standards and color
nomenclature, for instance, over 1,000 colour terms are used, but unfortunately the
swatches showing these colours have faded since publication, the degree of change
differing even between different copies of the book. The Villalobos Atlas (1947)
uses over 7,000 colour swatches (far too many for most people to discriminate
between) but at the other extreme, the most recent work by Smithe (1975) shows
only 86 colours, although the text is informative; Pickford (1970) urged use of the
Munsell scheme, developed in 1905, which has as many as 1,450 divisions based on
‘hue’, ‘value’ and ‘chroma’. It should not, however, be impossible to produce a
highly serviceable guide nowadays, with the benefit of modern technology.

An absolutely integral item of information that goes (or should go) with every
skin is, of course, the collector’s label, identifying the species, sex, locality of
collection and so forth. There are, however, various pitfalls in using the information
on labels (outlined in Rasmussen & Prys-Jones 2003, this issue). Apart from the
documentation of colours in life, mentioned above (but often hard to squeeze onto
the standard museum label when the data are complex to any degree), the specimen
may have been incorrectly sexed or even entirely misattributed to species, and there
are many problems in interpreting the actual locality (which commonly bears on the
discrimination of subspecific characters). There is also the challenge, particularly to
any user unfamiliar with taxonomy, of outmoded nomenclature, which commonly
survives on labels.

In ideal situations, authors and artists should work closely together to ensure
accurate artwork. In my experience, this happens too infrequently, for various reasons.
Some authors are uninterested in artwork, some feel unable criticise it, while others
are impossibly critical. Some authors and experts, on the other hand, can come up
with very helpful and informed criticism. In most cases, it is just too difficult to get
people together at the museum bench to look through all the relevant skins against
the illustrations. In comprehensive works, this would be an extremely time-consuming
task, on top of the time already spent in preparing the text and plates. However, the
high quality nowadays of colour photocopies means that illustrators can at least
circulate copies of their work for checking and comments.

Apart from the specific issues of working with skins, there are some points worth
noting in the wider context of bird illustrators and museum collections. In these
days of extensively illustrated textbooks on birds from all parts of the world, those
institutions with the most comprehensive collections are becoming more and more
essential for illustrators, and the collections in them subject to ever more handling.
There are, in fact, rather a small number of museums with really good worldwide
collections, mostly in the eastern United States and north-west Europe, so that
illustrators living outside these areas have problems of access; costs must be incurred
either by them or by their publishers. Also to be considered is the fairly recent

Martin W. Woodcock Sy Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

imposition of charges for artists working in some collections. This may be justifiable
in the light of the work being done for commercial reasons rather than scientific
research (although it is at least arguable that the creation of accurate images of
species, whether commercial or not, is a form of science—after all, some species
were described on the basis of their illustration—and is certainly a contribution to
the ability of fieldworkers, often conducting scientific surveys, to report with
confidence on their observations). However, these costs are passed on by publishers
to the consumer in the final price of the book (see Richford 2003, this issue), and it
is already evident that prices of some important reference works have drifted well
beyond the reach of many would-be purchasers in poorer parts of the world. This
circumstance reduces their contribution to the dissemination of ornithological
knowledge.

The ever-increasing use of skin collections by researchers from all over the world,
and the consequent frequent handling of skins, poses a curatorial conservation
problem. Damage to skins includes broken or missing legs, and wings or heads
falling off. Labels also become detached when tied loose or to a leg that falls off—
and why are not workers handling valuable and indeed irreplaceable skins not required
to wear surgical gloves (or at least required to wash their hands thoroughly before
each session at a bench)? When illustrators in particular are concerned, it is possible
that the imposition of charges and publishers’ deadlines may lead to more hurried
work, which also is not conducive to maintaining collections in the best condition.

References:

Pickford, K. D. (1970) Colour definition. bis 112: 117.

Rasmussen, P. C. & Prys-Jones, R. P. (2003) History vs mystery: the reliability of museum specimen
data. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 123A: 66-94.

Richford, A. S. (2003) Museum collections as a publisher’s resource. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 123A: 246-
248.

Ridgway, R. (1912) Color standards and color nomenclature. Washington, D.C.

Smithe, F. (1975) The naturalist’s color guide. American Museum of Natural History, New York.

Villalobos-Dominguez, C. & Villalobos, J. (1947) Atlas de los colores. Libreria E] Ateneo Editorial,
Buenos Aires.

Wagstaffe, R. & Williamson, K. (1947) Cabinet colour-changes in bird-skins and their bearing on racial
segregation. Brit. Birds 40: 322-325.

Address: Martin W. Woodcock, Furlongs, Long Lane, Wiveton, Holt, Norfolk NR25 7DD, UK

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

C.S. Roselaar DD Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

An inventory of major
European bird collections

by C. S. Roselaar

Introduction

During a Round Table Discussion convened by Dr Walter Bock and Dr Henri Ouellet
at the X XI International Ornithological Congress in Vienna, 20—25 August 1994, a
number of staff members of European ornithological collections expressed the opinion
that more cooperation among them was desirable. Many museums suffer from
shrinking budgets, making improvement, maintenance, or even access to the
collections difficult. Maintaining the world’s biodiversity is of major concern among
biologists at the moment, and although this concern is also acknowledged by various
governments it has not resulted in any additional support for museum ornithology.

Bird collections form a rich source of biodiversity data. Taxonomic information
in regional and global handbooks can only be extracted from museum collections.
Morphometric data taken from skins of various populations are of importance for
unravelling migration patterns for instance. Population studies profit from collections
of specimens of known age and sex. Reference collections for identification and
training will always be needed, both for laymen (e.g. rarity committees) and scientists
(e.g. as help in enforcement of CITES and other national and international nature
conservation legislation, for the statistics of bird/aircraft collisions, archaeology,
and in ecological studies). Recently, bird skins or feathers have acquired additional
relevance as a source of DNA for phylogenetic and population studies. Biochemical
data have become a major source of phylogenetic information, from the level of
populations up to the level of phyla, but can only be interpreted with reference to
collections of entire organisms.

The main aims of this inventory are to facilitate the exchange of data among bird
staff of European museums and to provide information to potential users of bird
collections about the material available and their whereabouts. The information on
which this inventory is based was obtained by sending questionnaires to those major
European ornithological collections of which the addresses could be found. In all,
190 questionnaires were distributed, of which 160 were returned. For c.100 other
collections presented here data derive from websites, country lists, various literature
(e.g. Stresemann 1951, Gebhardt 1964-1974, Mearns & Mearns 1998), or from
colleagues in nearby museums. The data given below are mostly the words of the
various respondents, and therefore vary somewhat in thoroughness. Under the title
References it is explained that the citations are, with some editing, as supplied by
correspondents; however, it should also be noted that short references given in the
texts, usually without titles of the papers, are again as given by correspondents.

Minor collections (fewer than c.4,000 study skins or fewer than 5,000 bird items)
as well as collections for which only limited data were available (e.g. because the

C.S. Roselaar 254 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

curators did not respond to the questionnnaire) are included in the ‘B-list’. This list
is likely to contain some more important collections, and a few major collections
may have been overlooked entirely. Readers are kindly requested to send the author
details of any collection they know of, or other data omitted from the main list
(although, for reasons of space, no collections with fewer than c.100 well-labelled
bird items will be included). These may then be included in a next version of this
inventory (e.g. an updated electronic one). I offer my apologies for any omissions
from my side. Note that this inventory was mainly based on the answers of the
respondents and did not include literature research; when checking the literature
references supplied by the various respondents, further details on the included
collections and others are likely to be found.

Appendix | lists museums by country. Appendix 2 assigns major collectors to
the museum to which their collections (largely) went. Appendix 3 tabulates the top
129 European museums in terms of size of collection, with equivalent non-European
museums for comparison.

The ‘A-list’, based largely on the questionnaires received

The data presented for the 109 bird collections on the A-list follow the structure of
the questionnaire. Entries are listed alphabetically by cities, with preferred acronym
added (occasionally deviating from that proposed in Leviton et al. 1985). The first
four paragraphs below the heading of each collection contain present-day addresses
and details of the staff involved with birds. The date on which the questionnaire was
received or updated is added: the details as shown were valid at least on that date.
The next four paragraphs present some details on the history of the collection,
including some of the more important contributors; in the list of important collections
represented, those of staff members mentioned in the previous paragraph are not
repeated. The last five paragraphs give some details on the present-day contents of
the collection, including the number of skins represented and specialities.

The A-list includes data from collections which include c.4,000 or more bird
skins for scientific study, or, for those which have less, have important numbers of
skeletons, anatomical specimens or other bird items. Please note that the size of a
collection (expressed in number of bird items available) is not the only value to
judge its importance: the presence of type specimens, skins or mounts of rare or
extinct birds, or of skins from areas not or poorly covered by other museums, may
make small collections particularly noteworthy.

Note that the ‘Tring collection’ mentioned in much of the older literature refers
to the private collection of Lord Rothschild, not to the present-day BMNH (now
Natural History Museum) collection in Tring (which was in London up to 1972);
Lord Rothschild’s collection (the largest private collection ever gathered, with
280,000 skins) was sold to the American Museum of Natural History in New York
int ONE

C.S. Roselaar

Altenburg (MMA)

Info from: N. Héser, 25 Jul 1996

address Naturkundliches Museum Mauritianum,
Postfach 1644, D-04590 Altenburg, Germany
(visitors address: ParkstraBe 1, D-04600
Altenburg)

telephone and fax #-49-3447-2589

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Norbert
Hoser (head), Mike Jessat (coll. manager)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 1 coll. manager

brief history Founded in 1817 by the
Naturforschende Gesellschaft des Osterlandes
zu Altenburg; the coll. came to government of
Thiiringen in 1945.

references to history, collections, or types —

important past bird staff C. L. Brehm, Hugo
Hildebrandt

important collections come from —

approx. nr. of bird skins 3,600 (1,300 species)

other bird items 100 skeletons, 200 birds in
alcohol, 200 egg sets, 10,000 biometrical data
of ringed birds

approx. recent annual increase in skins 40,
from local skins, made by private taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Germany,
East Africa, Australia

card or computer system present all skins on
card, computer in preparation

Amsterdam (ZMA)

Info from: J. Wattel, 19 Sep 1994, updated by T.
Prins, 10 Nov 2001

address Zodlogisch Museum, University of
Amsterdam, Postbus 94766, NL-1090 GT
Amsterdam, The Netherlands (visitors address:
Mauritskade 61)

telephone #-3 1-20-525-5423/5422, fax #-31-20-
525-7238, e-mail tprins @science.uva.nl,
roselaar @science.uva.nl

staff responsible for bird coll. Tineke Prins,
Drs Cees S. Roselaar

total staff of bird dept. 1 coll. manager, |
information officer, | taxidermist

brief history Founded in 1838 by the Royal
Zoological Society ‘Natura Artis Magistra’;
sold to the University of Amsterdam in the
1930s; the real increase in the coll. did not start
until the arrival of the first curator of birds in
1945

references to history, collections, or types
Roselaar (1990), Prins (1992), Roselaar &
Prins (2000)

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

important past bird staff Max Weber, Max
Fiirbringer, L. F. de Beaufort, Karel H. Voous,
Jan Wattel

important collections come from O. Bamberg,
W. Barentsz Exped. (W. Bierman, H. van der
Lee), L. P. le Cosquino de Bussy, G. B.
Dinesen, R. von Dombrowski, A. Eriks (eggs),
J. A. van Franeker, G. A. Frank, H. Griin, G A.
L.de Haan, A. F. C. A. van Heyst, D. S. Hoedt,
C. GB. ten Kate, V. A. Khakhloy, J. P.
Kleiweg de Zwaan, J. de Korte, A. Kovacs, J.
Laenen, H. Baron Loudon, J. G. van Marle, G.
A. Mavromonstakis, S. C. J. W. van
Musschenbroek, C. J. Neijssel (eggs), C.
Ragioneri, E. Schmitz, J. A. Sillem, W. GN.
van der Sleen, R. C. E. G. J. Baron Snouckaert
van Schauburg, R. Tancré, R. von Thanner, C.
Waldeck, C. J. M. Wertheim

approx. nr. of bird skins 53,000 (c. 4,000
species)

other bird items 1,000 skeletons, 500 in
alcohol, 5,000 egg sets, 8,000 spread wings,
6,000 microscopic feather preparations, 30,000
system cards with biometrics of birds received
dead but not retained in coll.

approx. recent annual increase in skins 150,
mainly local birds skinned by own taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Netherlands,
Palearctic, Indonesia, Netherlands’ Antilles;
petrels, waders, skuas, pigeons, birds-of-prey,
owls, passerines; c.150 types, c.20 extinct birds

card or computer system present 80% of skins
on card, 50% on computer

Athens/Athinai (ZMUA)

Info from: A. Legakis, 07 Feb 1995

address Zoological Museum, Dept. of Biology,
University of Athens, Panepistimioupolis
(Kouponia), GR-15784, Athens-621, Greece

telephone #-30-1-7284609 or 7293993, fax #-
30-1-7284604, e-mail
alegakis @atlas.uoa.ariadne-t.gr

staff responsible for bird coll. Prof. Dr A.
Legakis, G. Handrinos (volunteer associate)

total staff of bird dept. 0

brief history Founded 1835 by the Natural
History Society of Athens; became part of the
University of Athens in 1858

references to history, collections, or types
Lindermayer (1840), Kriiper (1862)

important past bird staff Th. Kriiper, A.
Kanellis

C.S. Roselaar

important collections come from L. & G.
Schrader

approx. nr. of bird skins 2,500 (2,000 species)

other bird items a few skeletons, 500 eggs, 100
nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 5,
from donations

bird skin collection specialised in Greece,
Balkans

card or computer system present none

Barcelona (MZBA)
Info from: E. Garcia, 25 Oct 1996
address Museu de Zoologia de Barcelona, Apt.

593, E-08080 Barcelona, Spain (visitors adress:

Parc de la Ciutadella, Pg. Picasso s/n, E-08003
Barcelona)

telephone #-34-3-319-6912, or -501, fax #-34-
3-3 10-4999

staff responsible for bird coll. Eulalia Garcia
Franquesa, Francesc Uribe

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 1 coll. manager,

1 taxidermist

brief history Founded 1900; owned by the
Council of Barcelona

references to history, collections, or types —

important past bird staff Ignaci de Segarra

important collections come from Aguilar-
Amat, Doménech, De La Escalera, L. Gomez

approx. nr. of bird skins 7,000 incl. 1,000
mounts (400 species)

other bird items 1,332 skeletons, 10 in alcohol,
24 egg sets, 1,137 sound recordings

approx. recent annual increase in skins 30,
from local birds skinned by own taxidemist

bird skin collection specialised in Spain (esp.
Catalufia), Ecuador, Thailand, Equatorial
Guinea

card or computer system present all skins on
card, part on computer

Bardejov (SMB)

Info from: M. Hromada, 4 Feb 1999

address Sarisske Museum, Natural History
Dept., Radnicé nam. 13, 08501 Bardejov,
Slovakia

telephone 00421-935-4722630 fax 00421-935-
4724966 e-mail sarmuz @netlab.sk

staff responsible for bird coll. Tomas Jaszay
(chief Nat. Hist. Dept.)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 1 coll. manager,
2 others (for entire Nat. Hist. Dept.)

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

brief history Founded in 1956 by Tibor Weisz,
government-owned

references to history, collections, or types
none

important past bird staff Tibor Weisz, Martin
Hromada

important collections come from none

approx. nr. of bird skins 6,000 (incl c.900
mounts)

other bird items 3,550 sterna, 800 egg sets,
many bird parasites and pellets of owls, a few
skeletons, birds in alcohol, and nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 30

bird skin collection specialised in Carpathians,
Baltic Sea, Black Sea, Cuba, Argentina

card or computer system present All birds on
card (including data on measurements etc.),
over 500 skins from former Czechoslovakia on
computer

Basel (NMBA)

Info from: Raffael Winkler, 17 Jan 1995

address Naturhistorisches Museum, Postfach
1048, CH-4001 Basel, Switzerland (visitors
address: Augustinergasse 2)

telephone #-41-61-266-5500, fax #-41-61-266-
5546

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Raffael
Winkler (head)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 1 coll. manager,
0.5 taxidermist

brief history Founded 1830, when the even
older private coll. of H. Bernoulli came to the
government

references to history, collections, or types
Sarasin (1939)

important past bird staff F. Sarasin, Ernst
Sutter

important collections come from Th.
Andersen, W. Markl, M. Markl, G. Orcés, P.
Sarasin, G. Schneider

approx. nr. of bird skins 25,000 (3,500
species)

other bird items 1,800 skeletons, 3,300 skulls,
many in alcohol

approx. recent annual increase in skins 150,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Europe

card or computer system present all skins on
card, 10% on computer

C.S. Roselaar

Belgrade/Beograd (NHMBEO)

Info from: Milica Ivovic, 14 Jan 2000

address Natural History Museum, Njegoseva
51, P.O. Box 401, 11000 Beograd, Yugoslavia

telephone #-38 1-11-3442 147, fax #-381-11-
3442 265, e-mail animig @net.yu

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Milica
Ivovic (curator of birds), Dr Vaslav Vasic
(director, bird specialist)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, | taxidermist

brief history Founded 1895, belongs to the
government

references to history, collections, or types See
J. Rasajski (1982) Glasnik prir. Muz. Beogr.
(Ser. B) 37, 107-125 (egg catalogue)

important past bird staff S. D. Matvejev

important collections come from O. Reiser

approx. nr. of bird skins 5,000 (350 species)

other bird items 90 skeletons, 150 birds in
spirits, many egg sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins 50,
from expeditions, buyings, donations, local
birds skinned by own taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Serbia,
former Yugoslavia, Balkan area generally (the
coll. formed the base for the monographs on
Yugoslavian birds of Matvejev & Vasic)

card or computer system present partly on
card

Bergen (ZMBN)

Info from: I. Byrkjedal, 19 Jan 1995, updated 19
Nov 1999

address Zoologisk Museum, Vertebrate Section,
University of Bergen, Muséplass 3, N-5007
Bergen, Norway

telephone #-47-55-212902/ 05, fax #-47-55-
321153, e-mail ingvar.byrkjedal@ zmb.uib.no,
web-site http://www.zoo.uib.no/systematikk/
samlinger/eng/birds

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Ingvar
Byrkjedal, Gunnar Langhelle

total staff of bird dept. | head, 1 taxidermist

brief history Founded 1825 as Bergens
Museum (a general museum); the first
vertebrate curator, S. Johnsen, was appointed
1913. The coll. came to the University of
Bergen when the latter was founded in 1948

references to history, collections, or types —

important past bird staff S. Johnsen, J. F.
Willgohs

important collections come from —

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

approx. nr. of bird skins 6,194 (688 species)

other bird items 144 in alcohol, 2,554 egg sets,
1,254 incomplete skeletons, 8,000 nest cards, 1
type specimen; also 3,400 recent complete
skeletons, but in separate archaeological
section with staff of 5

approx. recent annual increase in skins 200,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Western
Norway, Passer domesticus (c.1,000),
Tetraonidae, Falconiformes, etc.

card or computer system present all skins on
card and on computer

Berlin (ZMB or ISZ)

Info from: B. Stephan, 26 Nov 1996; S. Frahnert,

13 Nov 1999

address Museum fiir Naturkunde, Zentralinstitut
der Humboldt-Universitat, Institut ftir
Systematische Zoologie, Invalidenstrasse 43,
D-10115 Berlin, Germany

telephone #-49-30-2093-8512, fax #-49-30-
2093-8528, e-mail
sylke.frahnert @rz.hu.berlin.de

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Sylke
Frahnert, Jiirgen Fiebig, Frank Steinheimer

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 1 taxidermist

brief history Founded 1810 together with the
university. Part of the Humboldt-University

references to history, collections, or types
Stresemann (1954), Mauersberger (1988),
Neumann & Mauersberger (1990)

important past bird staff J. C. Graf von
Hoffmansegg, J. C. W. Illiger, H. Lichtenstein,
F. Deppe, J. L. Cabanis, A. Reichenow, H.
Schalow, P. Matschie, E. Hartert, O. Neumann,
H. Grote, G. Krause, R. Bohm, E. Hesse, W. K.
H. Peters, E. Stresemann, G. Mauersberger, B.
Stephan

important collections come from W. Beick, R.
A. Berger, R. Bohm, Maison Bouvier, W.
Bullock coll./Mus. Leverianum (see Wien/
Vienna), J. Biirgers, C. Baron von der Decken,
F. Deppe, C. G. Ehrenberg, Emin Pascha, C.
Euler, E. K Eversmann, F. von Faber, O. Finsch,
G. A. Fischer, G. W. Freirei8, F. Fiilleborn, F.
Grabowsky, R. Grauer, J. Gundlach, F.
Heilfurth, G. Heinrich, O. Heinroth, W.
Hemprich & C. G Ehrenberg, J. M.
Hildebrandt, C. Hilgert, Exp. J. Holderer, C.
Hiiesker, C. Hunstein, H. von Ihering (eggs), A.
Kaiser, F. H. von Kittlitz, T. Kleinschmidt, A. C.
& L. Koch, L. Krebs, J. S. Kubary, H. Ktihn, G.

C.S. Roselaar

H. von Langsdorff, R. Mell, J. J. Menden, A.
Nehrkorn (20,000 eggs), P. S. Pallas, W. Peters,
C. C. Platen, V. von Plessen, F. W. Riggenbach,
K. Roehl, E. Riippell, E. Schafer, R.
Schomburgk, H. Schubotz, A. Schultze, F.
Sellow, S. S. Sin, G Stein, A. von Treskow
(eggs), Voy. Gazelle, H. Weigold, E.Weiske, G.
Zenker, R. Zimmermann

approx. nr. of bird skins 135,000 (‘nearly all
known species represented’ )

other bird items 7,000 mounts, 4,000 skeletons,

5,000 in alcohol, 55,000 eggs, 1,500 nests;
2,900 type specimens

approx. recent annual increase in skins 100—
400, from local birds skinned by own
taxidermist, birds obtained on expeditions, and
donations

bird skin collection specialised in worldwide
(but especially China, Mongolia, Korea,
Burma, New Guinea, Afrotropics, Central &
South America, Kerguelen, etc.); virtually all
families represented

card or computer system present all skeletons
and part of egg coll. on card, no skins; alcohol
specimens on computer

Bern (NMBE)

Info from: M. Giintert, 25 Apr 1997, updated 18
Dec 1997

address Naturhistorisches Museum Bern,
Bernastrabe 15, CH-3005 Bern, Switzerland

telephone #-41-31-350-7222, fax #-41-31-350-
7499, e-mail guentert@nmbe.unibe.ch

staff responsible for bird coll. Prof. Dr Marcel
Giintert (director, also responsible for bird
coll.)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head and some
technicians and taxidermists (for the entire
vertebrate coll.)

brief history Founded 1802 when the coll. of
the Rev. Daniel Spriingli was donated to the
municipality after his death. Still owned by the
municipality of the Burghers of Bern

references to history, collections, or types
Meisner (1824), Giintert et al. (1993)

important past bird staff Friedrich Meisner,
Theophil Studer, Emil August Goeldi

important collections come from E. A. Goeldi,
J. Gould, J. & P. Henrici (eggs), T. J. Kriiper,
Gilbert Pochelon (eggs), W. Volz

approx. nr. of bird skins 13,200, incl. mounts

other bird items 1,200 skeletons & skulls, 100
in alcohol, 8,550 egg sets, 410 nests

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

approx. recent annual increase in skins ?

bird skin collection specialised in Switzerland,
Brazil (Goeldi coll., 3,000 skins)

card or computer system present Skin coll.
now being computerised, but not quite ready
by late 2002. See http://www-nmbe.unibe.ch

Bologna (INFS)

Info from: N. Baccetti, 5 Apr 2000

address Museo dell’Istituto Nazionale per la
Fauna Selvatica, Via Ca’ Fornacetta 9, I-40064
Ozzano dell’Emilia (Bologna), Italia

telephone #-39-051-6512218, fax #-39-051-
796628, e-mail infsmuse @iperbole.bologna.it

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Nicola
Baccetti (head), Dr Lorenzo Serra (researcher).
Dr Marco Zenatello (coll. manager), Adriano
De Faveri (taxidermist)

total staff of bird dept. 4 (see above)

brief history Founded 1933 as a branch of the
Zoological Museum of the University of
Bologna; separated from the latter 1970. Older
colls. were recently obtained

references to history, collections, or types
Toschi (1969), Spagnesi (1993)

important past bird staff A. Ghigi, A. Toschi

important collections come from T. Pierotti, G.
Altobello, E. Garavini

approx. nr. of bird skins 8,700 (c.500 species),
excluding c.1,000 mounts

other bird items 150 skulls, 150 egg sets, a
large number of traditional traps and bird-
catching devices

approx. recent annual increase in skins 300,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist
and private professionals, buying of colls., and
donations

bird skin collection specialised in Italy
(7,000), Libya, Ethiopia, Somalia, East Africa,
Guatemala; Falconiformes, Charadriiformes,
Strigiformes, Ciconiiformes. Coll. includes
skins of several rarities (e.g. 31 Falco
biarmicus feldeggii, 6 Numenius tenuirostris)

card or computer system present W Palearctic
species on card and computer, others largely
unregistered

note The Museo di Zoologia of the Universita di
Bologna (MZUB) has a small bird coll. which
includes the Zaffagnini coll. of Italian birds
(dating around 1910) and a minor part of the
Altobello coll.; for a partial catalogue, see
Marini (1985). The Museo di Anatomia
Comparata of the same university has 376

C.S. Roselaar

anatomical specimens and (partial) skeletons of
161 bird species (Minelli & Taranto 2001)

Bolton (BOLMG)

Info from: Kathryn Berry, 23 Nov 2001

address Bolton Museums, Art Gallery, and
Aquarium, Le Mans Crescent, Bolton
(Manchester) BLI 1SE, U.K.

telephone #-44-1204-332197,
fax #-44-1204-332241, e-mail
natural.history @ bolton.gov.uk

staff responsible for bird coll. Ms Kathryn
Berry (Keeper of Zoology)

total staff of bird dept. | (see above, for all
zoology)

brief history Founded 1883, owned by local
government

references to history, collections, or types -

important past bird staff E. Gorton, A.
Hazelwood

important collections come from B. King, F. G
Lupton, A. L. W. Mayo, F. Nisbet, F. W.
Peaples, J. Pennington Thomasson, L. A.
Pownall, L. Price, J. Wallrow

approx. nr. of bird skins 5,000

other bird items 500 (partial) skeletons, 5,500
egg sets, 180 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins below
100

bird skin collection specialised in British Isles;
some India, Australia, etc.

card or computer system present all on card,
in process of being computerised

Bonn (ZFMK)

Info from: R. Van den Elzen, 29 Dec 1994,
updated G. Rheinwald, 21 Jan 2000

address Zoologisches Forschungsinstitut und
Museum Alexander Koenig, Adenauerallee
160, D-53113 Bonn, Germany

telephone #-49-228-9 122-230, fax #-49-228-
216979, e-mail r.elzen.zfmk @uni-bonn.de,
website http://www.uni-bonn.de/
museumkoenig

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Renate Van
den Elzen, Dr Karl-L. Schuchmann

total staff of bird sect. 2 scientists, | coll.
manager, 0.25 secretary, 0.25 librarian, up to 6
others (biol. candidates etc)

brief history Founded in 1875 as private coll. of
Alexander Koenig (who had c.21,600 skins at

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

his death); the coll. came to the German
government in 1940

references to history, collections, or types
Rheinwald & Van den Elzen (1984), Van den
Elzen (1986), Schifter & Van den Elzen (1986)

important past bird staff A. Koenig, O. le Roi,
A. von Jordans, Fr. Neubaur, J. Steinbacher, G.
Niethammer, H. E. Wolters, G. Rheinwald

important collections come from Th. Andersen
(see Britton 1978, 1981), O. Bamberg, M. O.
E. Baddeley, H. Bregulla, C. L. & A. E. Brehm
(3,000 skins, stored separately; remainder of
Brehm coll. in New York), P. A. Clancey, K.
Dernedde, M. Eisentraut, Ms M. E. Ferreira, A.
Fischer, C. Floericke, E. Fliikiger, C. Fritsche,
H. Geyr von Schweppenburg, H. Griin, J.
Haffer, M. Harms, W. Hartwig, F.
Haverschmidt, G. Heinrich, C. Hilgert, W.
Hoesch, D. von Holst, G. Hoy, L. von Huyn, A.
Kaiser, H. Kelm, O. Kleinschmidt coll. (over
10,000 skins, stored separately), Th.
Kleinschmidt, Maria Koepcke, J. Klapperich,
H. Kumerloeve, P. Kunkel, Kiinzel, J. Laenen,
R. Lossin, W. Makatsch, J. Martens, J. von
Miiller, A. von Nagy, O. Natorp, R. de Naurois,
G. Nikolaus, V. von Plessen, W. F. H.
Rosenberg, E. Schafer, G. Schiebel, W.
Schliiter, G. Schrader, H. Sick, P. Spaiz, R.
Tancré, R. von Thannner, J. Unger, R.
Vierthaler

approx. nr. of bird skins 76,000 incl. 3,500
mounts (5,000 species)

other bird items 2,000 skeletons (800 species),
500 in alcohol, 54—60,000 sets of eggs

approx. recent annual increase in skins 100
skins and 100 skeletons and birds in alcohol;
obtained by own taxidermy and by buying of
colls.

bird skin collection specialised in Afrotropics,
North Africa, Germany, South America, Spain,
Spitsbergen, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran,
Afghanistan; Trochilidae, Estrildidae,
Fringillidae, passerines

card or computer system present eggs,
skeletons, and spirit specimens all on
computer, 30% of skins on card, another 30%
on computer

Braunschweig (SNMBG)

Info from: G. Boenigk, 21 Oct 1996

address Staatliches Naturhistorisches Museum,
PockelstraBe 10, D-38106 Braunschweig,
Germany

C.S. Roselaar

telephone #-49-531-3914351, fax #-49-531-
3914370, e-mail Michaela.Forthuber@
snhm.Niedersachsen.de

staff responsible for bird coll. Michaela
Forthuber (taxidermist)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head (vacant), 2
taxidermists

brief history Founded in 1754 as private coll. of
Herzog Carl I von Braunschweig und
Liineburg; now owned by the government of
Niedersachsen

references to history, collections, or types
Hajmassy (1983), Hinkelmann & Heinze
(1990), Frisch et al. (1994)

important past bird staff J. H. Blasius, W.
Blasius, E. F. von Homeyer, Adolf
Kleinschmidt, G. Boenigk

important collections come from M. Bartels,
A. E. Brehm, C. L. Brehm, F. Dorries, O.
Finsch, F. Grabowsky, E. Hartert, E. F. von
Homeyer (8,000 skins), A. Keyserling, H.
Moschler, A. Nehrkorn (5,000 skins), C. C.
Platen, H. Raap, J. Riedel, H. von Rosenberg,
G. Schneider, R. Tancré

approx. nr. of bird skins 27,000 (3,700
species)

other bird items 2,800 skeletons, 400 egg sets,
700 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 30,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist
and donations

bird skin collection specialised in Palearctic,
Borneo, Sulawesi, etc.; 77 types

card or computer system present all skins on
card, none on computer; eggs catalogued (see
Hajmassy 1983)

Bremen (UMB)

Info from: H. Hohmann, 19 Aug 1997

address Uberseemuseum, Bahnhofplatz 13, D-
28195 Bremen, Germany

telephone #-49-421-171347/420438, e-mail
uem7 @uni-bremen.de

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Herbert
Hohmann (head of Natural History Dept.), Dr
Horst Braun (bird dept.), Klaus Wechsler
(taxidermist)

total staff of bird dept. 2

brief history Founded by the Bremen Natural
History Society, but no proper bird coll. before
the arrival of G. Hartlaub in 1840s

references to history, collections, or types
Duncker (1953)

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

important past bird staff Gustav Hartlaub,
Otto Finsch, G. A. Weber, Eberhard Focke, P.
Becker

important collections come from Abel,
Anchieta, Andersen, Andersson, T. Ayres,
Balfour, A. E. Brehm, Bryant, Capt. Bulger, F.
M. Chapman, Du Chaillu, Capt. Conrad, A.
Dietrich, H. Dohrn, Emin Pascha (= Emin Bey,
E. Schnitzer, A. Schnitzler), Fitzgerald, A.
Garrettt, Mus. J. C. Godeffroy (duplicates only;
see Hamburg), Graffe, Grayson, J. Gundlach, J.
von Haast, Capt. Heinsohn, Heuglin, Hoesch,
Kirk, Knipper, A. Krause, J. Kubary, Lahusen,
Meller, Monteiro, Joh. Natterer, Newton, H. S.
Pel, Capt. Peters, Pollen, E. Riebeck,
Rosenberg, O. Salvin, H. Schauinsland, B.
Schmacker, G. P. Schmacker, Schultze, Speke,
F. Stoliczka, H. T. Ussher, Verreaux, Vierthaler,
H. O. Wagner, Wahlberg, K. Wei8, Maximilian
Prinz zu Wied-Neuwied, Paul Herzog von
Wiirttemberg (c.9,000 skins), J. Xantus,
Zimmermann

approx. nr. of bird skins over 20,000 of which
c.25% mounted

other bird items ?

approx. recent annual increase in skins very
few

bird skin collection specialised in Afrotropics
(incl. Sao Tomé, Principe, Socotra,
Madagascar, Mauritius), Central and South
America, and from many Pacific islands (from
Hawaii to Pelew and Lord Howe); c.200 type
specimens; 3,313 specimens lost during World
War II, including some types

card or computer system present ?

Brighton (BMB)

Info from: Jeremy M. Adams, 23 Nov 2001

address Booth Museum of Natural History
(Brighton and Hove Council Museums), 194
Dyke Road, Brighton BN1 5AA, E Sussex,
UEKe

telephone #-44-1273-292782, fax #-44-1237-—
292778, e-mail boothmus@ pavilion.co.uk

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Gerald Legg
(curator of zoology), Jeremy M. Adams (ass.
curator natural sciences)

total staff of bird dept. 1

brief history Founded Brighton and Hove
Council

references to history, collections, or types
Griffith (undated), Knox (1998)

C.S. Roselaar

important past bird staff E. T. Booth, A. F.
Griffith, J. G Dalgliesh, H. Langston

important collections come from Major
Bingham Crabbe, L. A. Curtis-Edwards, W.
Borrer, P. Godman, G. M. Henry, A. W.
Johnson, F. W. Lucas, Lt Col. B. F. Lynn Allen,
T. J. Monk, J. B. Nichols, M. J. Nicoll, J. P.
Nunn, T. Parkin, Capt. F. H. Scovil, E. C.
Stuart Baker, G. Vick

approx. nr. of bird skins 10,000 (incl. 5,000
mounts)

other bird items 3,300 (partial) skeletons, 12
birds in spirits, c.60,000 eggs (33,334
catalogued), 262 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 40—
120

bird skin collection specialised in worldwide,
but mainly British

card or computer system present yes, but for
only half of the eggs

Bristol (BCMAG)

Info from: Tessa Ivison, 6 Dec 2001

address Bristol Museums and Art Gallery
Service, Queen’s Road, Bristol BS8 IRL, U.K.

telephone #-44-117-9223598, fax #-44-117-
9222047, e-mail tessa-ivison @ bristol-
city.gov.uk, ray-barnett @ bristol-city.gov.uk

staff responsible for bird coll. Tessa Ivison
(curator), Ray Barnett (coll. manager)

total staff of bird dept. 2 for all zoology (see
above)

brief history Founded in 1820s; owned by
Bristol City Council

references to history, collections, or types -

important past bird staff -

important collections come from Greville
Smyth, Stanley Lewis

approx. nr. of bird skins 7,500 (incl. 2,500
mounts)

other bird items 600 (partial) skeletons, 2,400
egg sets (6,500 eggs), 300 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins a few

bird skin collection specialised in SW England

card or computer system present most skins
on card, computerisation in progress

Brno (LMB)

Info from: Helena Sutorova, 6 Jan 2000

address Moravské Zemské Muzeum,
Zoologicesce Oddoleni, Zelny trh. 6, CZ-659
37 Brno, Czech Rep.

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

telephone #-420-(0)5-42321205, fax #-420-
(0)5-42212792, e-mail hsutorova@mzm.cz,
website http://www.mzm.cz/

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Miroslav
Sebela (head), Dr Helena Sutorova, Ing Vaclav
Prasek (curators)

total staff of bird dept. | head, 2 curators (see
above), 2 taxidermists, | librarian-secretary (all
for entire zool. dept.)

brief history Founded approx. 1816 as
Franzens-Museum, but includes some older
specimens from earlier colls.; government—
owned

references to history, collections, or types
Schramm (1886), Varga (1973), Kux (1977)

important past bird staff K. Absolon, E.
Hachler, J. Hala, V. Capek, F. Chorinsky, F.
Hejl, J. Karasek, Z. Kux, J. Mrazek, K.
Plachetka, K. Hudec, F. Balat, J. Talsky, J.
Tesar, E.S. Vraz, F. Zdobnitzky

important collections come from A. Schwab, J.
Seilern, A. Koch

approx. nr. of bird skins 8,000

other bird items ?

approx. recent annual increase in skins 50—
60, from own collecting expeditions, gifts, and
buying of colls.

bird skin collection specialised in Moravia,
former Czechoslovakia, Venezuela (see Bull.
Brit. Orn. (Els Wiss tOIEl92):

card or computer system present ?

note also existing are the Zoologicke Depozitar
of Budisov & Trebic (nearby Brno).

Brussels/Bruxelles (IRSNB/KBIN)

Info from: G. Lenglet, 06 Jan 1997

address Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles
de Belgique/ Koninklijk Belgisch Instituut
voor Natuurwetenschappen, 29 Rue Vautier/
Vautierstraat, B-1000 Bruxelles/Brussel,
Belgium

telephone #-32-2-6274349, fax #-32-2-6464433

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Georges
Lenglet (head of vertebrate dept; there is no
separate bird dept), Walter Roggeman

total staff of bird dept. for entire vertebr. dept:
1 head, | taxonomist, 4 technicians

brief history Founded 1846; owned by the
Belgian government

references to history, collections, or types —

important past bird staff B. Du Bus de
Gisignies, Baron de Selys-Longchamps, René
& Rudolf Verheyen, A. Prigogine, P. Devillers

C.S. Roselaar

important collections come from C. Dupond,
J. Laenen, and many others

approx. nr. of bird skins 71,295 (3,000
species)

other bird items many skeletons, many egg
sets, a few in alcohol, a few nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 100,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist
and donations

bird skin collection specialised in Belgium,
Germany, west Mediterranean countries, North
Africa, Iran, Himalaya, Central Africa

card or computer system present all skins on
card, none yet on computer

Bucharest/Bucuresti (GAMNH /

MGAB)

Info from: A. Petrescu, 24 Apr 1996

address Muzeul de Istorie Naturala / Museum
of Natural History “Grigore Antipa’, Soseaua
Kisseleff 1, 79744 Bucuresti, Romania

telephone ?, e-mail grantipa@pcnet.ro

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Angela
Petrescu

total staff of bird dept. 1 head

brief history Founded 1848 by Carol
Wallenstein; now part of the Academy of
Sciences of Romania

references to history, collections, or types
Marinescu et al. (1972, 1985), Papadopol &
Talpeanu (1986-1987)

important past bird staff R. von Dombrowski,
A. Papadopol, M. Talpeanu

important collections come from E. Holub, P.
J. Licherdopol, H. Mitrea

approx. nr. of bird skins 6,000 (2,000 species)

other bird items 1,000 skeletons, 100 in
alcohol, 1,200 egg sets, 250 nests, 11,600 food
samples

approx. recent annual increase in skins 50,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist,
expeditions, and exchanges

bird skin collection specialised in ‘many bird
families’

card or computer system present all skins on
card, none on computer

Budapest (HNHM)

Info from: A. Bankovics, 18 Jan 2000

address Magyar Nemzeti Muzeum/ Hungarian
Natural History Museum, Dept. of Zoology,
Baross utca 13, H-1088 Budapest, Hungary

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

telephone #-36-1- 2101075/ 2105044 fax #-36-
1-1171669 e-mail bankovic @zoo.nhmus.hu

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Attila
Bankovics

total staff of bird dept. | head, 1 taxidermist
(partly retired)

brief history Founded in the early 1800s, and
the bird coll. was one of the largest in Europe
in the early 1950s; however, it was destroyed
in 1956, though now gradually rebuilding. A
governmental museum

references to history, collections, or types A
catalogue in preparation

important past bird staff J. Frivaldszki, S. J.
Petényi, G. Madarasz, N. Vasvari, K. Warga, J.
Gerschik, L. Horvath

important collections come from G. Almasy, A.
Baldi, P. Beretzk, G. Csorba, C. Floericke, E.
Frivaldszky, A. Keve (= E. Kleiner), L. Kovats,
J. Xantus, etc, but colls. of many of these
destroyed in 1956

approx. nr. of bird skins 70,000 by 1956, when
destroyed; now 12,500 (1,200 species)

other bird items approx. 1,700 skeletons (200
species), 1,400 egg sets (250 species), 120
nests

recent annual increase in skin coll. 50, from
own expeditions, donations, local birds
skinnned by own taxidermist, etc.

bird skin collection specialised in now mainly
Hungary, Brazil, Tanzania, Argentina,
Australia, Vietnam, Korea, Mongolia; before
1956, many from Sudan, C & S America, C
Asia, New Guinea, etc.

card or computer system present Partly on
card; available on computer by 2001

Cambridge (CUMZ)

Info from: A. E. Friday, July 1996; update 19
Nov 1999 by M. Brooke

address University Museum of Zoology,
Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, U.K.

telephone #-44-1223-336659, fax #-44-1223-
336676, e-mail mb10005 @cus.cam.ac.uk

staff responsible for bird coll. Michael de L.
Brooke, Ray Symonds

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, | coll. manager

brief history Founded 1815 as part of
Cambridge University

references to history, collections, or types
Salvin (1882), Gadow (1910), Benson (1970—
ID, UD/2, IYO)

C.S. Roselaar

important past bird staff H. E. Strickland, H.
Gadow, Alfred Newton, O. Salvin, C. W.
Benson, W. H. Thorpe

important collections come from Capt. Askew,
E. Blyth, T. E. Buckley, Cambridge
Philosophical Society, J. S. Constancia, F. Day,
W. B. Farr, H. W. Feilden, P. H. Gosse, J.
Gould, F. H. H. Guillemard, J. H. Gurney, G.
D. Haviland, Jj. E. Hepburn, B. H. Hodgson, T.
Horsfield, C. Hose, A. von Hiigel, W. Jardine,
T. C. Jerdon, J. J. Lister, Edw. Newton, J.
Richardson, P. J. Selby, A. Smith, S. Stevens,
H. E., A., & N. C. Strickland coll. (c.6,000
skins), W. Swainson, L. W. Wiglesworth, S. B.
Wilson, J. Wolley egg coll. (see book Ootheca
Wolleyana)

approx. nr. of bird skins 40,000 (‘most species
represented’ )

other bird items 2,200 skeletons, some in
alcohol, c.8,000 egg sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins 20,
from donations

bird skin collection specialised in Western
Palearctic, South Africa, Madagascar,
Mauritius, Seychelles, India, Borneo,
Sulawesi, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii,
California, eastern North America, Jamaica,
Barbados, Central America; includes 104 skins
of extinct and endangered birds (31 Hawaii, 19
Malagasy region, 16 New Zealand area, 13
West Indies), c.620 types

card or computer system present all skeletons
on computer and website (zoo.cam.ac.uk); all
skins on card, most on computer (for internal
use only)

Cardiff (NMWC)

Info from: P. Howlett, 1996

address National Museum & Galeries of Wales,
Dept of BioSyB, Cathays Park, Cardiff CF10
3NP, Wales, U.K.

telephone #-44-1222-397951, fax #-44-1222-
239009

staff responsible for bird coll. Peter Howlett
(curator of vertebrates)

total staff of bird dept. | head, 1 coll. manager

brief history Founded in the 1880s by the
Trustees of the Cardiff Museum; now belongs
to the government

references to history, collections, or types
none

important past bird staff P. J. Morgan

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

important collections come from Hewitt,
McCouch

approx. nr. of bird skins 20,000 (2,000
species)

other bird items 500 skeletons, 8,000 egg sets,
200 nest, 40,000 biometrical data of ringed
birds

approx. recent annual increase in skins 150,
from local casualties

bird skin collection specialised in Wales,
Britain, Asia, Australasia

card or computer system present less than
50% of skins on card, none on computer

Coburg (NMC)

Info from: Dr Werner Korn, 28 Nov 2001

address Naturkunde-Museum Coburg, Park 6,
D-96450 Coburg, Germany

tel #-49-9561-808111, fax #-49-9561-808140, e-
mail info @naturkunde-museum-coburg.de

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Werner Korn
(head), Ulrike Neumann (taxidermist) (both for
all zoology)

total staff of bird dept. 2 (see above)

brief history Founded as private coll. in about
1830 by the later Duke Ernst II von Sachsen-
Coburg und Gotha and his brother Prince
Albert, openend to the public in 1844; now
belongs to the Landesstiftung Coburg (Stiftung
des Offentlichen Rechts).

references to history, collections, or types
Korn et al. (1993)

important past bird staff H. von Boetticher

important collections come from C. L. Brehm,
Th. von Heuglin, W. Baldamus, Ferdinand I of
Sachsen Coburg-Gotha (King of Bulgaria)

approx. nr. of bird skins 14,500 (of which
14,000 mounted)

other bird items 15 skeletons, 3,000 egg sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins highly
variable

bird skin collection specialised in worldwide,
but largely historical; many Trochilidae

card or computer system present most on
card, now revised and completed

Coimbra (MZCoimbra)

Info from: I. Carreira, 12 May 1997

address Museu de Historia Natural-Museu
Zoologico, Faculdade de Ciéncias e Tecnologia
da Universidade de Coimbra, Largo Marqués
de Pombal, 3000 Coimbra, Portugal

C.S. Roselaar

telephone #-35 1-39-34729, fax #-351-39-26798

staff responsible for bird coll. Dra Isabel
Machado Carreira

total staff of bird dept. 1 head

brief history Founded 1775 by Domingos
Vandelli; now part of Coimbra University

references to history, collections, or types
Themido (1933), Carreira (1984-1986, 1990)

important past bird staff Albino Giriddes,
Paulino de Oliveira, A. A. Themido

important collections come from Nelo
Beeyner, Luis de Carvalho, Teodoro J. Cruz,
King Pedro V, Lopez Vieire

approx. nr. of bird skins 3,104 (1,092 species)

other bird items 44 skeletons, 1,129 egg sets,
238 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins a few,
mainly donations

bird skin collection specialised in Portugal,
Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Sao Tomé,
Australia

card or computer system present all skins on
card, part on computer

Copenhagen (ZMUC)

Info from: J. Fjeldsa, 11 Jul 1996, and J. Fjeldsa
& C. Rahbek, 14 Nov 2001

address Zoologisk Museum, Kgbenhavns
Universitet, Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100
Kgbenhavn-@, Denmark

telephone #-45-3532-1023/ 1000, fax #-45-
3532-1010, e-mail jfjeldsaa@zmuc.ku.dk

staff responsible for bird coll. Prof. Dr Jon
Fjeldsa (curator-in-charge), Prof. Dr Carsten

Rahbek (curator), Jan Bolding Kristensen (coll.

manager)

total staff of bird dept. 2 scientists, | coll.
manager/taxidermist, 3 others (at staff of
ringing centre)

brief history Founded 1805 by J. Reinhardt;
now part of Copenhagen University/

references to history, collections, or types
Preuss & Aaris-S¢@rensen (1981)

important past bird staff J. Reinhardt, Herluf
Winge, P. Hald-Mortensen, F. Salomonsen

important collections come from T. Andersen,
W. Beick, J. Fjeldsa, Galathea Exp., K. & S.
Harold Olsen, A. M. Hemmingsen, Hans

Johansen, Hermann Johansen, N. Krabbe, P. W.

Lund & J. Reinhardt, H. Méschler, Noona Dan
Exp., A. M. Ollala, K. Paludan, E. L. Schigler,
J. Waterstradt

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

approx. nr. of bird skins 97,000, incl. 5,000
mounts (5,500 species)

other bird items 14,000 skeletons (1,100
species), 10,000 in alcohol (800 species), over
20,000 buffered tissue samples (over 2,000
species), 17,000 egg sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins 200-
300 (sometimes much more), from local birds
skinned by own taxidermist and own
expeditions

bird skin collection specialised in Denmark,
Greenland, Iceland, Fenno-Scandia, Brazil,
Ecuador, Beidaihe (China), West Siberia, Iran,
Afghanistan, Andes, south-west Pacific,
Liberia, Tanzania, and many more

card or computer system present 90% of skins
on card; tissue coll. on computer; South
American and Afrotropical coll. on computer
(incl. also many non-skin records)

Dresden (SMTD)

Info from: S. Eck, 18 Mar 1997

address Staatliches Museum fiir Tierkunde,
KOonigsbrticker Landstrasse 159, D-01109
Dresden, Germany

telephone #-49-35 1-8926-344

staff responsible for bird coll. Siegfried Eck

total staff of bird dept. 1 head

brief history Founded 1728, but the oldest bird
is now from 1810; part of the coll. was
destroyed in 1940-1945. Owned by the
government of Sachsen

references to history, collections, or types
Meise (1929), Eck (1970, 1982-1985)

important past bird staff H. G L.
Reichenbach, A. B. Meyer, L. Wiglesworth, A.
Jacobi, W. Meise, R. Reichert

important collections come from U. Bahrmann
(7,180 birds and many partial] skeletons), F.
Briiggemann, B. Berg, O. Burger, C. W.
Cursham, F. von Faber, A. P. Farafontov, G. A.
Frank, B. Geisler, H. Griin, H. Gude, W.
Gueinzius, J. W. B. Gunning, B. Hantzsch, F. P.
Heilfurth, H. W. Henshaw, M. Hinsche, C.
Hunstein, V. A. Khakhloy, J. Klapperich, O.
Kleinschmidt (coll. # 2; Ist in Bonn), Th.
Kriiper, J. Kubary, Kuschel (eggs), L. Laglaize,
W. Makatsch (eggs), McGregor, J. J. Menden,
H. Moschler, S. C. J. W. van Musschenbroek,
H. Palmer, C. & R. Ragioneri, C. Ribbe, J.
Riedel, C. Rolle, H. von Rosenberg, F. & P.
Sarasin, Schierbrandt, R. Schlegel, C.

C.S. Roselaar

Schneider, C. Wahnes, H. Weigold (Stotzner
Exp.), E. Weiske

approx. nr. of bird skins 70,000

other bird items many skeletons, a few in
alcohol, 60,000 eggs, many nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 150,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist
and by buying of colls.

bird skin collection specialised in Germany
(esp. east), Sweden, Iceland, Spain, Italy;
Indonesia (esp. Wallacea & New Guinea),
Philippines, China (Sichuan, Manchuria),
Hawaii, E & S Africa, West Siberia, etc.
Includes 31 skins and mounts and 19 eggs of
extinct birds (24 species)

card or computer system present part of skins
on card system (including birds destroyed
during the war)

Edinburgh (RSM/ NMSE)

Info from: R. McGowan 06 Feb 1995 & 16 Nov
2001, A. Kitchener 13 Nov 1999

address National Museums of Scotland, Royal
Museum of Scotland, Dept. Geology &
Zoology, Chambers Street, Edinburgh EH1
1JF, Scotland, U.K.

telephone (DDI) #-44-131-247-4240, fax #-44-
131-220-4819, e-mail a.kitchener@nms.ac.uk,
b.mcgowan @nms.ac.uk, rym@nms.ac.uk

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Andrew C.
Kitchener (head of birds and mammal dept,
mostly working on mammals), Robert (Bob)
McGowan (curator of birds)

total staff of bird dept. 0.3 head, 1 curator, 0.3
taxidermist

brief history Founded c.1815 by Edinburgh
University; both government-owned from
c.1854

references to history, collections, or types
Stenhouse (1924-1930), McGowan (1988),
Herman et al. (1990)

important past bird staff A. S. Clark, W. Eagle
Clark, J. H. Stenhouse, I. H. J. Lyster

important collections come from L. Adams, E.
Baxter, W. Bullock coll./Mus. Leverianum (see
Wien/Vienna), P. A. Clancey, L. Dufresne, T. P.
Dutton (eggs), Edinburg Univ. Museum, J. A.
Harvie-Brown, Annie C. Jackson, W. Jardine,
P. P. King, Parry, J. Richardson, L. Rintoul, J.
C. Ross, Scot. natl. Antarctic Exp., H.
Seebohm, W. Serle, A. Smith, R. A. L. & V. G
L. Van Someren, C. Sturt, R. G. Wardlaw-
Ramsay, H. Whistler, J. I. S. Whitaker

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

approx. nr. of bird skins 63,000 (6,000
species)

other bird items 4,000 skeletons, 33,000 egg
sets, a few in alcohol

approx. recent annual increase in skins 200,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist
and donations

bird skin collection specialised in “worldwide
(c.50% Palearctic), all families’. E.g. South
Africa, Tristan da Cunha, Australia, Arctic
regions

card or computer system present Only part of
egg coll. on computer

Exeter (EXEMS or RAMM)

Info from: David Bolton, 4 Dec 2001

address Royal Albert Memorial Museum and
Art Gallery, Queen Street, Exeter, U.K.

telephone #-44-1392-665358, fax #-44-1392-
665858, e-mail david.bolton @exeter.gov.uk.

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr David Bolton
(Curator of Natural History

total staff of bird dept. | (for all natural
sciences)

brief history Founded 1865 by Sir Stafford
Northcote as a memorial to Prince Albert,
opened 1868; now owned by local
governement (Exeter City Council)

references to history, collections, or types
Lowe (1939), Howes (1969)

important past bird staff W. S. M. D’ Urban, F.
W. L. Ross, R. P. Nicholls, C. Blackie, A. B.
Gay, W. P. Lowe

important collections come from R. H. Buller,
W. T. H. Chambers, Cumming, Major-General
Elliot, J. Gilbert, J. Gould, Hollis, Maxwell, Sir
Wilfred Peek, Pershouse, Rolle, Mrs H. N.
Rowan, General W. N. T. Smee, Sir John
Walrond

approx. nr. of bird skins 8,500 (mainly
mounted)

other bird items 200 (partial) skeletons, 50 in
liquid, 1,000 egg sets, 100 nests, 100s of
wings, heads, etc.

approx. recent annual increase in skins below
10

bird skin collection specialised in England (esp
Devon) and USA, but in general worldwide;
includes various types and an impressive
number of extinct species (e.g. 9 each of
Ectopistes migratorius and Conuropsis
carolinensis )

C.S. Roselaar

card or computer system present Part on card,
computerised database in progress

Florence/Firenze(MZUF)

Info from: A. Nistri, 26 Jul 1996

address Museo Zoologico de “La Specola’,
Sezione del Museo di Storia Naturale ,
Universita degli Studi di Firenze, Via Romana
17, I-50125 Firenze, Italia

telephone #-39-055-2288261, fax #-39-055-
225325, e-mail specola@specola.unifi.it

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Marta
Poggesi (coordinator of vertebrate section), Dr
Annamaria Nistri (coll. manager), Dr Anna
Altobelli, Fausto Barbagli, Dr Silke Jantra
(volunteer associates)

total staff of bird dept. | head, | coll. manager

brief history Founded 1775 as private coll. of
Grand Duke Peter Leopold of Lorraine; now
belongs to the University of Firenze

references to history, collections, or types
Giglioli (1886-1907), De Germiny (1936—
1938), Violani et al. (1984), Poggesi &
Buracchi (1990), Voipio (1990)

important past bird staff Carlo Passerini, E. H.

Giglioli

important collections come from Bessi,
Dainelli, Della Gherardesca, Giglioli coll.
(c.4300 skins), Griffoli, Ridolfi, T. Salvadori,
Tozzi, Voy. Magenta

approx. nr. of bird skins 18,000 (3,000
species)

other bird items 2,500 skeletons, 300 in
alcohol, 350 egg sets, 100 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 150,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist,
buying of colls., and donations

bird skin collection specialised in Italy, South
America, Ethiopia, Somalia, East Africa. Coll.
includes skins of 164 extinct and endangered
birds

card or computer system present skins partly
on card and computer

Frankfurt am Main (SMF for colls,

FIS in general)

Info from: D. S. Peters, 17 Jan 1995; update G.
Mayr 14 Nov 1999

address Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum
Senckenberg, Senckenberganlage 25, D-60325
Frankfurt am Main 1, Germany

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

telephone #-49-69-7542348, fax #-49-69-
746238, e-mail gmayr @sug.uni-frankfurt.de

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Gerald Mayr,
Dr D. Stefan Peters (retired, volunteer)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 1 secretary, 1-2
others

brief history Founded 1818-1821 by the
Senckenbergische Naturforschende
Gesellschaft (SNG), but based on older coll. of
B. Meyer; still privately owned by SNG

references to history, collections, or types
Hartert (1891), Hilgert (1908), Steinbacher
(1949, 1954, 1959, 1967), Mertens and
Steinbacher (1955), Peters (1992)

important past bird staff E. Riippell, P. J.
Cretzschmar, T. Erckel, A. Koch, O.
Kleinschmidt, E. Hartert, C. Hellmayr, H. von
Boetticher, J. Steinbacher

important collections come from O. Baron, F.
Behn, H. H. C. L. Graf von Berlepsch (donated
private coll. of 55,000 skins), G. Cherrie,
Dobel, H. Dohrn, C. F. von Erlanger (donated
c.12,600 birds), G. W. FreyreibB, G. & O.
Garlepp (4,000 birds), J. von Haast, B. Hagen,
W. Hoesch, A. von Homeyer (eggs), G. Hopke,
H. von lhering, J. Kalinowski, F. H. von
Kittlitz, A. Koch, K. L. Koch, J. S. Kubary, C.
F. H. von Ludwig, B. Meyer, E. Peters, G.
Radde, B. Schmacker, H. Schubotz, A.
Schultze, J. Unger

approx. nr. of bird skins 90,000 (c.6—7,000
species)

other bird items 4,000 skeletons, 3,375 in
alcohol, 5,050 egg sets, many fossils

approx. recent annual increase in skin/
skeleton coll. 600, from local birds prepared
by own taxidermist and buying of colls.

bird skin collection specialised in South
America, Germany, northern and eastern
Africa, Middle East, Indonesia, New Zealand;
Trochilidae

card or computer system present most skins
on card (except Trochilidae), spirit and
skeleton colls. on computer

Fribourg (MHNF)

Info from: Dr André Fasel, 10 Dec 2001

address Museum d’ Histoire Naturelle de
Fribourg, Chemin du Musée 6, CH-1700
Fribourg, Switzerland

telephone #-41-26-3009040, fax #-41-26-
3009760, e-mail museehn @fr.ch

C.S. Roselaar

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr André Fasel
(director) (andre.fasel@ unifr.ch), Emanuel
Gerber

total staff of bird dept. —

brief history Founded 1823 with the donation
of the coll. of C.-A. Fontaine to the Fribourg
Canton; owned by the Fribourg government

references to history, collections, or types
Fasel (1998) (history)

important past bird staff C. de Buman, M.
Musy, O. Biichi

important collections come from J. de Buman,
R. de Boccard, Pere A. Buch

approx. nr. of bird skins 5,300 skins (of which
4,800 mounted)

other bird items 1,200 skeletons and skulls,
515 egg sets, and 130 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 100-
200

bird skin collection specialised in Switzerland,
SE China, Vietnam, Ethiopia

card or computer system present Most bird
items On computer

Geneva/Geneve (MHNGn)

Info from F. J. Baud, 06 Dec 1999

address Museum d’ Histoire Naturelle de
Genéve, Dpt. de Mammalogie et Ornithologie,
case postale 6434, CH-1211 Geneve 6, Suisse/
Switzerland (visitors address: | Route de
Malagnou)

telephone #-41-(0)22-4186302, fax #-41-(0)22-
4186301, e-mail francois.baud@ mhn.ville-
ge.ch

staff responsible for collection Dr Francois J.
Baud (curator), Dr M. Ruedi (research officer)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 2 coll.
managers, 2 taxidermist (these for combined
bird—mammal dept.; additional staff shared by
whole museum)

brief history Founded in c.1850 by the Societé
de Physique et d’ Histoire Natureile de Genéve;
now belongs to the municipality (Ville de
Geneve)

references to history, collections, or types
Baud (1976, 1977, 1978), Weber (1985)

important past bird staff Victor Fatio, T.
Horsfield, De Saussure

important collections come from T. Horsfield
(Java), W. Parsons (Philippines), K. von
Sneidern (Colombia), A. Kovacs (Argentina),
A. Vaucher (Trochilidae)

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

approx. nr. of bird skins 25,000

other bird items c.200 skeletons, 8,500 egg
sets, 1,000 bodies in alcohol (of which the
skins are in the coll.)

approx. recent annual increase in skins 250,
from own expeditions and local bird skinned
by own taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Switzerland,
Java, Philippines, Colombia, Argentina;
Trochilidae

card or computer system present Over 60% of
skins on computer

Genoa/Genova(MSNG)

Info from: Giuliano Doria, 16 Dec 1999

address Museo Civico di Storia Naturale
‘Giacomo Doria’, Via Brigata Liguria 9, I-
16121 Genova (Genoa), Italy

telephone #-39-(0) 10-564 567 or 582 171, fax
#-39-(0) 10-566 319

staff responsible for collection Dr Giuliano
Doria

total staff of bird dept. | curator (see above,
for all animals except insects), 1 taxidermist
(for all vertebrates)

brief history Founded in 1867 when the private
coll. of Marchese Giacomo Doria was given to
City of Genova; still in the possession of the
Municipality of Genova

references to history, collections, or types
Arbocco et al. (1979, 1987), Violani et al.
(1979, 1984), Capocaccia & Poggi (1982)

important past bird staff A. T. Salvadori
(volunteer from Torino, but described 283 new
taxa from the coll.)

important collections come from G. Doria, O.
Beccari, L.M. D’ Albertis, E. Modigliani, L.
Loria, O. Antinori, E. Ruspoli, V. Bottego, L.
Fea

approx. nr. of bird skins 30,000 (incl mounts)

other bird items 60 mounted skeletons, 400
sterna, 100 jars with many specimens in spirits,
100 egg sets, 100 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 30,
from donations and local birds skinned by own
taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Italy, North
Africa, Ethiopia, Cape Verde Is. (30 Alauda
razae!), Gulf of Guinea islands (Principe, etc.),
Burma, Indonesia, New Guinea. Includes 104
skins of extinct and endangered birds and types
or type series of 317 (sub)species.

C.S. Roselaar

card or computer system present All on card,
none on computer

Glasgow (GLAMG)

Info from: Richard Sutcliffe, 28 Nov 2001

address Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum,
Kelvin Grove, Glasgow G3 8AG, U.K.

telephone #-44-141-2872660, fax #-44-141-
2872690, e-mail richard.sutcliffe @
cls.glasgow.gov.uk

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Richard
Sutcliffe (Curator of Science)

total staff of bird dept. 1 (for all zoology)

brief history Founded 1870; owned by Glasgow
City Council

references to history, collections, or types -

important past bird staff C. E. Palmar, J.
MacNaught Campbell, Darryl Mead

important collections come from R. Arbuthnot
(eggs), M. A. Black, H. Brown, Major Christie,
Capt. H. L. Cochrane, Capt. D. Cross (eggs), P.
Hay (eggs), P. Leys, Sir James Lumsden, Col J.
M. D. Mackenzie (eggs), W. E. Praeger, J.
Ramsay, A. B. Stewart

approx. nr. of bird skins 6,400 (incl. 900
mounts)

other bird items 250 (partial) skeletons, 10,000
eggs, 100 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins a few
only

bird skin collection specialised in Scotland,
but also includes quite a number of exotic birds

card or computer system present Most on
computer

Gorlitz (SMNG)

Info from: Hermann Ansorge, 30 Nov 2001

address Staatliches Museum fiir Naturkunde
Gorlitz, Postfach 300154, D-02806 Gorlitz,
Germany (visitors address: Am Museum 1, D-
02826 Gorlitz).

telephone #-49-358 1-47600/ -4760400, fax #-
49-3581-4760101, e-mail smng.ansorge @t-
outline.de

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Hermann
Ansorge (head of vertebrate dept.), Diana
Jeschke (taxidermist)

total staff of bird dept. 2 (for entire vertebrate
dept: see above)

brief history Founded 1823 as Museum of the
Naturforschenden Gesellschaft zu Gorlitz, with

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

important enlargement by the donation of the
colls. of J. von Zittwitz and H. Boetsscher in
1860-1861.

references to history, collections, or types
Ansorge (1987)

important past bird staff J. G Krezschmar, R.
Tobias, J. W. Stolz

important collections come from Niesky
Padagogium, A. R. von Loebenstein (eggs),
Vogelschutzwarte Neschwitz

approx. nr. of bird skins 6,800 (incl. 5,500
mounts)

other bird items 1,250 (partial) skeletons, 1,750
egg sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins a few

bird skin collection specialised in worldwide,
e.g. with Ara tricolor, but primarily the Lausitz
area of E Germany

card or computer system present all on card,
part on computer

Gothenburg/Goteborg (GNM)

Info from: Goran Nilson, 27 Nov 2001
address Naturhistoriska Museet, Box 7283, S-
40235 Goteborg, Sweden (visitors address:

Slottsskogen, nr. Linnéplatsen)

telephone #-46-31-7752430, fax #-46-31-
129807, e-mail goran.nilson@gnm.se

staff responsible for bird coll. Goran Nilson

total staff of bird dept. 1

brief history Founded 1833; owned by the local
community.

references to history, collections, or types
Mathiasson (1985)

important past bird staff Sven Mathiasson

important collections come from K. Kolthoff
and others

approx. nr. of bird skins 25,000, incl. 3,548
mounts

other bird items 8,000 skeletons and skulls,
10,000 egg sets, a few birds in alcohol

approx. recent annual increase in skins 100

bird skin collection specialised in Sweden
(9,211 skins), remainder exotic; many groups
represented, e.g. 250 Cygnus spec. All on
computer: see Www.gnm.se

Grenoble (MHNGr)

Info from: A. Fayard, 9 Jul 2000

address Muséum d’ Histoire Naturelle de
Grenoble, B.P. 3022, 38816 Grenoble Cedex 1,
France (visitors adress: 1, rue Dolomieu)

C.S. Roselaar

telephone #-33- (0)4 76 44 05 35, (portable) #-
33-(0)6 82 86 92 31, fax #-33-(0)4 76 44 65
99, e-mail museum-histoire-naturelle @ ville-
grenoble.fr, web-site http://www. ville-
grenoble.fr

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Armand
Fayard (head curator), Anne Medard-Blondel
(adj. curator)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 1 adj. curator, |
taxidermist, 1 other

brief history Founded in 1847; now owned by
Ville de Grenoble

references to history, collections, or types
Langrand (1985, 1986a,b)

important past bird staff -

important collections come from Clot-Bey
(1842-1844), Bouteille (1847-1881), Vitalis
(1899), Bailly (1902), Blanchet (1921), L.
Lavauden (1935), Fleurian (1937), L. Léger.

approx. nr. of bird skins 9,000

other bird items 830 eggs, 30 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins ?,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist,
donations, and buying of colls.

bird skin collection specialised in SE France,
Tunisia, Egypt (71 mounts of Clot-Bey),
Afrotropics (especially Mauritania to Chad),
Madagascar (e.g. 269 mounts), etc.

card or computer system present part on a
card system, nothing on computer

Halberstadt (MH)

Info from: B. Nicolai, 27 Jun 1996

address Museum Heineanum, Domplatz 37, D-
38820 Halberstadt, Germany

telephone #-49-3941-551460, fax #-49-3941-
551469

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Bernd
Nicolai (head), Rtidiger Holz

total staff of bird dept. | head, 2 taxidermists,
1 librarian

brief history Founded in 1830 as private coll.
of F. Heine Sr.; the Heine coll. was presented
to Stadt Halberstadt in 1907 when A.
Hemprich became director

references to history, collections, or types
Cabanis, in part with Heine (1850-1863);
Busch (1957), Handtke (1974), Kummer
(1993), Nicolai (1993), Nicolai et al. (1994)

important past bird staff F. Heine Sr., F. Heine
Jr., J. Cabanis, C. Miiller, F. Tiemann, A.
Hemprich, R. Busch, H. von Boetticher, K.
Handtke, H. Konig

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

important collections come from J. G. W.
Brandt, G. A. Frank, M. Hiibner (eggs), J.
Kummer (eggs), Mus. Berlin (doublets), W.
Schliiter, Maison Verreaux, K. Wei

approx. nr. of bird skins 18,000 (4,500
species)

other bird items 2,000 skeletons, 6,000 egg sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins 100,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist
and expeditions

bird skin collection specialised in Germany
(3,000 skins), many from a wide scatter of
localities elsewhere; Trochilidae (1,800 skins)

card or computer system present all birds
received since 1965 on card, none on computer

Halle (IZH)

Info from: Dietrich Heidecke, 26 Nov 2001

address Institut fiir Zoologie, Zoologische
Sammlung, Martin-Luther-Universitat,
Postfach Universitat, D-06099 Halle am Saale,
Germany (visitors address: Domplatz 4, D-
06108 Halle/S.)

telephone #-49-345-5526455, fax #-49-345-
5527152, e-mail heidecke@ zoologie.uni-
halle.de

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr D. Heidecke
(Kustos), H.-J. Altner (taxidermist) (both for
all vertebrates)

total staff of bird dept. See above

brief history Founded in 1769 as natural history
cabinet by J. F. G. Goldhagen, but the oldest
birds in existence now are those of C. L.
Nitzsch (from about 1815); the coll. increased
strongly after the arrival of Burmeister as
director in 1837. Now part of the University of
Halle-Wittenberg

references to history, collections, or types
Taschenberg (1894), Herre (1940), Piechocki
(1971) (history); Boetticher (1940) (types);
Piechocki (1958, 1968), Piechocki & Bolod
(1972), Piechocki et al. (1981-1982)
(Mongolian and Manchurian colls.)

important past bird staff J. R. Forster, C. L.
Nitzsch, K. H. C. Burmeister, C. G. A. Giebel,
O. Taschenberg, L. Briihl, L. Ludwig, A.
Remane, H. von Boetticher, J. O. Hiising, R.
Piechocki

important collections come from C. L. & A. E.
Brehm, Brandt, Brendel, F. W. Junghuhn, G. A.
Frank, G. Hartlaub, A. von Humboldt, A. V.
Ladygin, J. F Naumann, R. A. Philippi, W.

C.S. Roselaar

Schliiter, M. Sch6nwetter (19,300 eggs of
3,839 species), M. Stubbe

approx. nr. of bird skins 9,063 (incl. 2,100
mounts of 1,900 species)

other bird items 6,300 (partial) skeletons,
20,000 eggs, over 100 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 20—
150

bird skin collection specialised in Germany,
Mongolia, Kamchatka, NE China, Cuba (over
900 birds), S America (e.g. Chile, Argentina);
endangered Palearctic birds of prey, owls, and
cranes (esp. skeletons); types of Nitzsch,
Burmeister and Giebel

card or computer system present all on card;
60% of skins on computer

Hamburg (ZMH)

Info from: H. Hoerschelmann, Aug. 1996

address Zoologisches Institut und Zoologisches
Museum, Universitat Hamburg, Martin-Luther-
King-Platz 3, D-20146 Hamburg, Germany

telephone #-49-40-4123-3860, fax #-49-40-
4123-3937, e-mail fb6a071 @ zoologie.uni-
hamburg.de

staff responsible for bird coll. Kordula
Bracker, H. Hoerschelmann (retired)

total staff of bird dept. 1 coll. manager, |
taxidermist

brief history Founded 1843; large parts of the
coll. were destroyed in 1943. Now part of
University of Hamburg

references to history, collections, or types ?

important past bird staff A. Reichenow, G. H.
Martens, H. & H. Bolau, F. Stuhlmann, N.
Peters, W. Meise, C. Kosswig, E. Focke

important collections come from F. Dorries, G
A. Fischer, L. Gomez, Hagenbeck Zoo, G.
Hartmann, G. Heidemann, G. Heinrich, Heinze
et al., D. von Holst, H. Kelm, G. A. von
Maydell, Mus. Godeffroy (J. C. Godeffroy;
Amalie Dietrich, A. Garrett, E. Graffe, Capt.
Heinsohn, F. Hiibner, Th. Kleinschmidt, J. S.
Kubary, A. Tetens; types and ‘originals’ to
Hamburg in 1886, duplicates to Bremen), H.
Moschler, D. S. Rabor, Prof. Rockstroh, H.
Schubotz, A. Schultze, W. Schulz, G. Siemssen,
W. Trense, K. Wei8, P. Wyrwich

approx. nr. of bird skins 30,000 (2,500 species)

other bird items 4,000 skeletons, 2,000 in
alcohol, 2,000 egg sets, feather-sets of 20,000
birds

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

approx. recent annual increase in skins 400,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist,
buying of colls., and donations

bird skin collection specialised in Germany,
Sao Tomé, Russian Far East, China, Angola,
East Africa, India, Pacific, Peru, Guatemala,
Philippines, New Guinea, Australia, Bismarck
Archipelago; feathers of West Palearctic birds;
Pica pica (2,000 skins Kelm coil.).

card or computer system present all skins on
card; computerising of card system in
preparation

Hanover/Hannover (NLMH)

Info from: Chr. Schilling, 21 Feb 2002

address Niedersdchsisches Landesmuseum,
Naturkunde-Abteilung, Willy-Brandt-Allee 5,
D-30169 Hannover, Germany.

telephone #-49-511-9807-827, fax #- fax #-49-
511-9807-880, e-mail naturkunde@
compuserve.com

staff responsible for bird coll. Frau Dr
Christiane Schilling (for entire Bioscience
coll.)

total staff of bird dept. 1 (see above)

brief history Founded c.1850, owned by
Niedersachsen government.

references to history, collections, or types
none (but unpublished catalogues for the
Kirchhoff and King George colls. available)

important past bird staff —

important collections come from King George
V, H. Kirchhoff (formerly in the Géttingen
Museum), H. Domeier (originally 40,000 eggs,
many from the Neotropics)

approx. nr. of bird skins 9,000

other bird items 75 skeltons, 29,000 eggs, 133
nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins minor
acquisitions

bird skin collection specialised in regional
avifauna (Niedersachsen), but also from Africa,
Asia, and small numbers from South America

card or computer system present all on card,
computerisation in preparation

Helsinki (ZMUH)

Info from: Risto A. Vaisaénen, 17 Nov 1999

address Zoological Museum, Finnish Museum
of Natural History, University of Helsinki, P.O.
Box 17, FIN-00014 Helsinki, Finland (visitors
address: P. Rautatiekatu 13)

C.S. Roselaar

telephone #-358-9-1917440, fax #-358-9-
1917443, e-mail risto. vaisanen @helsink1.fi

staff responsible for bird coll. Prof Ann
Forstén (head of vertebr. dept), Dr Risto A.
V aisanen (senior curator vertebr. dept), Dr
Torsten Stjernberg (curator, manager of egg
coll.), Pertti Saurola M. Sc. (curator, leader of
ringing centre), Martti Hilden M. Sc.
(assistant)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 3 coll.
managers, 1.5 taxidermist, 0.5 others

brief history Originally in University of Turku,
where coll. destroyed by fire in 1827;
University then moved to Helsinki, where new
coll. built up, to which in c.1830—1850 the
colls. of the Societas pro Fauna et Flora
Fennica and the private coll. of E. J. Bonsdorff
were added.

references to history, collections, or types —

important past bird staff A. von Nordmann,
M. von Wright, J. A. Palmén, Pontus
Palmgren, O. Kalela, P. Voipio, R. Kreuger, G.
Bergman, L. Sammalisto

important collections come from Musem
Oologicum R. Kreuger (worldwide egg coll.),
E. Wassenius (W Palearctic egg coll.)

approx. nr. of bird skins 29,000, incl. mounts
(c.2,200 species)

other bird items 1,200 skeletons & skulls, 900
in alcohol, 31,000 egg sets (3,200 species), 800
nests, 800 frozen tissue samples

approx. recent annual increase in skins 600,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist
and donation of colls.

bird skin collection specialised in Finland
(22,000 skins, mostly rather recent); other
skins generally rather old, exotic, partly
mounted; eggs (worldwide); birds of prey and
owls (esp Finnish Accipiter, Strix, Bubo)

card or computer system present all on card to
1996, all on computer

Karlsruhe (SMNK)

Info from: H.-W. Mittmann, 21 Jan 2002

address Staatliches Museum fiir Naturkunde,
Erbprinzenstrafe 13, D-76133 Karlsruhe,
Baden-Wiirttemberg, Germany.

telephone #-49-721-1752132, fax #-49-721-
175211-010, e-mail hwmittmann@aol.com

staff responsible for bird coll. Prof. Dr V.
Wirth (director), Dr Hans-Walter Mittmann
(vertebrate curator)

total staff of bird dept. | (for all vertebrates)

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

brief history Founded c.1785; owned by the
government of Baden-Wiirttemberg

references to history, collections, or types —

important past bird staff J. C. Gmelin, H.
Knipper, K. Silber

important collections come from Th.
Andersen, K. Haberer, B. Hagen, J. Holderer,
J. Riedel, J. Unger, Wandres, Zool. Inst.
Freiburg

approx. nr. of bird skins 5,000 (incl mounts)

other bird items 300 (partial) skeletons, 600
egg sets, fewer than 50 birds in alcohol

approx. recent annual increase in skins 100-
200

bird skin collection specialised in Germany
(esp. Baden-Wiirttemberg), C & E Asia,
Tanzania, Paraguay, Indonesia (New Guinea)

card or computer system present all items on
computer

Kaunas

Info from: Saulius Rumbutis, 20 Dec 1999

address Kaunas Zoological Museum, Laisves
aleja 106, LT-3000 Kaunas, Lithuania

telephone#-370-7-200305, fax #-370-7-229675,
e-mail muzzoo @takas.lt

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Algimantas
Macikunas (head), Saulius Rumbutis
(ornithologist of bird dept)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 1 coll. manager,
2 taxidermists

brief history Founded in 1919 by Prof. Tadas
Ivanauskas; owned by the government

references to history, collections, or types J.
Vaskelis (1985) Soobsh. Pribalt. Kom. Izuch.
Migr. Ptits 18: 112-118; Gaidiene (1999)
(history); Andriuskevicius & Macikunas (1988)
(catalogue).

important past bird staff T. Ivanauskas, K.
Bybartas, L. Jezerskas, V. Juska, V. Logmina,
V. Mackevicius, M. Navasaitis, B. Talandis, J.
Vaskelis

important collections come from L.
Ivanauskas

approx. nr. of bird skins 7,630 (828 species)

other bird items 435 skeletons (112 species)
and 446 partial skeletons or skulls, 660 birds in
spirits (80 species), 872 egg sets, 113 nests.

approx. recent annual increase in skin coll.
37, from own expeditions, buyings and
donations, local birds skinned by own
taxidermist

C.S. Roselaar

bird collection specialised in Lithuania
card or computer system present all on card

Kiel (ZMK)

Info from: Wolfgang Dreyer, 7 Dec 1999.

address Zoologisches Museum der Christian-
Albrechts-Universitaét, HegewischstraBe 3, D-
24105 Kiel, Germany

telephone #-49-(0)431-597 4180, fax #-49-
(0)431-597 4177 , e-mail zool/
museum @email.uni-kiel.de

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Wolfgang
Dreyer (director of the zoological museum)

total staff of bird dept. | head, 1 taxidermist
(for entire zoological museum)

brief history Founded 1836; now part of Kiel
University. See Hacker (1984)

references to history, collections, or types
Catalogue on bird bones in Arbeitsbldatter Univ.
Kiel. 8 (1985), on Dodo and Solitaire bones in
Arbeitsblatter Univ. Kiel 14 (1987)

important past bird staff W. Behn, K. Mobius

important collections come from F. Boie, G.
von Plessen

approx. nr. of bird skins 7,000 (1,950 species)

other bird items 50,000 skeletons; a few egg
sets and nests

approx. recent annual increase in skin coll. A
few, from local birds skinned by own
taxidermist

bird collection specialised in —

card or computer system present all skins on
card

Kiev (ZIK or ZMAU)

Info from: Alexander Peklo, 07 Jul 1996

address Zoological Museum, Natural History
Museum of the Ukrainian Academy of
Sciences, Bogdana Khmelnitskogo Str. 15,
252030 Kiev, Ukraine

telephone #-38-44-2247016

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Alexander
Peklo

total staff of bird dept. 1 curator

brief history Founded in 1919 by V. A.
Karavaev of the Ukrainean Academy of
Sciences; still part of the Ukrainean Academy
of Sciences

references to history, collections, or types
Shcherbak (1969), Peklo (1997a,b)

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

important past bird staff N. Sharleman, A.
Kistjakovsky, N. N. Shcherbak, M.
Voinstvensky, V. Loskot

important collections come from Y. Kostin, V.
Ochapovsky, V. Zubarovsky

approx. nr. of bird skins 40,000 (950 species)

other bird items 120 skeletons, 120 in alcohol,
1,200 egg sets, 600 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 30—
150, from local birds, own expeditions, buying
skins, and donations

bird skin collection specialised in Ukraine,
incl. Carpathians and Crimea (over 3,000 skins
from latter), Caucasus, Turkmenistan,
Transbaikalia, Russian Far East; most of the
material quite recent

card or computer system present Catalogue
published (see Peklo 1997a,b)

Kobenhavn
see Copenhagen

Krakow (ISEA)

Info from: Z. Bochenski, 25 Sep 1996

address Zaklad Zoologii Systematyczne] 1
Doswiadczalnej (Institute of Systematics and
Evolution of Animals), PAN (Polish Academy
of Sciences), Ul. Slawkowska 17, PL-31-016
Krakow, Poland [skins & mounts partly housed
in Muz. Przyrodnicze ISEZ, PAN, Sw.
Sebastiana St. 9, 31-049 Krakow; curator Dr
Wieslaw Krzeminski]

telephone #-48-12-227066, ext. 226 (secr.:
221901), fax #-48-12-224294

staff responsible for bird coll. Prof. Dr
Zygmunt Bochenski, Dr Zbigniew Bochenski
(both staff of entire vertebrate division); Dr
Teresa Tomek (curator of birds)

total staff of bird dept. Vertebr. section (incl.
birds): 1 head, 2 others (see above)

brief history Founded in 1865 as Muzeum
Komisji Fizjograficzne] Akademii
Umiejstnosci w Krakowie; now belongs to
Polish Academy of Sciences

references to history, collections, or types
Bochenski (1966, 1984, 1990)

important past bird staff K. Jelski

important collections come from Z.
Glowacinski, Z. Jakubiec, T. Oles, P. Profus, T.
Tomek

approx. nr. of bird skins 1,400, incl. 200
mounts (200 species)

C.S. Roselaar

other bird items 3,000 skeletons (1,033
species), 2,900 egg sets, 300 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins None,
but c.150 skeletons annually added, from own
taxidermy, exchanges, etc.

bird skin collection specialised in Skins &
eggs: Poland, North Korea. Skeletons:
worldwide (but esp W Palearctic)

card or computer system present c.1,000 on
card; all skeletons on continually updated
computer list

Lausanne (MZL)

Info from: Dr Olivier Glaizot, 30 Nov 2001

address Musée Zoologie (MZL), Canton de
Vaud, Case postale 448, CH-1000 Lausanne
17, Suisse/ Switzerland (visitors address: Palais
de Rumine, Place de la Riponne 6, CH-1005
Lausanne).

telephone #-#-41-21-316-3460, fax #-—3479, e-
mail olivier.glaizot @serac.vd.ch

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Olivier
Glaizot (curator for all vertebrates)

total staff of bird dept. See above

brief history Founded late nineteenth century;
owned by the Vaud Canton

references to history, collections, or types -

important past bird staff —

important collections come from Capt. Vouga
(in 1886), W. Morton, Delessert (eggs)

approx. nr. of bird skins 7,000 (incl. mounts)

other bird items 1,000 (partial) skeletons, 3,000
eggs, fewer than 100 birds on liquid and a few
nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 100,
mostly local

bird skin collection specialised in Switzerland
(esp. west); historical colls. worldwide

card or computer system present
computerisation in progress

Leeds (LEEDM)

Info from: Adrian Norris, 23 Nov 2001

address Leeds Museum Resource Centre, 1|
Moorfield Road, Yeadon, Leeds LS19 7BN,
WIS

telephone #-44-113-2146526, e-mail
adrian.norris @leeds.gov.uk

staff responsible for bird coll. Adrian Norris
(Senior Curator of Natural Sciences)

total staff of bird dept. 1 (see above)

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

brief history Founded in 1819 as the Leeds
Philosophical and Literary Society Collections;
went to the Leeds City Council in 1921, and
still run by this local authority. Partly bombed
in 1940-1945

references to history, collections, or types
Norris (1998)

important past bird staff -

important collections come from W. T.
Crampton (eggs), Eyres-Monsell coll, J. C.
Hirst, Sir William Milner, Roundell coll.;
Wakefield, Halifax & Swindon Museums

approx. nr. of bird skins 4,500 (incl. 3,500
mounts; an additional 1,000 mounts and many
original data of other birds were lost by the
damage in 1940-1945)

other bird items 50 (partial) skeletons, 3,000
egg sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins very
few

bird skin collection specialised in mounts
worldwide, partly historical (mounts in glass
cases); includes various rare and extinct
species. Eggs from Britain, Europe, Australia
and N America

card or computer system present Skins and
mounts on computer, but only a minor part of
the eggs.

Leiden (RMNH for colls., NNM in

general)

Info from: R. Dekker, 19 Mar 1997

address Naturalis, Nationaal Natuurhistorisch
Museum, Postbus 9517, 2300 RA Leiden, the
Netherlands (visitors: Darwinweg 2)

telephone #-31-71-5687623, fax #-31-71-
5687666, e-mail dekker @naturalis.nnm.nl

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr René W. R. J.
Dekker (head), Hein van Grouw (technical
support)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, | coll. manager/
taxidermist

brief history Founded 1815 when the older coll.
of C. J. Temminck came to government, with
Temminck as first director; now a private
institution with governmental support

references to history, collections, or types
Gijzen (1938), Stresemann (1951), Holthuis
(1995)

important past bird staff C. J. Temminck, C.
Reinwardt, H. Boie, H. Schlegel, O. Finsch, J.
Biittikofer, E. D. van Oort, GC. A. Junge, G.
F. Mees

C.S. Roselaar

important collections come from T. Andersen,
M. Bartels (15,000 skins from Java), H. A.
Bernstein, A. A. Bruyn, W. Bullock coll./Mus
Leverianum (see Vienna/Wien), H. Biirger, K.
H. Chen, L. Coomans de Ruiter, D. C. van
Dam, P. M. Diard, F. von Faber, E. A. Forsten,
G. W. FreyreiB, J. Gilbert, J. Gould, B. Hagen,
J. C. van Hasselt, F. Haverschmidt, P. A. Hens,
Th. von Heuglin, W. C. & F. C. van Heurn, D.
S. Hoedt, A. Hoogerwerf, E. R. Jacobsen, C.
Klaesi, Th. Kriiper, J. S. Kubary, H. Kuhl, T.
Kumlien, J. R. Laenen, F. Levaillant, T. G van
Lidth de Jeude, H. A. Lorentz, H. C. Macklot,
S. Miiller, A. W. Nieuwenhuijs, J. W. Nouhuys,
H. S. Pel, V. von Plessen, F. Pollen, G. van
Raalten, L. van Renesse van Duivenbode, J.
Riedel, H. von Rosenberg, W. F. H. Rosenberg,
E. Riippell, G. Schlegel, L. A. C. M. Schwaner,
W. E. D. Scott, P. F. von Siebold, F. K.
Stampfli, R. Swinhoe, J. E. Teysman, E. J.
Verreaux, A. G. Vorderman, J. P. van
Wickevoort Crommelin

approx. nr. of bird skins 170,000, incl.
c.53,000 mounts (in total, 7,000 species)

other bird items 6,673 skeletons, 1,200 in
alcohol, 32,571 eggs, c.3,500 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 500,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist
and buying of colls.

bird skin collection specialised in Indonesia,
Japan, Netherlands, E China, Taiwan,
Madagascar, Liberia, Tanzania, Kenya,
Surinam; over 2,400 types. 37,900 mounts and
41,100 skins of non-passerines, remainder
passerines (mainly skins)

card or computer system present c.50% of
skins on card; only types & extincts on
computer

Leipzig (NKML)

Info from: M. Meyer, 30 Nov 2001

address Naturkundemuseum Leipzig,
LortzingstraBe 3, D-04105 Leipzig, Germany

telephone #-47-341-982210, fax #-47-341-
9822122

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr M. Meyer
(curator of vertebrates)

total staff of bird dept. | (for entire vertebrate
coll., see above)

brief history Founded 1906 by the
Naturwissenschaftliche Vereinigung des
Leipziger Lehrervereins, opened 1912; from
1930 owned by Stadt Leipzig

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

references to history, collections, or types —

important past bird staff E. Hesse, E. Poppig.
H. H. ter Meer, etc

important collections come from H. O.
Grimm, W. Gueinzius, R. Schlegel (eggs), E.
Weiske

approx. nr. of bird skins 6,250 (incl. 2,300
mounts)

other bird items 310 (partial) skeletons, 10 in
liquid, 5,000 eggs sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins nil

bird skin collection specialised in Europe; the
exotic birds formerly in the coll. were given to
the Dresden Museum in the 1970s, but still
includes extinct birds like Pinguinus, Nestor
productus, Heteralochia, etc.

card or computer system present all on card

Lille

Info from: Roger Marcel, 27 Dec 1999

address Musée d’ Histoire Naturelle de Ville de
Lille, 19 Rue de Bruxelles, 59000 Lille,
France.

telephone #-33-(0)3-285530380 fax #-33-(0)3-
20861482

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Roger
Marcel (conservateur universitaire), Bertrand
Rodigois (coll. manager)

total staff of bird dept. See above

brief history Founded in the mid-1850s when
the coll. of Degland was obtained by the Lille
Municipality; still owned by the Ville de Lille

references to history, collections, or types
Only Degland’s catalogue available, printed
1857

important past bird staff A. Bart

important collections come from C. D.
Degland, coll. Vilmarest-de Cossette

approx. nr. of bird skins 11,000 (incl. many
mounts)

other bird items very few, and without
scientific interest

approx. recent annual increase in skins c.50,
from various sources

bird skin collection specialised in Europe
(especially France) (c.5,000 birds from the
colls. Degland and Vilmarest), also, 6,000 birds
from elsewhere in the world, but largely
without full locality data

card or computer system Degland coll. on card
& computer, cataloguing of Vilmarest coll. in

prep.

C.S. Roselaar

Linz

Info from: G. Aubrecht, 6 Dec1999

address Biologie Zentrum des
Oberosterreichisches Landesmuseums, Johann-
Wilhelm-Klein-Strabe 73, A-4040 Linz-
Dornach, Osterreich/ Austria.

telephone #(0)723-759733-57,
fax #(0)732-759733-99, e-mail
g.aubrecht @landesmuseum-linz.ac.at

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Gerhard
Aubrecht (zoologist), Mag. Stefan Weig]
(zoologist, head of taxidermist laboratory),
Jiirgen Plass (coll. manager)

total staff of bird dept. see above; also, |
taxidermist & | secretary

brief history Founded 1833 as Museum of
Upper Austria (a private society), now owned
by Government of Upper Austria

references to history, collections, or types
Kerschner & Schadler (1933), Lindorfer
(1970), Aubrecht & Mayer (1983), Aubrecht
GIS S7en995))

important past bird staff A. Reischek, T.
Kerschner, G.Th. Mayer

important collections come from A. Reischek
(but most went to Vienna), T. Angele (1,500
specimens, incl. coll. A. G H. Rudatis from
Natal), G. Wieninger (e.g. Paraguay), J.
Lindorfer (eggs)

approx. nr. of bird skins 8,200 (incl 3,600
mounts), c.1,000 species

other bird items a few skeletons, 160 skulls,
3,400 egg sets (360 species), 450 nests,
feathers and pluckings of c.220 birds

approx. recent annual increase in skins c.100,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist
and buying of colls.

bird skin collection specialised in Upper
Austria, New Zealand, Natal, Paraguay;
raptors and owls.

card or computer system All until 1990s on
card; all skins, the Angele coll., and birds
received since 1990 are on computer (in the
ZOBODAT system), making geographical
grouping and plotting on maps easier

Lisbon/Lisboa (MB)

Info from: C.Almaga, 03 Apr 1997, updated C.
Hazevoet, 27 Mar 2002

address Museu Bocage, Fac. de Ciéncias, Rua
da Escola Politécnica 58, P-1200 Lisboa,
Portugal

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

telephone #-35 1-1-3965853 or 604485, fax #-
351-1-3969784, e-mail calmaca@fc.ul.pt,
hazevoet @fc.ul.pt

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Maria da
Graga Ramalhino (head of vertebrate section),
Dr Carlos Almaga (director of Museum), Dr C.
J. Hazevoet (bird dept.)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 1.5 taxidermist,
0.5 secretary, 1 other (all for entire vertebr.
section)

brief history Founded in 1772 by Domingos
Vandelli as Real Museu e Jardim Botanico da
Ajuda; now belongs to the University of
Lisboa. A fire destroyed the entire coll. in
March 1978, but it is now gradually being built
up again

references to history, collections, or types
Before the fire of 1978: Soares (1970, 1971,
1973, 1977); after the fire: Soares (1983),
Almaga (1987, 1993, 1994, 1996), Almaca &
Neves (1987)

important past bird staff J. V. Barbosa du
Bocage, G. F. Sacarrao, A. A. Soares

important collections come from several old
ones, but destroyed by fire (see above)

approx. nr. of bird skins 2,500 (at present; see
above), 250 species

other bird items a few eggs and nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 100,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Originally,
many birds from Angola, Mozambique,
Portugal, etc. After the fire, a coll. of birds of
Portugal is being made again, with some
additional birds present from Madeira and Sao
Tomé

card or computer system present All on card
and computer; the card system for the coll.
destroyed by fire is still in existence

Lisbon/Lisboa (CZ/IICT)

Info from: J. Crawford-Cabral, 07 May 1997

address Centro de Zooiogia, Instituto de
Investigacgao Cientifica Tropical, Rua da
Junqueira 14, P-1300 Lisboa, Portugal

telephone #-351-1-3637055, e-mail
czool @ www. lict.pt

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Luis Mendes
(curator), Pedro Santos (head, higher vertebrate
colls.), Maria José Teixeira (coll. manager)

total staff of bird dept. see above (for entire
vertebrate section)

C.S. Roselaar

brief history Founded as Junta das Missdes
Geograficas e de Investigagdes Coloniais in
1936, which organised expeditions; to keep the
colls., the Centro de Zoologia was founded in
1948; a governmental institution

references to history, collections, or types
Rosa Pinto (1983), de Naurois (1994 a,b)
[books based on the colls. of the CZ/IICT]

important past bird staff F. Frade, Joao
Crawford-Cabral

important collections come from Missao
Cientifica de S. Tomé (1954-1956), Missao de
Estudos Zoolégicos do Ultramar (1963-1970),
Missao Zoologica da Guiné 1944-1946,
Missao Zoologica de Mocambique 1948 &
1955, R. de Naurois, A. A. da Rosa Pinto, G.
Stein

approx. nr. of bird skins 6,340 (1,120 species)

other bird items 250 in alcohol, 110 eggs, a
few nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 0

bird skin collection specialised in Cape Verde
Islands (600 skins, 55 spec.), Guinea Bissau,
Sao Tomé and Principe, Mozambique, Goa,
Macau, Timor

card or computer system present all skins on
card system; computerisation planned

Liverpool (LivCM)

Info from: C. T. Fisher, July 1996

address Liverpool Museum, National Museums
& Galleries on Merseyside, Dept. of Vertebrate
Zoology, William Brown Street, Liverpool L3
8EN, U.K.

telephone #-44-151-207-0001, fax #-44-151-
478-4390

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Clemency T.
Fisher (curator of birds & mammals), Tony
Parker B. Sc. (ass. curator vertebrates), Dr
Malcolm J. Largen (herpetologist, but
occasionally also birds)

total staff of bird dept. 3 scientists, 2
taxidermists, 2 others (all partly working on
other groups)

brief history Founded 1851 when the large and
much older private coll. of Lord Stanley (the
13th Earl of Derby) was presented to the City
of Liverpool; now funded by the government
(formerly by the Merseyside County Council)

references to history, collections, or types
Wagstaffe (1978), Fisher (1981), Cowper
(1984), Largen & Rogers-Price (1985), Largen
(1987, 1988), Woolfall (1990)

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

important past bird staff T. J. Moore, H. O.
Forbes, L. Fraser, E. Lear, H. G. Robinson, R.
Wagstaffe, P. J. Morgan

important collections come from J. Abbot, T.
Ayres, Bates, T. Bridges, W. E. Brooks, W.
Buller, W. Bullock coll. (see Vienna/Wien), J.
Burke, W. D. Cowan, H. Cuming, W. R.
Davison, H. O. Forbes, L. Fraser, W. T. & E.
Gerrard, J. Gilbert, J. Gould, J. H. Gurney, G.
Henderson, India Mus., W. Jardine, T. C.
Jerdon, F. H. Kirby, J. Latham, C. L. & E. LE.
Layard, J. Leadbeater, J. MacGillivray, L.
Mandelli, Mus. Godeffroy, Rev. Inglis, Mus.
Leverianum (see Vienna/Wien), E. W. Oates,
R. C. L. Perkins, H. Pryer, P RendeliaG sre
Richards, W. Rowan, H. Salt, O. Salvin, St.
Helen’s Mus., A. Smith, Lord Stanley (Earl of
Derby) coll. (over 20,000 skins), W. Swainson,
R. Swinhoe, H. B. Tristram coll. (over 17,000
skins; another 7,000 to Philadelphia), Verreaux,
Voy. Beagle, A. R. Wallace, Webster-Harris
exp., Whitfield, S. Whitmee, A. Whyte, J. G
Williams

approx. nr. of bird skins 48,192, excl. 3,367
mounts (5,700 species)

other bird items 700 skeletons, 12,000 egg sets,
180 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 50,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist,
buying of colls., and donations

bird skin collection specialised in ‘strong in all
areas and families’; Tristram coll. especially
strong in Middle East, North Africa, Canary
Is., Bermuda, eastern USA, Pacific, Japan, etc.

card or computer system present All items on
card and all on computer (except part of eggs),
available in various arrangements (Dbase III)

Lund (ZMUL)

Info from: L. Cederholm, Aug. 1996

address Zoologisk Museum, Universitet fran
Lund, Helgonavagen 3, S-22362 Lund, Sweden

telephone #-46-46-222-9330, fax #-46-46-222-
4541, e-mail zool @zool.lu.se

staff responsible for bird coll. Prof Sven-Axel
Bengtson (head of entire museum)

total staff of bird dept. 0.5 taxidermist

brief history Founded 1735; now part of the
University of Lund

references to history, collections, or types
Loéwegren (1968)

C.S. Roselaar

important past bird staff Sven Nilsson, G.
Rudebeck, Yngve Lowegren, Lennart
Cederholm

important collections come from —

approx. nr. of bird skins 20,000

other bird items 1,000 skeletons, 800 in
alcohol, 2,000 tissue samples, 8,393 egg sets,
400 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 300-
2,000, from local birds skinned by own
taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Sweden

card or computer system present all skins and
mounts on computer

Lviv (Lvov)

Info from: Ihor Shydlovskyy, 4 Jan 2000

address Benedykt Dybowsky Zoological
Museum of the Ivan Franko Lviv National
University, Hrushevsky Str. 4, 79005 Lviv,
Ukraine

telephone #-380-(0)322-794 548, fax #-, e-mail
zoomus @frank.|viv.ua, website http://www.
carpathian.uar.net/museum/ or http://
ecocarpathian. uar.net/museum/

staff responsible for bird coll. [hor
Shydlovskyy

total staff of bird dept. See above (head of
entire museum as well as taxidermist); also,
staff present of the West-Ukrainian
Ornithological Station WUOS

brief history Founded 1885, but includes
material of the Lvov Cabinet of Natural
History, dating from 1823; now part of the
University

references to history, collections, or types
Catalogue of rare and endangered animals:
Tsaryk (2000); oological catalogue is in
preparation

important past bird staff B. I. Dybowsky, F. I.
Strautman, N. A. Srebrodolska, A. Ulianovsky,
Z. I. Pavliv, I. I. Hladunko, I. Gorban

important collections come from —

approx. nr. of bird skins 3,500 (incl. 1,604
mounts)

other bird items 476 egg sets, 55 nests, a few
skeletons and spirit specimens

approx. recent annual increase in skins 20—
25, from own expeditions and local specimens

bird skin collection specialised in Ukraine, but
also quite a number of exotic species (120
families represented)

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

card or computer system present in
preparation

Madrid (MNCN)

Info from: J. Barreiro, 02 Sep 1996 & 11 Nov
2001

address Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales
(Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Cientificas CSIC), José Gutiérrez Abascal, 2,
E-28006 Madrid, Spain

telephone #-34-91-411-1328, fax #-34-91-564-
5078, e-mail jbarreiro@mncn.csic.es

staff responsible for bird coll. Ms Josefina
Barreiro (curator of birds and mammals), Dr
Eulalia Moreno (researcher Ecologia Evolutiva
dept.), Dr P. Alberch (general director)

total staff of bird dept. | coll. manager, 1.5
taxidermist, 0.4 other (for birds and mammals)

brief history Founded in 1771 when King
Carlos III obtained the colls. of Pedro Franco
Davila; now part of the Vicedireccion de
Colecciones y Documentacion of CSIC, a
governmental organisation

references to history, collections, or types
Barreiro (1997), Barreiro & Pérez del Val
(1998)

important past bird staff A. Gil Lletget, F.
Bernis

important collections come from A. Boucard,
P. Franco Davila (obt. 1771; no birds left now),
Exped. Pacifico 1862-1866

approx. nr. of bird skins 19,000 (1,000
species)

other bird items 6,000 skeletons, 1,900 in
alcohol, 1,500 egg sets, 235 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 200
(mainly to skeleton or alcohol coll.), from local
birds skinned by own taxidermist and
donations

bird skin collection specialised in Spain (9,300
skins), Morocco (965), C & S America (4,452:
esp Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil,
Guatemala, Cuba, Panama, Peru), Philippines
(524), Eq. Guinea (503), Zaire (462), Japan
(281), China (247), Indonesia (151), India
(132), Australia (116); Trochilidae (1,749),
Accipitridae (1,480), Emberizidae (1,318), etc.
2 types. Most birds from 1880-1930

card or computer system present part of skins
on card system, all on computer

C.S. Roselaar

Magdeburg (MfNM)

Info from: H. Pellmann, 28 Nov 2001

address Museum fiir Naturkunde Otto-von-
GuerickestraBbe 68-73, D-39104 Magdeburg,
Germany.

telephone #-49-391-5403501

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Hans
Pellmann (for all vertebrates)

total staff of bird dept. | (see above)

brief history Founded 1874; owned by the city
of Magdeburg

references to history, collections, or types
Kriiger (1925) (history, catalogue)

important past bird staff —

important collections come from —

approx. nr. of bird skins 6,200

other bird items 1,200 egg sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins 10-50

bird skin collection specialised in Magdeburg
and surrounding state of Sachsen-Anhalt; also
from elsewhere in Germany, as well as various
Palearctic and exotic birds

card or computer system present All on card;
catalogue in preparation

Manchester (MANCH)

Info from: M. Hounsome, 03 Apr 1997

address The Manchester Museum, University of
Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13
OPL, U.K.

telephone #-44- 161-275-2673, fax #-44-161-
275-2676, e-mail m.hounsome @ man.ac.uk

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Michael V.
Hounsome (Keeper of Zoology)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, | part-time
technician, 2 volunteers

brief history Founded in 1821 by the
Manchester Society of Natural History, now
owned by the University of Manchester

references to history, collections, or types For
catalogue, see Internet page

important past bird staff R. B. Sharpe, H. E.
Dresser, Coward

important collections come from H. E. Dresser
coll. (15,000 birds, obtained 1896, and many
eggs, obtained 1906)

approx. nr. of bird skins 16,500, incl. 400
mounts (3,500 species)

other bird items 100s of skeletons, 50 in
alcohol, 10,000 egg sets ( of 3,000 species), 50
nests

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

approx. recent annual increase in skins 50,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist,
own expeditions, buying of colls., and
donations

bird skin collection specialised in ‘worldwide,
but especially Palearctic; all families’

card or computer system present part of skins
on card, all on computer, available at web
page: see http//www.man.ac.uk/museum

Milan/Milano (MSNM)

Info from: G. Chiozzi, 11 May 1995, updated 13
Nov 1999

address Museo Civico di Storia Naturale, Corso
Venezia, 55, I-20121 Milano, Italy

telephone #-39-02-781312, fax #-39-02-7602-
2287, e-mail giorgio_chiozzi@hotmail.com

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Giorgio
Chiozzi (head), Dr Luigi Cagnolaro (head dept.
vertebr. zool.)

total staff of bird dept. 0.1 head, 1 coll.
manager, | taxidermist

brief history Founded in 1831 by G De
Cristoforis & G Jan, but only a few birds were
included until 1884; part of coll. destroyed in
1943; owned by the Municipality of Milano

references to history, collections, or types
Violani et al. (1984), Violani (1985), Chiozzi
(1993)

important past bird staff Edgardo Moltoni

important collections come from L.
D’ Albertis, O. Beccari, A. A. Bruijn, Emin
Pasha, J. Hildebrandt, L. Laglaize, Capt.
Loche, A. Malherbe, H. Moéschler, A. B.
Meyer, T. Salvadori, G. Scortecci, Count E.
Turati private coll. (20,661 skins, 700
skeletons, 3,000 eggs), Maison Verreaux

approx. nr. of bird skins 34,000

other bird items126 skeletons, 1,000 skulls &
keels, 2,500 eggs

approx. recent annual increase in skins 100,
purchased from private taxidemists

bird skin collection specialised in Italy,
Palearctic, Algeria, NE Africa, Comoros,
Madagascar, S America; Charadriiformes,
Picidae, Trochilidae, Paradisaeidae,
Passeriformes. Includes 124 skins of extinct
and endangered birds

card or computer system present small parts
of the coll. on card and computer

C.S. Roselaar

Moscow/Moskva (ZMMU)

Info from: P. Tomkovich, 15 Mar 1995, updated
by M. Kalyakin, 26 Jan 2000 & 11 Nov 2001

address Zoological Museum, Orn. dept.,
Moscow Lomonosov State University
(Zoologicheskii Muzei MGU), Bolshaya
Nikitskaya Str. 6, 103009 Moscow (Moskva),
Russia

telephone #-7-95-203-4366,
fax #-7-95-203-2717, e-mail
tomkovic @ 1.zoomus.bio.msu.ru,
kalyakin @rambler.ru

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Pavel
Tomkovich (head), Dr Eugene A. Koblik
(specialised in Emberizidae and fauna of
former USSR), Dr Mikhail V. Kalyakin
(specialised in Sylviidae, Pycnonotidae,
anatomy, and fauna of Vietnam)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 2 scientific coll.

managers, 2 taxidermists

brief history Restarted in 1812 by J. G Fischer
von Waldheim after a fire had destroyed the
older museum in the Napoleontic War; part of
Moscow State University

references to history, collections, or types
Bogdanov (1892), Turov (1956), Sudilovskaya
(1959, 1962, 1972, 1977), Tomkovich &
Barisheva (1987), Rossolimo (1991)

important past bird staff J. G. Fischer von
Waldheim, M. N. Bogdanov, M. A. Menzbier,

S.A. Buturlin, S. I. Ognev, G P. Dementiev, N.

A. Gladkov, S. M. Uspenskii, E. P.
Spangenberg, A. M. Sudilovskaya, S. S. Turov
important colections were obtained from or

presented by V. N. Bostanzhoglo (Bostanjolo),

P. G Demidov, V. E. Flint, V. E. Fomin, V. A.
Khakhlov, A. P. Kuzyakin, G. Baron von
Langsdorf, V. V. Morozov, G. I. Polyakov, N.
A. Severtzov, S. S. Turov

approx. nr. of bird skins 117,000 (1,500
species)

other bird items 2,000 skeletons, 3,000 in
alcohol (500 species), 8,500 egg sets (often
with the nests) (600 species)

approx. recent annual increase in coll. 500-—
600 items (skins, egg sets, etc), from
expeditions, donations, and local birds skinned
by own taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Former
Soviet Union (especially the NE), Mongolia, N
& W China, Vietnam, Brazil, Japan, USA;
birds of prey, waders, gulls, owls, passerines
(e.g. Paridae); 300 types

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

card or computer system present all skins and
most egg sets & nests on card, only types on
computer

Moscow/Moskva (SDM)

Info from: E. Nesterov, 16 Jul 1996

address Darwin Museum, Vavilova Street 57,
117292 Moskva, Russia

telephone & fax #-7-95-135-33-76, e-mail
jennest @darwin.museum.ru

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Eugene V.
Nesterov (head), Igor V. Fadeev (curator)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, | curator, 1
secretary

brief history Founded in 1907 by Prof. A. F.
Koths; government-owned

references to history, collections, or types
Fadeev (1999)

important past bird staff —

important collections come from G. P.
Dementiev, M. N. Divnogorskii, V. A.
Khakhlov, A. M. Khomyakovy, A. P. Kuzyakin,
F. K. Lorentz, M. A. Menzbier, E. P.
Spangenberg, P. P. Sushkin

approx. nr. of bird skins 11,000 (1,500 species)

other bird items 50 skeletons, 1,000 egg sets,
150 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 150,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist,
expeditions, donations, and from zoos &
customs

bird skin collection specialised in worldwide;
all families, especially Tetraonidae, Anatidae,
Trochilidae; incl. Pinguinus impennis &
Ectopistes migratorius

card or computer system present all skins on
card and computer

Moscow/Moskva

(PIN RAS)

Info from: Y. Kurochkin, 10 Feb 2000

address Laboratory of Paleoherpetology and
Paleo-ornithology, Institute of Paleontology,
Russian Academy of Sciences, 123
Profsouznaya Streeet, 117868 Moscow GSP-7,
Russia

telephone #-7-95-339-6988, fax #-7-95-339-
1266, e-mail enkur@paleo.ru

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Yevgeny N.
Kurochkin (head), Dr Aleksandr Karhu

total staff of bird dept. See above.

C.S. Roselaar

brief history Founded 1962 by the Russian
Academy of Sciences

references to history, collections, or types
none (but see Wood et al. 1982)

important past bird staff —

important collections come from —

approx. nr. of bird skins none, but 5,000 bird
skeletons (1,500 species)

other bird items 70 in alcohol

approx. recent annual increase in skeleton
coll. 100, from own expeditions and zoo
specimens

bird collection specialised in skeletons

card or computer system present all skeletons
on card, part on computer

Munich/Miinchen (ZSM)

Info from: J. H. Reichholf, 07 Apr 1997, some
add. F. Steinheimer, Aug 2002

address Zoologische Staatssammlung,
Miinchhausenstrasse 21, D-81247 Miinchen,
Germany

telephone & fax #-49-89-8107-123 (81070:
general)

staff responsible for bird coll. Prof Dr Josef H.
Reichholf (head of bird department), Ms Ruth
Diesener (ass.)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 1 technical
assist., 1 taxidermist

brief history Founded in 1759 as private coll. of
Kurfiirst Maximilian II Joseph von Bayern,
but real growth only after arrival of von Spix in
1807, and again, after a 60-year gap in bird
activity, with C. E. Hellmayr in 1903; now
belongs to the Bayern government

references to history, collections, or types
Hellmayr (1928), Reichholf (1983)

important past bird staff J. B. von Spix, J.
Wagler, A. Wagner, F. Doflein, K. Parrot, H.
Sachtleben, E. Zugmayer, C. Hellmayr, C.
Zimmer, A. Laubmann, G. Diesselhorst

important collections come from G. von
Almasy, T. Andersen, Princes Therese von
Bayern, Canesi, Comte R. de Dalmas, K.
Deniger, H. Diirck, Exp. Filchner, A. Fischer, J.
Gengler, J. von Haast, K. Haberer, J. Haffer, B.
Hagen, J. C. van Hasselt, Haverschmidt, Keerl,
S. M. Klages, K. L. Koch, H. Krieg, H. Kuhl,
Kunkel, priv. coll. A. Laubmann (6,000 skins),
M. von Leuchtenberg, F. Leybold, L. Martin,
G. Merzbacher, K. Michahellis, L. Miiller, J.
Natterer, O. Neumann, Neunteufel, M. W.

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Palmer, Popp, M. Prager, G. Radde, J. Riedel,
A., H. & R. Schlagintweit, R. Schlegel, W.
Schliiter, J. von Seilern, Ph. F von Siebold, Lt.
Sommerfeld, E. Stechow, E. Stresemann, J. H.
C.F & J. W. Sturm, O. Tauern, R. von
Thanner, V. von Tschusi, H. & C. Watkins, H.
Weigold, L. von Wiedenfeld

approx. nr. of bird skins 60,000 (6,000
species)

other bird items almost nil

approx. recent annual increase in skins 50,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist,
donations, customs, etc.

bird skin collection specialised in Germany
(Bavaria, Pfalz), Corsica, Lithuania, Hungary,
Macedonia, Asia Minor, Iraq, Caucasus area, C
Asia (W Tibet, Tien Shan, Baluchistan, Nepal),
Sri Lanka, E China, Japan, Kuril Is, Indonesia
(e.g. Sumatra, Bangka, Timor, Buru, Misol),
NE New Guinea, Senegambia, Tanzania,
Mexico, Galapagos, South America (Colombia,
Venezuela, Trinidad, Brazil, Peru), etc.; over
400 types

card or computer system present part of skins
on card, none on computer

Munster (WMN)

Info from: H Terlutter, 30 Nov. 2001

address Westfalisches Museum fiir Naturkunde,
Sentruper Strabe 285, D-48149 Minster,
Germany

telephone #-49-25 1-5916014, e-mail
h.terlutter@1wl.org

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Heinrich
Terlutter

total staff of bird dept. 1

brief history Founded 1872 by Bernard Altum,
F. von Droste-Hiilshoff, and H. Landois,
opened 1874, considerably enlarged in 1891
and after the arrival of Rensch in 1937; owned
by Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe

references to history, collections, or types
Franzisket (1967)

important past bird staff F. von Droste-
Hiilshoff, H. Landois, R. Koch, H. Reeker, H.
Reichling, B. Rensch, L. Franzisket

important collections come from L. zu Salm-
Salm, A. Tenckhoff (eggs)

approx. nr. of bird skins 6,000

other bird items 20 (partial) skeletons, 600 egg
sets, 100 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 100

C.S. Roselaar

bird skin collection specialised in NW
Germany

card or computer system present In
preparation

Nantes (MHNNT)

Info from: Francois Meurgey, 29 Jan 2002

address Museum d Histoire Naturelle de
Nantes, 12 rue Voltaire, F-44000 Nantes,
France

telephone #-33-2-40-992620/ 992627, fax #-33-
2-40-51840191, e-mail
Francois.Meurgey @ mairie-nantes.fr

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Francois
Meurgey

total staff of bird dept. —

brief history Founded nineteenth century;
belongs to municipality of Nantes

references to history, collections, or types
Marchand & Kowalski (1903), Durand (1961),
Recorbet (1991)

important past bird staff Louis Bureau, J.
Kowalski

important collections come from Blandin,
Bonjour, Vian

approx. nr. of bird skins 22,100

other bird items 108 (partial) skeletons, 8,757
egg sets, 365 feather sets, 124 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins fewer
than 10

bird skin collection specialised in W France,
but also birds from elsewhere in Europe and
from Africa and Asia.

card or computer system present All on
computer (Taurus database)

Neuchatel (MHNNL)

Info from: B. Mulhauser, 26 Nov 2001

address Muséum d’ Histoire Naturelle de
Neuchatel, Rue des Terreaux 14, CH-2000
Neuchatel, Switzerland

tel. #-41-32-7177960, fax #-41-32-7177969, e-
mail blaise.mulhauser @mhnn.unine.ch

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Blaise
Mulhauser (curator of all vertebrates)

total staff of bird dept. 1 (see above)

brief history Founded 1835, but based on older
coll. of C. D. de Meuron presented to the city
in 1795); owned by the city of Neuchatel

references to history, collections, or types
Dufour & Haenni (1985) (history), Desfayes
(1994) (data on 91 types of Tschud: from Peru)

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

important past bird staff L. Coulon, P. Godet,
Louis Agassiz, M. Desfayes

important collections come from J. J. von
Tschudi, A. Mathey-Dupraz, F. Gehringer, S.
Robert (eggs),

approx. nr. of bird skins 10,000 (3,200
species)

other bird items 200 (partial) skeletons, 6,000
eggs, 200 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 30

bird skin collection specialised in Switzerland,
Europe generally, N USA (Agassiz), C & S
America (esp. Peru: Tschudi), Australia; incl.
91 types and 24 paratypes from Tschudi and
c.13 types from other authors

card or computer system present —

Newcastle (NEWHM)

Info from: L. Jessop, 07 Apr 1997

address The Hancock Museum, Barras Bridge,
Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne & Wear NE2 4PT,
WAKE

telephone #-44-191-222-7418, fax #-44-191-
222-6753, e-mail hancock.museum @ncl.ac.uk

staff responsible for bird coll. A. Coles
(curator of entire biology and geology coll.), L.
Jessop (keeper of biology [incl. birds]), E.
Morton (ass. keeper biology)

total staff of bird dept. Fewer than 1: see above
(no one specifically dedicated to bird coll.
only)

brief history Founded c.1760—-1770 as private
coll. of Marmaduke Tunstall; coll. went to
Newcastle in 1822, and belongs to the Natural
History Society of Northumbria since the latter
was founded in 1829

references to history, collections, or types
Howse (1899)

important past bird staff John Hancock,
Thomas Bewick

important collections come from Herb.
Stevens

approx. nr. of bird skins 12,000, incl. 2,000
mounts

other bird items 200 skeletons, 10 in alcohol,
10,000 egg sets, 1,000 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 10,
from own taxidermy

bird skin collection specialised in Great
Britain; India (Stevens coll., 4,050 skins,
received 1965); also, some types and 8 extinct
or endangered birds (catalogue of rarer birds in

prep.)

C.S. Roselaar

card or computer system present all skins on
computer; mounts not catalogued

Oslo (ZMUO)

Info from: J. Lifjeld, 12 Nov 1999

address Zoologisk Museum, Sars gate 1, N-
0562 Oslo, Norway

telephone #-47-22851726, fax #-47-22851837,
e-mail j.t.lifjeld@toyen.uio.no

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Jan T. Lifjeld

total staff of bird dept. 2

brief history —

references to history, collections, or types Ore
& Hgeg (1961) (history)

important past bird staff R. Collett, Edvard K.
Barth, R. Vik, Gunnar Lid, T. Slagsvold

important collections come from A. Bernoft-
Osa, Y. Hagen, C. Lumholtz, @. Olsen, H. T. L.
Schaanning, J. Koren, J. Thome

approx. nr. of bird skins 25,000, incl. 2,000—
4,000 mounts

other bird items 1,000 skeletons, 500 in spirit,
6,500 egg sets, 5,000 tissue samples

approx. recent annual increase in skins 50—
100

bird skin collection specialised in Norway,
Australia, Borneo, Antarctica, Siberia,
Svalbard, Tristan da Cunha

card or computer system present Skins, eggs,
and tissue samples on computer

Oxford (OUM)

Info from: J. Pickering, 1996

address Zoological Collections, Oxford
University Museum, Parks Road, Oxford OX1
3PW, U.K.

telephone #-44-1865-272950, fax #-44-1865-
272970

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Tom Kemp
(curator of the zoological colls.), Jane
Pickering M.Sc. (assistant curator of birds)

total staff of bird dept. 0.5 head, | ass. curator,
1 technician

brief history Founded in 1683 as private coll. of
J. Tradescant when the Ashmole coll. arrived in
Oxford; coll. came to Oxford University in
1860

references to history, collections, or types
Davies & Hull (1976, 1983)

important past bird staff ‘many’

important collections come from O. V. Aplin,
Sir John Barrow, W. J. Burchell, C. & E. Hose,

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

F. P. Pascoe, HS) RohuyS=W2silver ieee
Thomas, W. H. Treacher, C. M. N. White

approx. nr. of bird skins 19,000 (“many
species’ )

other bird items 1,500 skeletons, 500 in
alcohol, 2,000 egg sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins 20,
from donations

bird skin collection specialised in Britain,
South Africa, Borneo, Sulawesi, New Guinea,
Ecuador, Brazil, Arctic, New Zealand

card or computer system present all skins on
card, none on computer

Paris (MNHN)

Info from: E. Pasquet, 07 May 1997, updated 14
Nov 1999

address Muséum National d’ Histoire Naturelle,
Laboratoire de Zoologie, dep Mammifeéres et
Oiseaux, 55 Rue de Buffon, F-75005 Paris,
France

telephone #-33-1-40793062, fax #-33-1-
40973063, e-mail pasquet@ mnhn.-fr,
lefevre @mnhn.fr

staff responsible for bird coll. Eric Pasquet
(curator of bird coll.), Christine Lefevre
(curator of skeletons), Géraldine Veron, C.
Voisin, J.-F. Voisin, C. Jouanin (volunteer
associate)

total staff of bird dept. See above; also 1
technician, | taxidermist, 1 secretary (for Dept.
of Birds & Mammals), | librarian (for entire
Zoology Lab.)

brief history Founded in 1793, when the older
colls. of Réaumur, Brisson, and the Cabinet du
Roi went to the Muséum d’ Histoire Naturelle;
owned by the French government

references to history, collections, or types
Berlioz (1929, 1935, 1950), Jouanin (1951,
1962), Voisin (1992, 1993, 1995)

important past bird staff G-L. Buffon, F.
Cuvier, J. Verreaux, R. P. Lesson, E. & I.
Geoffroy de St Hilaire, A. Milne-Edwards, E.
Oustalet, A. Ménégaux, J. Berlioz, R. D.
Etchécopar, J. Dorst, F. Roux

important collections come from G. Babault,
N. Baudin, J. A. Bernier, G. Bonvalot, A.
Boucard, J. Bourcier, Maison Bouvier, W.
Bullock coll./Mus. Leverianum (see Vienna/
Wien), M. J. Brisson, A. A. Bruijn, Pére
Armand David, A. David-Beaulieu, Jean
Delacour, P. A. Delalande, P. M. Diard, L.
Dufresne, J. Dumont d’ Urville, L. Duperrey,

C.S. Roselaar

Maison Dupont, A. Duvaucel, P. Engelbach, L.
Freycinet, J. P. Gaimard, P. Garnot, J. B.
Hombron, P. Jabouille, C. & H. Jacquinot,
Baron Meiffren Laugier, J. Leschenault de la
Tour, F. Levaillant, Marche, R. Maugé de Cely,
H. Moschler, R. de Naurois, A. Néboux, Prince
Henri d’ Orléans, Maison Parzudaki, F. Péron,
Maison Petit, A. A. du Petit-Thouars, F.
Prévost, J. Pucheran, J. R. C. Quoy, R. H.
Schomburgk, Maison Verreaux, L. P. Vieillot,
Voy. Astrolabe, Voy. Astrolabe & Zélée, Voy.
Coquille, Voy. Géographe, Voy. Naturaliste,
Voy. Urania, Voy. Vénus, K.Y. Yen

approx. nr. of bird skins 161,000, incl.
c.30,000 mounts (6,755 species: c.75% of all
bird species)

other bird items 8,000 skeletons, c.2,000 birds
in spirits, 300+ tissue samples, 5,000 egg sets,
many nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins below
100, from local birds skinned by own
taxidermist and own expeditions (few at
present)

bird skin collection specialised in worldwide,
but especially Afrotropics, Madagascar, China,
SE Asia, Indonesia, Australia, Pacific islands,
(sub)antarctic islands, C & S America; c.2,620
types, many extinct and endangered birds;
8,500 skins from France

card or computer system present types,
skeletons, and bird skins from France on
computer

Pisa (MSNTP)

Info from: M. Zuffi, 19 Nov 2001

address Museo di Storia Naturale e del
Territorio, Universita di Pisa, Via Roma 79, I-
56011 Calci (Pisa), Italy

telephone #-39-50-937092, fax #-39-50-
937778, e-mail marcoz@museo.unipi.it

staff responsible for bird coll. Marco A. L.
Zuffi (Curator of Zoology and Comparative
Anatomy of non-mammal vertebrates)

total staff of bird dept See above

brief history Founded about 1750, now belongs
to the University of Pisa

references to history, collections, or types Savi
(1927-1929) (on Savi coll.), Secone & Zuffi
(1996) (catalogue of nests and eggs)

important past bird staff Paolo Savi

important collections come from An
anonymous person from Lucca (donated many
local birds in early 1900s)

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

approx. nr. of bird skins 10,000 (incl c.9,000
mounts)

other bird items 275 (partial) skeletons, 50 in
alcohol, 1,100 eggs, 800 nests, 450 anatomical
preparations

approx. recent annual increase in skins 15—20

bird skin collection specialised in Italy, esp.
Pisa area and Toscana region generally (e.g. the
Savi coll., containing the types of several well-
known European taxa, but Savi material is
partly lost); also the Americas, C & S Africa,
Middle East, SE Asia, Australia, with birds of
virtually all families, incl. extinct birds like
Fregilupus varius and Pinguinus impennis

card or computer system present 3,500 birds
on card and computer

Prague/Praha (MNHP or NM Praha)

Info from: Pavel Janda, 21 Jan 2000

address Narodni Muzeum, Zoologické oddelenti,
Vaclavské namesti 68, CZ-11579 Praha 1,
Czech Republic

telephone #-42-2-2449 7224, fax #-42-2-2422
6488, e-mail milos.andera@nm.cz (Milos
Andera, head of zool dept)

staff responsible for bird coll. Pavel Janda
(coll. manager), Pavel Kamenik (assistant)

total staff of bird dept See above

brief history Founded 1818, owned by the
government

references to history, collections, or types
Varga (1973), Stepanek (1975) (history)

important past bird staff Antonin Fric, Jan
Hanzak, Jan Hora, Frantisek Pojer

important collections come from C. von
Feldegg, J. V. Voboril, E. Holub, Duke L. von
Habsburg, K. Knezourek, A. Horice, J.
Musilek, J. von Seilern, K. Plachetka, B. K.
Kinsky, J. Jirsik, F. Hromadka, F. Mocek, M.
Vach, J. Urbanek, R. Prazny

approx. nr. of bird skins 22,000 skins

other bird items 120 skeletons, 900 sternums,
4,400 egg sets; head and bones of a Dodo
Raphus cucullatus, adult & juvenile of
Pinguinus impennis, pair of Camptorhynchus
labradorius, etc

approx. recent annual increase in skins 10,
from local birds and zoo specimens skinned by
own taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Bohemia,
Balkan, E Siberia, South & North America,
South Africa, New Guinea; Trochilidae (10,000
skins)

C.S. Roselaar

card or computer system present most on
card, part of the mounts on computer

Prerov (MOSPrerov)

info from: Frantisek Hanak, 8 Dec 1999

address Muzeum J. A. Komenského, Moravska
ornitologicka stanice, Horni namesti 1, 751 52
Prerov, Czech Republic

telephone #-420-641-219910

staff responsible for bird coll. Frantisek Hanak
(head), Jilji Sitko (helminthology of birds)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 2 coll.
managers, | taxidermist, | librarian, 1 other

brief history Founded in 1970, owned by the
government

references to history, collections, or types
Hanak (1991), Sitko (1986, 1991, 1996); also
Zpravy MOS 37 (1979): 9-35

important past bird staff Frantisek Hejl

important collections come from F. Hejl, L.
Holub, Zdenek Kluz, O. Lipecky, J. Rehurek,
V. Sajdl, V. Tichy, Jiri Toufar (eggs), Z. Verbis,
En VEZ,

approx. nr. of bird skins 6,100 (393 species)
skins remaining after flooding of coll. in Jul
1997

other bird items 1,700 sternums (110 species).
3,060 egg sets (12,665 eggs, of 181 species),
14,000 trematodes of birds

approx. recent annual increase in skins 100,
from own expeditions, donations, and local
birds skinned by own taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Moravia,
Czech Republic generally; also, 463 exotic
birds (330 species).

note The floods of July 1997 destroyed part of
the original skin series and 50% of the books
and journals.

card or computer system present All on card,
part on computer

Reykjavik (IMNH /NHMR)

Info from: 2. Petersen, 02 Aug 1996

address Icelandic Institute of Natural History
(Natttrufraedistafnun Islands, formerly
Icelandic Museum of Natural History), P.O.
Box 5320, IS-125 Reykjavik, Iceland (visitors
address: Hlemmur 3)

telephone #-354-56-29822, fax #-354-56-
20815, e-mail ni@nattfs.is, or: aevar@nattfs.is

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr var
Petersen

284 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 1 taxidermist.
c.1 other (various part-time helpers)

brief history Founded in 1889 by the Icelandic
Natural History Society; to Iceland government
from 1947

references to history, collections, or types
Petersen (1984)

important past bird staff Finnur Gudmundsson

important collections come from —

approx. nr. of bird skins 14,000 (450 species)

other bird items 1,500 skeletons, 100 in
alcohol, 2,600 egg sets, 650 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 200,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist,
own expeditions, and donations

bird skin collection specialised in Iceland:
Greenland, Faeroes

card or computer system present 90% of skins
on card and computer (these almost all
Icelandic birds, but not rechecked yet to coll.)

Rome/Roma (MZGZ)

(questionnaire not returned; some info from C.
Violani, 14 Nov 1999 & N. Baccetti 6 Apr
2000)

address Museo Civico di Zoologia di Roma, Via
Aldrovandi 18, I-00197 Roma, Italy

telephone and fax #-39-6-3216586, e-mail

staff responsible for bird coll. R. Carlini
(head), B. Cignini

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 2 taxidermists

brief history ?

references to history, collections, or types
Arrigoni degli Oddi (1929), Foschi er al. (1995,
1996)

important past bird staff A. Carruccio

important collections come from E. Arrigoni
degli Oddi (10,373 skins), Antinori, F. Chigi
della Rovere, M. Blanc, G. von Burg, Collett,
Dal Nero, Lepri, Loria, G. B. Dinesen, Farren,
Gallardo, M. Harms, Melloni, A. Owston, D.
Rossi, W. Schliiter, R. Baron Snouckaert van
Schauburg, R. von Thanner, V. von Tschusi,
Mus. Zagreb

approx. nr. of bird skins 15.000

other bird items ?

approx. recent annual increase in skins ?

bird skin collection specialised in Italy (esp.
Veneto and Sardinia), Europe, Tunisia, Borneo.
New Guinea

card or computer system present the Arrigoni
coll. is catalogued on computer

C.S. Roselaar

note A small coll. of 306 mounted birds, largely
from Lazio with some from the remainder of
Italy and 4 from abroad is owned by Prince
Ruspoli, in the Palazzo Ruspoli di Cervetari in
Roma (Avocetta 25: 153).

Rotterdam (NMR)

Info from: Kees Moeliker, 16 Oct 1999

address Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, Westzeedijk
345 (Museumpark), 3015 AA Rotterdam/
POBox 23452, 3001 KL Rotterdam,
Nederland.

telephone #-3 1-10-4364 222, fax #31-10-4364
399, e-mail moeliker@nmr.nl.

staff responsible for bird coll. Drs C. W.
(‘Kees’) Moeliker (curator, also for other
animals)

total staff of bird dept. C. W. Moeliker, Dr C.
J. Heij (honorary curator), Dr E. J. O.
Kompanje (honorary curator)

brief history Founded 1920; owned by a
society, the Vereniging Natuurmuseum
Rotterdam

references to history, collections, or types
none

important past bird staff C. Eykman

important collections come from Coll. of the
Rotterdam Zoological Garden, received in
1939, containing many important historical
specimens from the Netherlands

approx. nr. of bird skins 2,200 (including
1,200 mounts) (c.350 species)

other bird items 5,000 skeletons & skulls (300
species), 300 birds in alcohol, 500 egg sets, 50
buffered tissue samples

approx. recent annual increase in skin/
skeleton coll. 250, from donations, exchanges,
and local birds skinned by own taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Europe
(especially the Netherlands), a few Indonesia;
skeletons of Laridae

card or computer system present 50% on card,

10% on computer

Sarajevo

Info from: Svjetoslav Obratil & Denana
Buturovic, 30 Dec 1999

address Zemaljski Muzej Bosne 1 Hercegovina
Sarajevo (National Museum of Bosnia and
Herzegovina), Zmaja od Bosne 3, BiH-71000
Sarajevo, Bosna i Hercegovina

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

telephone #-387-71-668025 fax #-387-71-
668027

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Svjetoslav
Obratil (curator of birds), Dr Drazen Kotrosan
(bird scientist), Zuza Borivoje (bird
taxidermist), Dr Denana Buturovic (director of
entire museum)

total staff of bird dept. See above

brief history Founded as Landesmuseum fiir
Bosnien-Hercegowina in 1888, with Otmar
Reiser as first director (to 1914). Now owned
by the Sarajevo Canton of the Federation of
Bosnia and Herzegovina

references to history, collections, or types
Reiser (1891)

important past bird staff Otmar Reiser, C.
Floericke, L. von Fiihrer, K. Schilling von
Canstatt, Dr Siyaric

important collections come from Reiser’s coll.
of c.9,500 Balkan skins

approx. nr. of bird skins 10,234 (incl. 1,255
mounts) (over 400 species)

other bird items 4,112 eggs (neglected since
arrival in 1892), 90 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins ?

bird skin collection specialised in Balkan
countries and Greece; 696 exotic species

card or computer system present none, only
inventory books

Sevenoaks (HZM)

Info from: Paul Bates, 02 Apr 1997

address The Harrison Zoological Museum,
Bowerwood House, St Botolph’s Road,
Sevenoaks, Kent TN13 3AQ, England

telephone & fax #-44-1732-742446, e-mail
hzm @btinternet.com

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Paul Bates

total staff of bird dept. | part-time coll.
manager (for entire coll., not for birds only)

brief history Founded in 1920 as the private
coll. of James M. Harrison; now a private
charitable trust

references to history, collections, or types
none [but, e.g. Harrison (1953) was based on
coll. ]

important past bird staff James M. Harrison,
Jeffery Harrison, David Harrison

important collections come from large private
colls. of W. Payne and C. B. Ticehurst; also,
skins of E. Fliikiger, K. Kobayashi, P. Patev
(Pateff), etc

C.S. Roselaar

approx. nr. of bird skins 19,500

other bird items a few skeletons, nothing else

approx. recent annual increase in skins 2,
local birds

bird skin collection specialised in Palearctic;
emphasis on ducks, waders, and passerines

card or computer system present all on card
system and on computer

Seville/Sevilla (EBD)

Info from: J. Cabot Nieves, 08 Aug 1996

address Estacion Biologica de Donana, Consejo
Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas
(CSIC), Aptdo 1056, E-41080 Sevilla, Spain
(visitors address: Avda. Maria Luisa s/n.
Pabellon del Pera, E-41013 Sevilla)

telephone #-34-95-4232340 (or -8, -9), fax #-
34-95-4621125

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr José (Pepe)
Cabot Nieves

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 3 coll.
managers, 2 taxidermists

brief history Founded in 1970 by Dr J. A.
Valverde; now managed by the Consejo
Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC)

references to history, collections, or types
Cabot Nieves (1992)

important past bird staff J. A. Valverde

important collections come from Dr
Castroviejo, Dr M. Delibes

approx. nr. of bird skins 22,000 (1,574
species)

other bird items 1,000 skeletons, 575 in
alcohol, 1,344 egg sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins 1,000,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist
and expeditions

bird skin collection specialised in Spain,
Portugal, Morocco, Algeria, Western Sahara,
Gabon, Equitorial Guinea, Sao Tomé, Principe,
Philippines, Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela,
Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Argentina

card or computer system present all skins in
catalogue book, c.75% on computer

Sibiu (MBS)

Info from: Doru Banaduc, 10 Dec 2001

address Muzeul Brukenthal — Muzeul de Istorie
Naturala, 1 Cetatii Street, RO-2400 Sibiu,
Romania

telephone #-40-69-436868/ 09-2604338, e-mail
banaduc @ yahoo.com

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Doru
Banaduc (curator for all vertebrates)

total staff of bird dept. See above

brief history The natural history dept. of the
museum was founded in 1849 by the
Siebenbiirgischen Verein fiir
Naturwissenschaften; now belongs to the
Ministerul culturii of Romania

references to history, collections, or types
Popescu (1986)

important past bird staff E. A. Bielz, F. W.
Stetter, D. Czekelius sr., K. Fuss, C. F. Jickel,
W. Knopfler, W. Hausmann, A. Miiller, A.
Neugeboren, E. Witting, A. von Spief, C.
Orendi, Alexius Buda, A. Kamner, D.
Stanescu, H. Stein, C. Popescu, I. W6rdinger

important collections come from F. W. Stetter,
J. Gromer, P. Theil, Adam Buda, J. KF & F.
Binder, C. Melisca, K. Neugeboren, A.
Senoner, R. Klement

approx. nr. of bird skins 2,526 (of which
c.2,000 mounted)

other bird items 594 skeletons & skulls, 1,575
eggs, 603 birds in alcohol and nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins
strongly variable

bird skin collection specialised in mainly
regional, but also includes birds from
elsewhere in Romania and Europe, and 429
exotic birds

card or computer system present both
partially only

Siena (MZAFS)

Info from: N. Baccetti, 5 Apr 2000

address Museo Zoologico dell’ Accademia dei
Fisiocritici, Piazza Sant’ Agostino 4, I-53100
Siena, Italia

telephone #-39-0577-47002, fax #-39-0577-
47002, e-mail cancelli@unisi.it

staff responsible for bird coll. Prof. Baccio
Baccetti (supervisor of Zoological Museum),
Fabrizio Cancelli (coll. manager and
taxidermist), Dr Nicola Baccetti, Dr Francesco
Pezzo (volunteer associates)

total staff of bird dept. 1 coll. manager and
taxidermist (for all animals)

brief history Founded 1759 by G Baldassarni;
all pre-1798 specimens destroyed by
earthquake. Main period of activity 1840—
1910. Oldest published catalogue: Baldacconi
(1845). The colls. were largely neglected
during 1935-1970, but the museum re-opened

C.S. Roselaar

in 1972, when also old colls. of the University
of Siena (dating from 1900-1930) were added
and a modern taxidermy laboratory was
founded

references to history, collections, or types
Ricci (1972), Baccetti (1885), Baccetti (1996),
Cancelli et al. (in prep.)

important past bird staff Massimiliano Ricca,
Apelle Dei, Sigismondo Brogi

important collections come from A. Dei,
Baron B. Ricasoli, C. Passerini, with 327, 507,
resp. 206 specimens still existing; a few
duplicates from Savi (ante 1840).

approx. nr. of bird skins 2,556 (810 species);
mainly mounts —

other bird items a few skeletons

approx. recent annual increase in skins 50,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist
and donations

bird skin collection specialised in Central Italy
(1,099 birds from Tuscany). Coll. includes
skins of several endangered birds (e.g.
Numentus borealis, N. tenuirostris, Strigops
habroptilus etc.)

card or computer system present All on
computer; several old partial catalogues

Sofia (NMNHS/NZMS)

Info from: Z. Boev, 04 Apr 1997, updated 13
Nov 1999 and 10 Nov 2001

address National Museum of Natural History,
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Blv. Tsar
Osvoboditel 1, BG-1000 Sofia, Bulgaria

telephone #-359-2-9879326, fax #-359-2-
9882897, e-mail nmnhzb@bgcict.acad.bg or
boevzaro @ yahoo.co.uk

staff responsible for bird coll. Prof. Dr
Zlatozar Boev (head of fossil and recent bird
dept.)

total staff of bird dept. | head/ coll. manager, |
secretary; also (for entire museum) |
taxidermist, | librarian

brief history Founded in 1889 by King
Ferdinand I Sachsen Coburg-Gotha of
Bulgaria, grew rapidly but part of coll. lost in
fire in March 1944; now belongs to the
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

references to history, collections, or types
Anon. (1907), Boev (1990, 1991, 1994, 1997)

important past bird staff Ferdinand I of
Bulgaria, P. Leverkiihn, Boris III of Bulgaria,

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

K. Andersen, H. Gretzer, P. Patev, N. Boev, S.
Donchev

important collections come from Amedé
Alleon, Stuart Baker, H. von Boetticher, I.
Buresch, E. Holub, Julius, E. Werner (700
birds, from 19 countries)

approx. nr. of bird skins 15,500 (incl. 4,155
mounts) (1,200 species)

other bird items 13,000 (sub)fossil remains
(23% of the fossil bird species known), 2,000
skeletons, 50 in alcohol, 260 egg sets, 12 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 20,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist;
also, many fossils added

bird skin collection specialised in Bulgaria,
European Turkey (Alleon coll.), N Germany
(Werner coll.), India; 11 Numenius tenuirostris

card or computer system present all skins on
card system, none on computer

Stavanger

Info from: K. Skipnes, 31 Jan 2000

address Stavanger Museum, Zoologisk
Avdeling, Musé gt. 16, N-4010 Stavanger,
Norway

telephone #-47-5184 2711, fax #-47-5184 2701,
e-mail kolbjorn.skipnes @
stavanger.museum.no website www.
stavanger.museum.no

staff responsible for bird coll. Kolbjgrn
Skipnes (curator), Olav Runde (head)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 1 curator, |
taxidermist, | secretary, | assistant (all for
entire zoology coll.)

brief history Founded 1877

references to history, collections, or types
Skipnes (1989), Runde (1991)

important past bird staff H. Tho. L.
Schaanning, A. Berhhoft-Osa, Holger
Holgersen

important collections come from J. Koren,
Voy. Maud

approx. nr. of bird skins 4,200 (944 species)

other bird items ?

approx. recent annual increase in skins ?

bird skin collection specialised in Rogaland
area (W Norway), Norway generally, Novaya
Zemlya, Arctic Siberia

card or computer system present all on card,
part on computer

C.S. Roselaar

Stockholm (NRM)

Info form: P. Ericson, 31 Oct 1995, updated 13
Nov 1999

address Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet, Research
dept., Sektionen for Vertebratzoologi, Box
50007, S-10405 Stockholm, Sweden (visitors
address: Frescativagen 44)

telephone #-46-8-666-4000, fax #-46-8-666-
4212, e-mail p.ericson@nrm.se

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Per Ericson
(head), Goran Frisk (coll. manager), Dr Carl
Edelstam (retired, voluntary associate)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 1 coll. manager,

3 taxidermists, 1 other

brief history Founded in 1739 as cabinet of the
Royal Academy of Sciences (under presidency
of C. von Linné), but a real increase in the coll.
size occurred only when a new building was
erected 1819-1820, when also the private coll.
of G. von Paykull arrived. A few hundreds of
specimens from the last decades of the
eighteenth century are still present. Now
belongs to the Swedish government

references to history, collections, or types
Lonnberg (1926), Gyldenstolpe (1926)

important past bird staff Anders Sparrman,
Sven Nilsson, Carl J. Sundevall, Fredrik A.
Smitt, Friedrich W. Meves, Einar Lonnberg,
Nils Gyldenstolpe, Carl Edelstam

important collections come from Adelborg, J.
G. Anderson, K. Backstrom, O. Bamberg, C.
Bangert, S. Bergman, Dr Bovallius, Von
Carlsson, Eisenhofer, G. W. FreyreiB, S. H.
Granvik, J. W. Grill, J. Hedenborg, S. Hedin,
G. von Hofsten, P. A. Holst, G Kolthoff, K. E.
Laman, S. Lovén, E. P. Mjéberg, Nathorst, R.
Nicolin, Nordenskidld, A. M. Ollala, H.
Sandeberg, B. Y. Sjéstedt, K. G Sd6derbom, L.
Sdderstrom, P. Spatz, T. F. Tullberg, J. F.
Victorin, Voy. Eugenie, Voy. Vega, J. A.
Wahlberg, General Westin, G. de Wylder, O.
Graf von Zedlitz (private coll. of c.7,500 skins,
stored separately)

approx. nr. of bird skins 105,000 (c.6—7,000
species)

other bird items 13,000 skeletons, 1,100 in
alcohol, 27,000 egg sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins 100
skins & 900 skeletons/alcohol specimens, from
expeditions and local birds skinned by own
taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Sweden,
Fenno-Scandia, Arctic (Greenland, Iceland,

288

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Svalbard, North European Russia), Iran, C & E
Asia (Kamchatka, Kuril Is., Sakhalin, China,
Mongolia, Tien Shan), Thailand, Malaya, N,
NE, C & S Africa, New Guinea, Nicaragua,
Galapagos Is., South America, Middle East

card or computer system present all skins on
card, 95% of skins, skeletons, and eggs on
computer

St Petersburg/Sankt-Peterburg

(ZISP)

Info from: V. Loskot, 25 Aug 1995

address Zoologicheskii Institut, Rossiiskoi
Akademii Nauk (Russian Academy of
Sciences), dept of Ornithology,
Universitetskaya nab. 1, 199034 Sankt-
Peterburg, Russia

telephone #-7-812-2180011, fax #-7-812-114-
04444, e-mail SOA @ZISP.SPB.SU

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Vladimir M.
Loskot (head), Dr L.V. Firsova, A.V. Panteleev,
Dr A.M. Sokolov, Dr E.P Sokolov

total staff of bird dept. | head, | coll. manager,
3+ others

brief history Founded in c.1714 as private
‘Kunstkamer’ of Peter the Great, but intense
skin collectioning occurred only from c.1820
onwards; from 1832, the coll. became part of
the Zoological Museum of the Imperial
Acadademy of Sciences (now Russian
Academy of Sciences)

references to history, collections, or types
Neufeldt (1978), Scarlato (1982), Sokolov &
Il’ yashenko (1987)

important past bird staff J. F. Brandt, T. (= F.
D.) Pleske, N. M. Przhevalskii, V. L. Bianchi,
P. P. Sushkin, B. K. Stegmann, E. V. Kozlova,
A. Ya. Tugarinov, L. A. Portenko, A. I. Ivanov,
K.-A. Yudin, I. A. Neufeldt

important collections come from K. M. Baer,
M. M. Berezowskii, T. T. Brandt, Bykov, V. S.
Elpatev, E. A. Eversmann, J. P. Falk, L. von
Fiihrer, S. G. Gmelin, G. E. & M. E. Grum-
Grzhimailo, J. A. Giildenstadt, C. L. Hablizl, F.
H. von Kittlitz (754 specimens), P. K. Kozlov,
K. Krebs, G. H. Baron von Langsdorff, I.
Lepechin, R. K. Maak, M. A. Menzbier, C.
Merck, A. von Middendorff, P. S. Pallas, M. V.
Pevtsov, G. N. Potanin, F. L. Potapov, G.
Radde, J. Riedel, V. I. Roborovski, L. von
Schrenck, N. A. Severtzov, L. M. Shulpin, G.
W. Steller (1 certain specimen only), P. P.

C.S. Roselaar

Sushkin, Voy. Nadezhda, Voy. Senyavin, I. G
Voznesenski, N. A. Zarudny

approx. nr. of bird skins 170,000 (4,240
species)

other bird items 2,700 skeletons, 7,500 in
alcohol, c.20,000 eggs and nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 150,
from own expeditions

bird skin collection specialised in former
Soviet-Union, Mongolia, China, Poland,
Brazil, North Pacific

card or computer system present all skins on
card, alcohol and skeletons on computer.

St Petersburg/Sankt-Peterburg

(ZM SPBU)

Info from: Irina Savinich, 28 Jan 2000

address Zoological Museum, Dept of Vertebrate
Zoology, Faculty of Biology and Soil Sciences,
St Petersburg State University,
Universitetskaya nab. 7/9, 199034 Sankt-
Peterburg, Russia

telephone #-7-8 12-324 0885, fax #-7-812-328
9689, e-mail irene @isav.usr.pu.ru

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Irina
Savinich (curator, senior lecturer)

total staff of bird dept. | curator

brief history Founded 1819, but real increase
not until arrival of S. Kutorga in 1833 and
especially K. Kessler in 1862. Now part of the
University

references to history, collections, or types
Shimkevich & Vagner (1899), Raykov (1953),
Malchevsky & Polyansky (1969) (ail on
history)

important past bird staff V. Andreevsky, Th.
Pleske, W. Shimkevich, M. Bogdanov, A.
Nikolsky, E. Buchner, V. Bianki, K. Derjugin,
P. Kashkarov, L. Shulpin, A. Malchevsky

important collections come from Prince Alexis
of Russia, Bilkevich, Meves (eggs)

approx. nr. of bird skins 4,500 (1,100 species),
incl. mounts

other bird items 150 skeletons, 150 spirit
specimens, 140 frozen tissue samples, 800 egg
sets, 100 nests, and 1,160 recordings of birds
sounds

approx. recent annual increase in skins 40,
from own expeditions, donations, and local
birds skinned by own taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Russia,
Central Asia

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

card or computer system present part on card,
with another part of the card system burnt in
1995; computerisation just started

Strasbourg (MZS)

Info from: Elisabeth Lang, 6 Dec 2001

address Musée zoologique de |’ Université
Louis Pasteur et de la Ville de Strasbourg, 29
Boulevard de la Victoire, F-67000 Strasbourg,
France

telephone #-33-3-90-240489 or -90, fax #-33-3-
90-240558, e-mail elang @cus-strasbourg.net,
website www.mairie-strasbourg.fr

staff responsible for bird coll. Mme Elisabeth
Lang (head conservator), Marie-Dominique
Wandhammer (birds)

total staff of bird dept. 2 (see above)

brief history Based on a coll. of c.900 birds of
Johann Hermann, started in 1760 (but few of
these remain), later bought by the Ville de
Strasbourg and serving as a base for a museum;
still belongs to the city of Strasbourg but
jointly curated by the university and city

references to history, collections, or types
Koenig (1993, 1994) (catalogues of
Madagascar birds and Anseriformes)

important past bird staff P. Koenig, O.
Langrand

important collections come from Von Berg,
Berger, G. A. Frank, Lantz, Mus. Saint-Denis
(Réunion), Pougnet, Pouillet, G. Schneider,
Sicard, Ursch, Wehrung

approx. nr. of bird skins 18,000 (incl. mounts)

other bird items 50 (partial) skeletons, 17 in
liquid, 2,000 eggs sets, 300 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 20

bird skin collection specialised in worldwide
(e.g. over 300 from Madagascar), all families
(e.g. 720 ducks of 120 species); includes
extinct birds like Camptorhynchus labradorius
and Rhodonessa caryophyllacea

card or computer system present all on card

Stuttgart (SMNS)

Info from: M. Grabert, 06 Nov 1996; updated
Friederike Woog, 11 Jan 2002

address Staatliches Museum fiir Naturkunde,
Rosenstein 1, D-70191 Stuttgart, Germany
(visitors address: Museum SchlofB Rosenstein)

telephone tel. #-49-711-8936-253, fax #-49-
711-8936-200, e-mail woog.smns @
naturkundemuseum-bw.de

C.S. Roselaar

staff responsible for collection Dr Claus K6nig
(director), Dr Friederike Woog (curator of
birds), Severine Mattes (taxidermist), Holger
Haag (scientific assistant)

total staff of bird dept. | curator, 1 coll.
manager, | taxidermist, 5 volunteers

brief history Founded in 1791 by Herzog C.-E.
von Wiirttemberg; now belongs to the
government of Baden-Wiirttemberg

references to history, collections, or types Van
den Elzen & Konig (1983), Konig (1991)

important past bird staff Ernst Schiiz, M.
Grabert

important collections come from T. Andersen,
C. von Barth, A. Boucard, Chevalier, Coll.
Duoc, Duve, Elliot, A. Fischer (6,000 skins), G.
Frank, K. Fritsche, W. & P. Gatter, H. Griin, H.
Gude, Th. von Heuglin, H. von Hochstetter, G.
Hoy, A. Kappler, C. F H. Baron von Ludwig,
H. Moschler, F. von Miiller, G. Nikolaus, W.
Salzmann, F. Sarg, W. Schliiter, F. K. I. Streich,
Herzog Paul von Wirttemberg

approx. nr. of bird skins 70,000, incl. 15,000
mounts (5,500 species)

other bird items 6,000 (partial) skeletons,
10,000 egg sets, 1,000 nests, 8,000 spread
wings

approx. recent annual increase in skins 200,
from expeditions, local birds skinned by own
taxidermist, and buying of colls.

bird skin collection specialised in Palearctic,
South America (e.g. Surinam), Liberia,
Tanzania, and many other parts of the world

card or computer system present most skins
on card, c.50% on computer

Tartu

Info from: Rainer Ilisson, 13 January 2000

address Zooloogia muuseum/ Museum of
Zoology, Tartu Ulikool/Tartu University,
Vanemuise Str. 46, EE-51014 Tartu, Estonia

telephone #-372-7-375833, e-mail jux @ut.ee,
jluig @ut.ee, webpage http://www.ut.ee/
~BGZM

staff responsible for bird coll. Rainer Ilisson
(birds), Jaan Luig (chief curator all animals)

total staff of bird dept. 1 (see above)

brief history Founded 1802, but the coll. was
mainly formed in 1905-1912 (when birds from
various parts of Russia arrived) and in 1920s—
1930s and 1950s (largely birds from Estonia).
Owned by University of Tartu

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

references to history, collections, or types
Ilisson (1992) (skins), Ong (1996) (eggs)

important past bird staff V. Russow, M.
Harms, J. Piiper, J. Lepiksaar, E. Kumari

important collections come from A. Graf
Keyserling, O. von Koch (eggs & nests), both
private, and the coll. of the Institute of Zoology
and Botany of the Academy of Sciences of
Estonia (Dr Vilju Lilleleht)

approx. nr. of bird skins 8,500 (over 800
species)

other bird items 2,000 skeletons (c.150
species), c.3,000 egg sets (357 species), 100
nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins a few

bird skin collection specialised in Estonia;
former Soviet Union generally

card or computer system present skins and
eggs on card, but not skeletal material

Terrasini

Info from: N. Vitale, 25 Aug 1997

address Museo di Storia Naturale di Terrasini,
Via Cala Rossa 14, 90049 Terrasini (Palermo),
Sicilia, Italy

telephone #-39-091-868 2497, fax #-39-091-
868 2420

staff responsible for bird coll. Sig. Nino Vitale
(curator), Bruno Massa (pres. Scient. Com.),
Vittorio E. Orlando, Marcello Arnone
(honorary curators)

total staff of bird dept. | head, 1 taxidermist, 1
librarian

brief history Founded c.1928—1930 by C.
Orlando; now, the buildings owned by the
Municipality of Terrasini, the colls. by the
Sicily Region

references to history, collections, or types
Arnone & Orlando (1990), Massa (1977),
Orlando (1978, 1990a,b, 1991, 1995a,b)

important past bird staff C. Orlando

important collections come from Sig. Ajola,
M. Arnone, M. Jannizzotto, C. & V. E.
Orlando, A. Trischitta, F. Venezia, A. Vitale

approx. nr. of bird skins 8,000 (600 species)

other bird items 25 skeletons, 15 in alcohoi,
150 egg sets, 316 nests, 4,000 various

approx. recent annual increase in skins ?,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Sardinia,
Sicily, mainland Italy, Europe. Together 5,781
birds from coll. C. Orlando, 1,895 coll. A.

C.S. Roselaar

Trischitta, 284 coll. M. Jannizzotto, and 120
coll. A. Vitale; types of 14 taxa

card or computer system present all skins on
card and computer

Tervuren (KMMA/ MRAC)

Info from: M. Louette, 25 Jan 1995

address Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-
Afrika / Musée Royal de I’ Afrique Centrale,
Steenweg op Leuven 13, B-3080 Tervuren,
Belgium

telephone #-32-2-7695211, fax #-32-2-
7670242, e-mail louette @ africamuseum.be

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Michel
Louette (head), M. Herremans, W. Plompen
M.Sc., P. Herroelen (volunteer)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 0.2 coll.
manager, 0.25 secretary

brief history Founded in 1897 to house colls.
made in Central African colonies. Belongs to
the Belgian government

references to history, collections, or types
Louette (1980)

important past bird staff H. Schouteden, J. P.
Chapin, A. Prigogine, A. de Roo

important collections come from Bonnevie,
Hutsebaut, F. J. Jackson, C. M. de la Kethulle,
Captain Pauwels, A. Pillette, Voy. C. Christy,
Voy. Rosenberg (G. L. Bates, W. J. Ansorge,
Usscher), A. F G Weyns, G. F. de Witte

approx. nr. of bird skins 150,000 (over 8,000
species)

other bird items 500 skeletons, 15,000 in
alcohol, 1,500 egg sets, 400 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 400,
from expeditions and donations

bird skin collection specialised in Central
Africa; all Afrotropical families

card or computer system present part of skins
on card, soon on computer

Torino see Turin

Toulouse (MHNT)

Info from: Pierre Dalous, 20 Dec 2001

address Museum d’ Histoire Naturelle de
Toulouse, 35 Allées Jules Guesde, F-31000
Toulouse, France

telephone #-33-5-61-479225, fax #-33-5-61-—
554275, e-mail pierre.dalous @ mairie-
toulouse.fr

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Pierre
Dalous

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

total staff of bird dept. | (for all vertebrates)

brief history Founded in about 1900; owned by
city

references to history, collections, or types -

important past bird staff -

important collections come from V. Besaucéle,
R. Bourret, G. Cossaune, M. Gourdon,
Hammonville, A. Lacroix, Reboussin

approx. nr. of bird skins 8,900 (incl. 7,500
mounts)

other bird items c.2,000 skeletons & skulls,
5,300 eggs

approx. recent annual increase in skins 20

bird skin collection specialised in Europe
(especially France), but also a fair number of
exotic species

card or computer system present All on
computer, except skeletons/ skulls

Tring (BMNH or NHM)
Info from : R. Prys-Jones, 18 Nov 1994, F.
Steinheimer 22 Nov 2001

address The Natural History Museum, Bird
Group, Akeman Street, Tring (Herts) HP23
6AP, U.K.

telephone #-44-207-942-6158, fax # -44-207-
942-6150, e-mail (preferably) bird-
enquiries @nhm.ac.uk or (direct) R.Prys-
Jones @nhm.ac.uk, m.adams @nhm.ac.uk,
f.steinheimer @nhm.ac.uk,
m.walters@nhm.ac.uk, jhc@nhm.ac.uk.,

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Robert Prys-
Jones (head), Mark Adams (skins & loans),
Michael Walters (eggs & nests), Jo Cooper
(alcohol, skeletons), Frank Steinheimer
(associate)

total staff of bird dept. | head, 4 curators

brief history Founded in 1753 as private coll. of
Hans Sloane; now belongs to the government

references to history, collections, or types
Sharpe (1874-1898, 1885, 1906), Warren et al.
(1966-1973), Blandamer & Burton (1979),
Stearn (1981), Knox & Walters (1992, 1994),
Steinheimer (in press b)

important past bird staff G. Shaw, W. E.
Leach, J. E. Gray, G. R. Gray, P. L. Sclater, R.
Bowdler Sharpe, W. R. Ogilvie-Grant, P. R.
Lowe, N. Kinnear, D. Snow, B. P. Hall, D.
Goodwin, C. J. O. Harrison, I. C. J. Galbraith,
P. R. Colston

important collections come from A. L. Adams,
J. Aitchison, B. Alexander, J. Anderson, F. B.

C.S. Roselaar

Armstrong, D. A. Bannerman, G. L. Bates, R.
C. Beavan, J. Biddulph, C. T. Bingham, W.
Blanford, W. Blewitt, W. E. Brooks, G. Brown,
F. Briiggemann, A. Buchanan, W. Buller, A. L.

Butler, E. A. Butler, G. Caley, D. Carruthers, R.

E. Cheesman, W. N. Chill, A. F. Christison,
Miss Cockburn, J. Cockerell, Capt. P. Conrad,
J. Cook, W. D. Cowan, C. & S. Coxen, J. N.
Cripps, P. Crowley, H. Cuming, J. W. N.
Cumming, C. R. Darwin, C. Davison, W. R.
Davison, J. Delacour, P. M. Diard, F. Dorries,
H. Durnford, Emin Pasha, A. H. Everett, T. C.
Eyton, H. W. Feilden, H. O. Forbes, A. D.
Forbes-Watson, D. Forsyth, L. Fraser, E.
Gerrard, J. Gilbert, F. D. Godman, H. H.
Godwin-Austen, A. Goldie, W. Goodfellow, P.
Gosse, J. Gould, C. H. B. Grant, J. H. Gurney,
E. Hargitt, H. H. Harington, E. Hartert, G.
Henderson, H. W. Henshaw, B. H. Hodgson, P.
A. Holst, T. Horsfield, A. O. Hume, India
Mus., C. Ingram, F. J. Jackson, H. B. James, T.
C. Jerdon, H. H. Johnston, E. G. Johnstone, F.
C. R. Jourdain (eggs), H. J. Kelsall, J. Kirk, C.
Boden Kloss, C. L. Landbeck, J. D. D. La
Touche, E. & L. Layard, Linnean Society of
London, J. J. Lister, C. Livingstone, W. L.
Lloyd, G. Loddiges, W. P. Lowe, F. Ludlow, H.
Lynes, J. MacGillivray, L. Mandelli, C. H. T.
Marshall, J. McClelland, E. McConnell, R.
Meinertzhagen, A. B. Meyer, G. Montagu, H.
Moseley, J. Murray, E. Newton, E. W. Oates,
A. Owston, Capt. Pemberton, H. Philby, S.
Pinwill, J. Polatzek, H. Pryer, T. S. Raffles, S.
G. Reid, W. B. Richardson, C. B. Rickett,
Comte de Riocour, G. Rippon, H. C. Robinson,
A. W. Roepstorff, W. F. H. Rosenberg, E.

Riippell, O. B. St John, O. Salvin, H. Saunders,
R. H. Schomburgk, W. E. D. Scott, J. Scully, H.

Seebohm, W. Serle, R. Shaw, F. Shaw Mayer,
G. E. Shelley, G. Sherriff, H. H. Slater, A.
Smith, H. Smith, L. Sowerby, W. Stalker, J. K.
Stanford, S. Stevens, F. Stoliczka, C. Sturt, F.
W. Styan, R. Strachey, C. & R. Swinhoe, W. H.
Sykes, Tangier-Smith coll., W. R. Thompson,
C. B. Ticehurst, S. Tickell, H. B. Tristram
(eggs), Marquis of Tweeddale, J. Vincent, Voy.
Alert, Voy. Blossom, Voy. Challenger, Voy.
Erebus & Terror, Voy. Herald, Voy.
Rattlesnake, Voy. Sulphur, A. R. Wallace, H.
Walton, A. E. Ward, R. G Wardlaw-Ramsay, J.
Waterstradt, E. Weiske, H. Whistler, J. I. S.

Whitaker, C. H. T. Whitehead, J. Whitehead, A.

Whyte, E. Wilson, A. W. S. Wingate, H. F.

292

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Witherby, A. F. R. Wollaston, C. M. Woodford,
C. K. Worthen, J. W. Yerbury, Zoological
Society of London (L. Fraser, J. Gilbert, J.
Gould, T. Horsfield, Raffles, N. Vigors, Voy.
Beagle, G. R. Waterhouse), and many others

approx. nr. of bird skins 750,000 (8,492
species), excluding 6,000 mounts

other bird items 15,187 (partial) skeletons
(2,600 species), 17,135 in spirit (3,300
species), 4-500,000 egg sets, 2,000 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 200,
from local birds skinned by staff and donations

bird skin collection specialised in world-wide,
all families

card or computer system present most egg
sets on card, 33,000 skins and 24,000 egg sets
on computer (e.g. skins of all extinct and
endangered birds, most types, all Mexican and
Spanish birds, and most Australian birds and
Nectariniidae); types on museum web page

Troms¢@ (TSZV)

Info from: Robert Barrett, 26 Nov 2001

address Universitets Museet i Troms¢, Zoology
Dept., Lars Thgringsvei 10, NO-9037 Tromsg,
Norway

telephone #-47-77-645013/5010, fax #-47-77-
645520, e-mail zoo @imv.uit.no,
robb @imv.uit.no

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Robert
Barrett (for all zoology)

total staff of bird dept. | (see above)

brief history Founded 1872; part of Tromsg
University

references to history, collections, or types -

important past bird staff W. Vader

important collections come from —

approx. nr. of bird skins 4,100

other bird items 512 (partial) skeletons, 890
egg sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins 20—
200

bird skin collection specialised in Northern
Norway, Spitsbergen, Arctic regions generally

card or computer system present All bird
items on card and computer

Trondheim

Info from: O. Hogstad, 09 Apr 1997

address Museum of Natural History &
Archaeology, Institute of Natural Histoy, dept.
of Zoology, Norw. Univ. of Science and

C.S. Roselaar

Technology NTNU, N-7004 Trondheim,
Norway (visitors: Vitenskapsmuseet, Erling
Skakesgt. 47)

telephone #-47-7-3592207, fax #-47-7-
3592295, e-mail olav.hogstad@vm.ntnu.no

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Olav
Hogstad (head zoology dept)

total staff of bird dept. | head, | taxidermist

brief history Founded in 1760 by J. E.
Gunnerus and Det Kongelige Norske
Videnskabens Selskab; now part of NTN
University

references to history, collections, or types —

important past bird staff Y. Hagen, S. Haftorn

important collections come from —

approx. nr. of bird skins 3,200 (450 species)

other bird items a few skeletons and birds in
alcohol, 400 eggs, 50 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 150,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in c.3,000 skins
from Norway (mainly central), 200 exotic

card or computer system present all skins on
card and computer

Turin/Torino (MRSN)

Info from: C. Pulcher, 20 Nov 1996, some add.
Dario Zuccon, 16 Oct 2002

address Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali,
Via Giolitti 36, I-10123 Torino, Italy

telephone #-39-011-432-3001, fax #-39-011-
432-3331

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Elena Gavetti
(head of entire zoology section), Claudio
Pulcher (part-time contractor for birds)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head (also for other
sections), | temporary coll. manager, |
temporary taxidermist

brief history Founded in c.1815, when Bonelli
started the bird section of the Museum of
Zoology of Torino University; now, the
museum building is owned and the coll.
managed by the government of the Regione
Piemonte, but part of the bird coll. is owned by
Torino University.

references to history, collections, or types
Salvadori (1914), Tortonese (1957), Passerin
d’Entréves et al. (1986), Elter (1986), Violani
et al. (1997)

important past bird staff F. A. Bonelli, G.
Gené, F. De Filippi, A. T. Salvadori

important collections come from L. M.
D’ Albertis (c.380 birds), O. Antinori (c.1,000

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

birds), O. Beccari (c.350 birds), A. Borelli
(1,000+ birds), A. A. Bruijn, Bullock coll./
Mus. Leverianum (see Vienna/Wien), G. Doria,
L. Fea, E. Festa (4,100+ birds), E. H. Giglioli,
L. Loria, Marquis of La Marmora, E.
Modigliani, V. Ragazzi (c.700 birds), Count
Solaroli, Voy. Magenta (F. de Filippi & E. H.
Giglioli; c.1,150 birds), duplicates from the
colls. of Gould, Rtippell, Savi, Swinhoe,
Temminck, and others

approx. nr. of bird skins 21,000 (3,000
species)

other bird items over 100 skeletons and eggs

approx. recent annual increase in skins 0)

bird skin collection specialised in Italy,
Wallacea & West New Guinea (c.1,000 skins),
Libya to Ethiopia (over 4,000 skins), South
America (c.4,000 skins), Middle East (e.g.
Iran), Himalayas, Burma, South Pacific; c.300
type specimens

card or computer system present a modernised
version of the catalogue of Elter (1986) is on
computer

Uppsala (ZMUU)

Info from: M. Eriksson, Mar 1998

address Evolutionsmuseet, Zoologi-sektionen,
Uppsala Universitet, Norbyvagen 16, S-75236
Uppsala (visitors: Villavagen 9), Sverige

telephone #-46-47 12668, fax #-46-4712794, e-
mail mats.eriksson@ evolmuseum.uu.se

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Mats
Eriksson

total staff of bird dept. 5 (for entire zoology
dept.)

brief history ?

references to history, collections, or types
Wallin & Wallin (1994) (history), Wallin
(1996, 1997) (types)

important past bird staff Sven Ho6rstadius

important collections come from A. W.
Eriksson, L. A. Jagerskiold, G. Kolthoff, A.
Kovacs, T. Kumlien, M. Lagerstrom, W.
Lilljeborg, C. von Linné, Melbourne Mus., D.
Melin, B. Morner, B. Pettersson, C. P.
Thunberg, J. A. Wahlberg, General Westin, A.
E. & J. G Williams

approx. nr. of bird skins 6,900

other bird items ?

approx. recent annual increase in skins ?

bird skin collection specialised in Sweden
(c.3,100, mainly Uppland, Skane, Oland),
Brazil (378), Svalbard (342), Greenland &

C.S. Roselaar

Faeroes (c.140 each), South Africa (188),
Australia (183), Norway (c.110), Russia (104),
USA (95), New Guinea (77)

card or computer system present all skins on
computer

Venice/Venezia (MCSNV)

Info from: M. Bon, 17 Jul 1996

address Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di
Venezia, S. Croce 1730, Fontegna dei Turchi, I-
30135 Venezia, Italy

telephone #-39-041-524-0885, fax #-39-041-
524-2592

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Mauro Bon
(head), Dr Giuseppe Cherubini , Massimo
Semenzato (both volunteer associates)

total staff of bird dept. | head

brief history Founded in 1923 by the
Municipality of Venezia (Venice), but includes
older colls.; still owned by Municipality of
Venezia

references to history, collections, or types
Rallo (1988), Bon et al. (1993)

important past bird staff —

important collections come from G. Bisacco
Palazzi, Conte A. P. Ninni

approx. nr. of bird skins 2,500 (400 species)

other bird items some skeletons, alcohol
specimens, and egg sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins a few

bird skin collection specialised in north-east
Italy, North Africa

card or computer system present part of skin
coll. on card

Verona (MSNVR)

Info from: Roberta Salmasa, 22 Dec 1999

address Museo Civico di Storia Naturale,
Lungadige Porta Vittoria 9, I-37129 Verona,
Italia.

telephone #-39-(0)45-8079400, fax #-39-(0)45-
8035639, e-mail leonardo_latella@
comune.verona.it, roberta_salmaso@
comune.verona. it.

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Leonardo
Latella (curator), Roberta Salmaso (technician)
(both of entire zoology dept)

total staff of bird dept. see above

brief history Founded c.1906, oldest birds from
c.1850 (no birds remaining from earlier Verona
museums which latter date back to 1571);

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

owned by the Commune (Municipality) di
Verona

references to history, collections, or types Dal
Fiume (1907)

important past bird staff V. Dal Nero, S. Rufo

important collections come from De Betta,
Perini, Carraro, Cipolla, Dal Fiume, Zangheri’s
Museum

approx. nr. of bird skins 5,000 (600 species)

other bird items a few eggs and nests, 400
sternums

approx. recent annual increase in skins 1—2,
local birds

bird skin collection specialised in north-east
and central Italy, Eritrea (c.500 birds); includes
1 type: Cryptolopha erytreae

card or computer system present A large part
on card and computer, but neither complete

Vienna see Wien

Warsaw/Warszawa (MZPW for coll.,

MIZ PAN for Institute)

Info from: Tomasz Huflejt, 22 Dec 1999
address Museum and Institute of Zoology, P. A.
N. (Polish Academy of Sciences), Ul. Wilcza

64, PL-00 679 Warszawa, Poland

telephone #-48-629-3221 , fax #-48-629-6302 .
e-mail thuflejt@robal.miiz.waw.pl

staff responsible for bird collection Tomasz
Huflejt (entomologist, head of collection
division)

total staff of bird dept. No ornithologists;
entire staff of coll. division: 1 head and 3
assistants

brief history A combination of the cabinet of F.
P. Jarocki (from 1819) and the private coll. of
Constantin & Xaver Graf von Branicki
(founded 1887), which latter came to
government in 1919 (with Domaniewski as
first director of the combination); now belongs
to the Polish Acad. of Sciences

references to history, collections, or types
Kazubski (1996) (history), Sztoleman &
Domaniewski (1927) (type list)

important past bird staff L. Taczanowski, B.
Dybowski, J. Sztoleman (Stolzmann), K.
Jelski, J. Kalinowski, M. Jankowski, T.
Chrostowski, J. Domaniewski, A. Dunajewski,
S. Zielinski

approx. nr. of bird skins 40,000 (incl. c.5,000
mounts) (3,000 species)

C.S. Roselaar

other bird items many eggs sets; a few
skeletons, birds in alcohol, nests, etc.; 380
types

approx. recent annual increase in skins About
none in the last 30 year

bird skin collection specialised in Poland,
Belarus, Ukraine, European Russia (esp.
Caucasus area), Turkey, Uzbekistan, East Asia,
China, Mongolia, Korea, Vietnam, South
America (esp. Peru)

card or computer system present All as a list
on paper and computer, but nomenclatorially
partly outdated and with many misspellings

Wien (NMW)

Info from: Ernst Bauernfeind, 19 Jan 1995,
updated 10 Nov 2001

address Naturhistorisches Museum, |.
Zoologische Abteilung — Vogelsammlung,
Burgring 7, A-1014 Wien, Austria/ Osterreich

telephone #-43-1-52177-295, 296, or 499, fax
#-43-1-52177-364, e-mail
vogelsammlung @nhm-wien.ac.at,
anita.gamauf@nhm-wien.ac.at, hans-
martin.berg @nhm-wien.ac.at webpage
www.nhm-wien.ac.at/nhm

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Ernst
Bauernfeind (head), Dr Anita Gamauf, Hans-
Martin Berg, Dr Herbert Schifter (retired,
volunteer)

total staff of bird dept. | head, 1 ass. curator, 1
secretary, | taxidermist

brief history Founded in 1793 by Emperor
Franz I of Austria, when he acquired the coll.
of his retired falconer J. Natterer; now
government-owned; oldest specimens from
James Cook (2"! voyage, c.1773)

references to history, collections, or types von
Pelzeln (1870, 1873, 1890), von Pelzeln &
Lorenz (1886-88), Keve (1948), Keve &
Rokitansky (1966), Schifter & Van den Elzen
(1986), Schifter (1990, 1992a,b, 1993, 1994,
1996), Bauernfeind (1995), Schneider &
Bauernfeind (1998), Schifter & Violani (1999)

important past bird staff Joseph Natterer Sr. &
Jr., J. Heckel, A. von Pelzeln, J. Zelebor, C. E.
Hellmayr, C. von Schreibers, F. Steindachner,
L. Lorenz von Liburnau, M. Sassi, G.
Niethammer, G. von Rokitansky, H. Schifter

important collections come from Graf Almasy,
F. L. Bauer, W. Bojer, C. L. Brehm, W. Bullock
coll. [which included part of the colls. of J.
Banks, James Cook, J. R. & G Forster, J.

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Latham, G. Montagu, R. Solander, W.
Swainson, Voy. Endeavour, Voy. Resolution;
these colls. in part from the former Mus.
Leverianum. The Bullock coll. was sold in
1819 to the museums of Berlin, Edinburgh,
Glasgow, Leiden, Paris and Turin, and to the
private colls. of the Earl of Derby (now in
Liverpool), Sabine, W. Swainson, N. Vigors,
etc.], F. Deppe, R. von Dombrowski, C. W. R.
van Duivenbode, Emin Pascha [see Bremen],
O. Finsch, A. Fischer, G. W. Freyrei8, L. von
Fiihrer, R. Grauer, J. von Haast, J. Hector, T.
von Heuglin, F. von Hochstetter, D. S. Hoedt,
C. von Hiigel, J. Jacquin, P. Knoblecher, T.
Kotschy, M. Markl, A. B. Meyer, H. Moschler,
Mus. Berlin (Lichtenstein, Hemprich &
Ehrenberg), Mus. Leiden (Temminck,
Schlegel), Mus. Leverianum [with the colls. of
A. Lever, J. Banks, J. Cook, J. R. & G Forster,
R. Solander, Voy. Endeavour, Voy. Resolution.
The Lever Museum coll. was sold in 1806 to,
among others, the Wien Mus., to the Earl of
Derby and from there to Liverpool Mus., and
to W. Bullock], Joh. Natterer, E. Parzudaki, Ida
Pfeiffer, J. Polatzek, N. M. Przhevalskii
(duplicates), A. Reischek, O. Reiser, G.
Schiebel, C. J. W. Schiede, F. Schillinger, W.
Schimper, J. von Seilern, F. Sellow, F.
Stoliczka, R. Swinhoe, J. J. von Tschudi, V.
Tschusi zu Schmidhoffen, Underwood,
Verreaux, Voy. Novara, E. Weiske, O. von
Wettstein, Zimmer, and many others

approx. nr. of bird skins 104,300 (incl.
c.10,000 mounts); c.7,000 species

other bird items 8,000 skeletons, 10,000 egg
sets, 1,000 nests, many feather sets, a bone
reference coll., bird sound recordings, etc.

approx. recent annual increase in skins 500-
1,000, from local birds skinned by own
taxidermist, donations, and buying of colls.

bird skin collection specialised in Austria,
Hungary, Balkan countries, Jan Mayen, Egypt,
Sudan, Ethiopia, C & E Africa, Madagascar,
Himalayas, Tibet, S India, Sri Lanka,
Philippines, Sulawesi, Ambon, Australia,
Norfolk Isl., New Zealand, C & S America
(especially Brazil: over 13,000 skins from
Natterer, etc), Haiti; over 1,000 types (list in
preparation)

card or computer system present skeletons
and mounts on card and computer; most eggs
on computer, but only 10% of skins

C.S. Roselaar

Wiesbaden (MWHN)

Info from: Fritz Geller-Grimm, 6 Dec 2001

address Landesmuseum Wiesbaden,
Naturwissenschaftlichen Sammlung, Friedrich-
Ebert-Allee 2, D-65185 Wiesbaden, Germany.

telephone #-49-61 1-335-2170/ -2178/ -2182,
fax #-49-611-3352192, e-mail nws@museum-
wiesbaden.de, fritz @ geller-grimm.de

staff responsible for bird coll Dr Volkert
Rattemeyer (head), Fritz Geller-Grimm (coll.
manager/taxidermist)

total staff of bird dept. 2 (for entire vertebrate
coll., see above)

brief history Founded 1829; owned by the
government

references to history, collections, or types
Romer (1863, 1879, 1892), Lampe (1904—
1912)

important past bird staff C. Fetzer, E. Lampe,
F. Neubaur, A. ROmer, E. Zenker

important collections come from A. A. Bruijn,
C. Feldmann, A. Fischer, E. A. Fritze, B. Lyon,
B. De Mons, J. W. von Miiller, F. Odernheimer,
O. Rau, C. Thoma, J. Weiler

approx. nr. of bird skins 6,800 (incl. mounts)

other bird items 150 (partial) skeletons, 6,000
egg sets, 100 fossil birds

approx. recent annual increase in skins 50

bird skin collection specialised in many areas,
but mainly C Europe

card or computer system present All on card,
computer in progress (soon on www.nws-
wiesbaden.de/coll02.html)

Wilhelmshaven (IfV)

Info from: Prof. Dr F. Bairlein, 31 Jan 2000

address Institut fiir Vogelforschung ‘Vogelwarte
Helgoland’, An der Vogelwarte 21, D-26386
Wilhelmshaven-Riistersiel, Germany

telephone #-49-(0)442 1-96890, fax #-49-
(0)4421-968955, e-mail ifv @ifv.terramare.de
homepage http://home.t-online.de/home/
O.Hueppop-IFV/ifv-hp.htm

staff responsible for bird coll. Rolf Nagel (coll.

manager), Franz Bairlein (director)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 5 scientists, 1
coll. manager, | taxidermist, 19 others (incl
ringing staff and staff for migration studies and
ecological research)

brief history Founded in 1843 by Heinrich
Gatke on Helgoland, moved to Wilhelmshaven
in 1947; owned by government of
Niedersachsen

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

references to history, collections, or types H.
Bub (1985) Orn. Mitt. 37: 38-47.

important past bird staff H. Weigold, R. Drost.
F. Goethe, H. Bub

important collections come from
Nordseemuseum Helgoland , Heinrich Gatke,
Hugo Weigold

approx. nr. of bird skins 5,500 (550 species),
incl. many mounts (on show in Heinrich-
Gatke-Halle)

other bird items 300 partial skeletons (skulls,
sternums, etc), many eggs of c.270 species,
120 nests

approx. recent annual increase in skins 75.
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist

bird skin collection specialised in Germany,
China; migratory birds

card or computer system present partly on
computer (system old)

Wroclaw (MPUW)

Info from: T. Stawarczyk, 31 Jan 1995

address Muzeum Przyrodnicze (Museum of
Nat. Hist.), Uniwersytet Wroclawski (Univ. of
Wroclaw), Sienkiewicza 21, 50-335 Wroclaw,
Poland

telephone #-48-71-3754149, fax #-48-71-
3225044, e-mail tomilu @biol.uni.wroc.pl

staff responsible for bird coll. Prof. Ludwik
Tomialojc (head), Dr Tadeusz Stawarczyk, Mr
Jan Lontkowski (coll. managers)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 2 coll.
managers

brief history Founded in 1814 by J. LC.
Gravenhorst; now part of University of
Wroclaw

references to history, collections, or types
Gravenhorst (1832)

important past bird staff E. Grube, F.
Tiemann, C. Zimmer

important collections come from P. Kollibay
(2,500 skins), O. Natorp, W. Volz, etc.

approx. nr. of bird skins 12,000 (2,000
species)

other bird items 136 skeletons, 2,000 egg sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins 5—10,
from local birds skinned by own staff

bird skin collection specialised in Poland,
Palearctic, Java, Sumatra, New Guinea, Brazil

card or computer system present none

C.S. Roselaar

Zagreb (ZZO)

Info from: Davor Cikovic, 20 Dec 1999

address Zavod za Ornitologiju /Institute of
Ornithology (ZZO), Hrvatske Akademije
Znanosti i Umjetnosti, [irski trg. 9, 10000
Zagreb, Hrvatska (Croatia)

telephone & fax #-385-1-4851 322, e-mail
zzo @hazu.hr

staff responsible for bird coll. Davor Cikovic,
BSc.

total staff of bird dept. 5 scientists (Dr G.
Susic, Dr J. Muzinic, Dr V. Tutis, J. Kralj, D
Radovic), | curator (D. Cikovic)

brief history Founded 1938, with A. Mastrovic
as first director; part of the Croatian Academy
of Sciences and Arts

references to history, collections, or types
Susic et al. (1988), Crnkovic et al. (1993)

important past bird staff D. Rucner, R.
Kroneisl-Rucner, K. Igalffy, S. Ivkovic, A. Tlic,
K. Leskovar, R. Crnkovic

important collections come from A. Mastrovic,
A. Tlic (eggs)

approx. nr. of bird skins 6,700 (317 species)

other bird items 557 egg sets (274 species)

approx. recent annual increase in skins 2

bird skin collection specialised in Former
Yugoslavia (mainly Croatia)

card or computer system present all on card

The ‘B-list’

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Zurich (ZMUZ)

Info from: J. Hegelbach, 25 Jun 1996

address Zoologisches Museum der Universitat
Ziirich-Irchel, WinterthurerstraBe 190, CH-
8057 Zirich, Schweiz / Switzerland

telephone #-41-1-257-4750, fax #-41-1-364-
0295, e-mail hegzm@ zoolmus.unizh.ch

staff responsible for bird coll. Dr Johann
Hegelbach (head), Prof. Dr V. Ziswiler (retired,
volunt. assoc.)

total staff of bird dept. 1 head, 0.5 taxidermist

brief history —

references to history, collections, or types no
publications

important past bird staff H. Steiner, K.
Immelmann

important collections come from H. Moschler,
Gc

approx. nr. of bird skins 4,000 (1,000 species)

other bird items 50 skeletons, 50 in alcohol,
800 egg sets

approx. recent annual increase in skins 50,
from local birds skinned by own taxidermist
and donations

bird skin collection specialised in —

card or computer system present all skins on
card, part on computer

In this list, some smaller collections are mentioned which have fewer than c.4,000 skins, or fewer than
c.5,000 bird items, or of which no exact information could be obtained because the questionnaire was
not returned, even after repeated asking. At least addresses are mentioned, as well as some other details
as far as known. Some of these collections may belong on the ‘A-list’. As indicated there, collections
with a smaller number of birds may not necessarily be less important, because they still may include

types, rarities or birds from relatively unknown regions not represented in larger museums.

Acores Museu Carlos Machado (MCM), Rua de
Santo André, Apartado 258, P-9503 Ponta
Delgada (Sao Miguel), Acores, Portugal.
Contains a small bird coll.

Aarhus Naturhistoriska Museum, Bygning 210,
Universitetsparken, DK-8000 Arhus-C,
Denmark. Curator: Poul Hansen (e-mail:
poulh @naturhist.aau.dk). Has a small coll. of
bird skins. Former curator: Paul Bondesen.

Akureyri Akureyri Museum of Natural History,
PO Box 580, IS-602, Akureyri, Iceland.
Contains a small bird coll.

Augsburg Naturmuseum und Planetarium
Augsburg, Im Thale 3, Augsburg, Germany.
Tel. #-49-821-324-6730, fax —6741. Head: Dr
Michael Achtelig. Includes a small bird coll.

Autun Musée d’ Histoire Naturelle de Ville
d’ Autun, 12-14 rue Saint Antoine, F-71400
Autun, France. Conservator: Gilles Pacaud.
Includes a small bird coll.

Bacau Muzeul Judetean Bacau, Sectia Stiintele
Naturii, Str. Karl Marx 2, Bacau, Romania. The
bird coll., founded in 1959 and with entries
from 1962 onwards, held c.2300 skins and

C.S. Roselaar

skeletal items by the end of 1979, largely
obtained by Dr Catalin Rang and largely from
the Bacau area, but also from the eastern
Carpathians and the Danube delta; also, 104
birds from Kisangani and Kivu in Congo. See
Rang (1980).

Bad Diirkheim Pfalzmuseum fiir Naturkunde
(PMN), Pollichia-Museum, Hermann-Schiafer-
Strabe 17, D-67098 Bad Diirkheim, Germany.
Tel. #-49-6322-9413-0 or -23, fax —941311.
Curator of zoology: Dipl.-Biol. Roland van
Gyseghem (R.Gyseghem@ pfalzmuseum.bv-
pfalz.de), former curator G. Groh. Founded
1840. Contains the coll. of the Pollichia
(Verein fiir Naturforschung und Landespflege),
which includes 100 bird skins, 50 skulls, 18
birds in alcohol, 300 egg sets, 50 nests, and a
number of mounted birds, mostly from the
Rheinland-Pfalz region, not on card or
computer.

Bamberg Naturkunde-Museum Bamberg
(NKMBA), FleischstraBe 2, D-96047
Bamberg, Germany. Tel.: #-49-951-86312-48.
Head of coll.: Dr Matthias Mauser
(matthias.maeuser @en.uni-bamberg.de).
Founded in 1792 by the archbishop Franz
Ludwig von Erthal, now owned by the
Lyzeum’s foundation Bamberg, supervised by
the Bavarian States Collections of Natural
Science. Has 1,550 mounted birds (800
species), 31 (partial) skeletons, 552 eggs, and
112 nests, with data and photographs of all
mounts on computer. Important past staff
members D. Linder, A. Haupt, G. Fischer, T.
Schneid, A. Kolb; coll. included specimens
from Amalie Dietrich, J. C. Godeffroy, J.
Natterer, J. L. Schénlein, J. B. von Spix, C. T.
E. von Siebold, W. Schliiter, J. H. C. Sturm,
and E. Weiske. See Jaeck (1815), Mauser
(1995a,b), and Steinheimer (in press a).

Bari, Italy. In the city are 2 small separate bird
colls., one of which is the historical De Romita
collection, quite famous in the past (N.
Baccetti per. comm.) See also Suppl. Ric. Biol.
Selvaggina 22 (1995).

Bialywieza This village in the centre of the
Bialowieza Reserve in NE Poland has a small
museum which includes 950 skins and mounts
of birds (130 species) and 335 eggs of local
origin.

Bielefeld Naturkunde-Museum der Stadt
Bielefeld, KreuzstraBe 20, D-33602 Bielefeld,
Germany. Tel. #-49-521-516734, fax —512481,

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

e-mail NaturkundeMuseum@ bielefeld.de.
Head: Dr Peter R. Becker. Includes a small
bird coll.

Birchington Quex House & Gardens, the
Powell-Cotton Museum, Quex Park,
Birchington, Kent C17 OBH, U.K. One curator,
partly dedicated to natural history. Includes
many mammal skeletons, but also bird skins,
eggs, and mounts in dioramas, mostly from
Africa; many skins of Spheniscidae obtained
from E. Shackelton’s Antarctic Expeditions. (F.
Steinheimer in Jitt.). See also Powell-Cotton
(undated).

Birmingham Birmingham Museum and Art
Gallery (BMAG), Chamberlain Square,
Birmingham B3 3DH, U.K. Tel.: #-44-121-
3034510, fax —3031315. Head of curatorial
services: Dr Jane Arthur (jane_arthur@
birmingham.gov.uk). Natural History part
opened 1913 but based on colls. founded in the
1840s, e.g. of Queen’s College and C. Beale;
owned by Birmingham City Council. Former
curators W. Ellis and W. H. Edwards, major
colls. received of R. W. Chase, W. R. Lysaght,
and J. B. Williams. Includes over 2,000 mounts
and over 1,000 egg sets, mostly local but also
from abroad (e.g. Toronto) and including
extinct birds like Pinguinus impennis and
Nestor productus; partly on card and computer.
Access to coll. at moment restricted due to
budgetary and staff constraints.

Bitov This town in the Czech Republic has a
museum which contains 590 birds of 273
species.

Bordeaux Muséum d Histoire Naturelle de
Bordeaux, 5 Place Bardinaeau, F-33000
Bordeaux, France. Founded 1811. Includes a
small historical coll. of birds.

Bratislava Slovenské Narodné Mtizeum (Slovak
National Museum) (SNMBS), dept of Zoology,
Vajanského nabrezie 2, SL-81436 Bratislava,
Slovakia. Tel. #-421-7-366836, fax —366653.
Curator: Branislav Matousek. Includes c.6,000
bird skins.

Brescia Museo Civica di Scienze Naturali,
GRAN, Via Ozanam 4, I-25128, Brescia, Italy.
Curator: Pierandrea Brichetti. Director: Dr
Marco Tonon. Includes a bird coll.

Budisov Moravského Zemského Muzea,
Budisov Castle, near Trebic, SW Moravia,
Czech Republic. Has over 2,600 mounted birds
of many species, provenance worldwide,
including many from Seilern (E Asia, S

C.S. Roselaar

America) and the coll. of Adolf Schwab

(Mistek). See Sutorova & Hanak (1996) for

history, a catalogue, and other details.
Burgas Natural History Museum (NHMB), 30

Constantin Fotinov Str., 8000 Burgas, Bulgaria.

Tel #-359-56-45855, fax #-359-56-843239.
Founded 1962, belongs to the Municipality of
Burgas. Curator: Dr Dimitrina Smilova; former
head Alexander Prostov. Includes c.300 skins
and c.500 mounts of c.200 species, all on a
card system, including rarities like Numenius
tenuirostris; also, a fair coll. of subfossil bird
bones. See Prostov & Smilova (1983).

Bytom Upper Silesian Museum, Bytom, S-C
Poland. Has 1,100 bird skins, 884 mounts, 140
(partial) skeletons, 3,821 eggs, and 234 nests,
mostly from Poland but also 130 mounts from
Borneo. Includes colls. of M. Bielewicz, E.
Drescher, Gedroyc, O. Natorp, and S. Sobania.

Cagliari Instituto de Zoologia (IZUCS),
Universita di Cagliari, Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy.
Includes a small historical coll. of Sardinian
birds.

Carlisle Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery,
Castle Street, Carlisle CA3 8TP, Cumbria,
U.K. Tel. #-44-1228-534781, fax -810249.
Keeper of Natural Sciences: Stephen Hewitt
(SteveH @carlisle-city.gov.uk). Founded in
1893, owned by Carlisle City Council.
Important past staff members or persons
donating colls: Rev. H. A. Macpherson, L. E.
Hope, E. Blezard, Marjory Garnett, E. B.
Dunlop, D. L. Thorpe, J. W Harris. Includes
2,500 skins, 1,500 mounts, 100 (partial)
skeletons, and c.3,500 egg sets, virtually all
from Carlisle and the Cumbria region.

Casalnuovo Monterotaro Museo Civico di
Storia Naturale, Via Diaz, Casalnuovo
Monterotaro, Foggia prov., Italy. Has a bird
coll. of 1,350 mounts; see: Suppl. Ric. Biol.
Selvaggina 22 (1995).

Catania Gemmellaro State Institute, Catania,
Sicily. For a catalogue of its small bird coll.,
see : A. Cantarero (1993) Naturalista Siciliano
17: 183-185.

Ceska Lipa Okresni Vlastivedné Muzeum, nam
Osvobozeni 297, CZ-470 01, Ceska Lipa,
Czech Republic. Tel.: 00-420-425-22791,
22854 & 22843. A former monasatery coll.
including local and exotic bird mounts.

Chemnitz Museum fiir Naturkunde,
Theaterplatz 1, D-09111 Chemnitz, Germany.
Tel. #-49-371-4884551, fax 4884597, e-mail

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

naturkundemuseum®@ stadt-chemnitz.de.
Mainly geological/entomological, but includes
a small bird coll.

Chieri A museum in Piedmont prov., Italy.
Contains the Villa Brea coll.; for a catalogue of
the small bird coll., see G. Aimassi & L. Levi
(1993) Riv. Piemontese di Storia Naturale 14:
217-230.

Cluj-Napoca Zoological Museum, Dept. of
Biology, University of Cluj-Napoca, Ro-3400
Cluj-Napoca, Romania. A coll. founded 1859,
which had 1,146 birds in 1964 (of 396
species). Former curator a.o.: L. von Fiihrer.
See Gherghel (1988, 1989).

Coventry Herbert Art Gallery and Museum
(HAGM), Jordan Well, Coventry CV1 5QP.,
U.K. Tel.: #-44-2476-832374, fax —832410.
Keeper of Natural History: Steve Lane
(steve.lane@coventry.gov.uk). Founded 1949,
part of Coventry City Council. Has 250 skins
and mounts and 4,500 eggs with data (and at
least 5,000 more without), all on computer.
Includes the colls. of, e.g. Nicholls, Betteridge,
Beddall-Smith (eggs), Bellgrove (eggs), and
Ground (eggs), mostly of local origin
(Warwickshire) or from the U.K. generally.
Cruz Quebrada-Dafundo Aquario Vasco da
Gama, 1495 Cruz Quebrada-Dafundo,
Portugal. Head: Dr Aldina Moreira Inacio. The
aquarium also has a small bird coll.

Czestochowa Muzeum Okregowe, Al.
Najswietszej Marii Panny 45a, PL-42-200
Czestochowa, SC Poland. Tel.: #-48-34-
3244424, fax #-48-34-3243275. Contains 135
bird skins and mounts (119 species) and 567
eggs.

Darmstadt Hessisches Landesmuseum
(HLMD), Zoologische Abteilung,
Friedensplatz 1, D-64283 Darmstadt, Germany.
Tel. #-49-6151-165703, fax —28942. Curator
Dr U. Joger. Includes many local birds from
Hessen, the large former coll. of J. J. Kaup,
and some material of F. Briiggemann, J.
Gundlach, C. F. H. von Ludwig, H. von
Rosenberg, and many others. For history, see:
R. Kuhn (1993) Collurio 11: 36-47.

Dijon Muséum d Histoire Naturelle, Pavillion
de Il’ Arquebuse, 1 Avenue Albert ler, Dijon,
France. A large show coll. with dioramas.

Dobrich (Tolbukhin) Cultural and Historical
Heritage, Direction of Tolbukhin, Bulgaria. Tel
#-359-58-24463. Contains a small coll. (228
birds, 178 species) from the Bulgarian part of

C.S. Roselaar

the Dobrogea region, all well-registered. See
Nonev (1982).

Dortmund Museum fiir Naturkunde,
MiinsterstraBe 271, D-44145 Dortmund,
Germany. E-mail: naturkundemuseum @
stadtdo.ge. Founded 1912. Includes a small
bird coll.

Dublin Natural History Museum/Miusaem na
Staire Nadurtha, National Museum of Ireland
(NMI), Merrion Street, Dublin 2, Ireland. Tel:
#-353-1-6777444, fax -6761348, e-mail
nmi @indigo.ie. Curator for all non-
entomological zoology Dr Mark Holmes,
education officer Dr Damien Walshe (spare-

time occupying with bird coll.). Founded 1857.

Includes the coll. of O’ Mahorey.
Ekaterinburg Institute of Zoology, Russian
Academy of Sciences. Curator: Vadim K.

Ryabitsev (riabits @etel.ru). An important coll.,

but not included in the main list because
Ekaterinburg is just within Asia, not Europe.

Elverum Norsk Skogsbruksmuseum, P.O. Box
117, N-2401 Elverum, Norway. Tel. #-47-624-
10299, fax -13015. Curator Mr Andersen. Has
a small bird coll.

Erlangen Institut fiir Zoologie, Erlangen
Universitat, StaudstraBe 5, D-91058 Erlangen,
Germany. Has a small bird coll. which
includes, for instance, 2 Ectopistes
migratorius. Head of Institute: Prof. Dr O. von
Helversen.

Essex Saffron Walden Museum (SWM),
Museum Street, Saffron Walden, Essex CB10
1JL, U.K. Curator of Natural Sciences: Sarah
Kenyon, tel/fax #-44-(01)799-5 10333, e-mail
museum®@ uttlesford.gov.uk. Founded 1832 by
the Saffron Walden Natural History Society.
Founders and former staff include Lord
Braybrook, Clarke, Gibson, and Maynard.
Contains 1,500 mounts and skins of birds
(mostly British/ European, partly mounted by
J. Gould and Leadbeater, but also foreign:
Asia, Australia, N & S America, Africa) and
6,540 eggs (e.g. the Tuke and Smith colls.,
mainly British), largely collected in the
nineteenth century.

Fermo Museo di Scienze Naturali, Fermo, Italy.
Includes 408 mounted Italian birds of the
private coll. of T. Salvadori, donated by him to
the city of Fermo in 1930. See Suppl. Ric. Biol.
Selvaggina 22 (1995), and Violani et al.
(1997); in the latter work, all birds are shown
on photographs.

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Ferrara Istituto di Zoologia e Biologia
Generale, Universita degli Studi di Ferrara, Via
Previati 24, I-44100 Ferrara, Italy. Contains
c.2,000 skins and mounts: see S. Mazzotti & S.
Volponi (1993) Museol. Scientifica 10: 53-61.

Forli Museo Ornitologico ‘F. Foschi’, Forli,
Emilia Romagna prov., Italy. Contains the coll.
of F. Foschi (assembled 1934—1980) of c.3,500
mounts of Italian birds, and includes also
several older colls. See U. F. Foschi
(‘1993°=1994) Museol. Scientifica 10: 335-
336. A 112 pp. catalogue was published by U.
F. Foschi in 1984.

Funchal Museu Municipal do Funchal (Historia
Natural) (MMP), Ornithology section, Rua da
Mouraria 31, 9000 Funchal, Madeira, Portugal.
Tel. #-351-91-792591, fax -225180. Curator
(for entire zoology) E. C. Gerrard (‘Ted’)
(egerrard@ tethys.uma.pt). Founded by Padre
E. Schmitz, now owned by municipality of
Funchal. A small but important coll. of birds
from Madeira and other Atlantic islands

Gottingen Zoologisches Museum (ZIMG),
Institut fiir Zoologie und Anthropologie der
Universitat Gottingen, Berliner StraBe 28, D-
37037 Gottingen, Germany. Tel. : #-49-551-
395524, fax —395579. Curator: Dr Gert Tréster
(gtroest@ gwdg.de). Includes colls. of the past
staff members J. F. Blumenbach, Ehlers, and H.
Kirchhoff. The bird coll. has c.350 mounts and
1,350 skins, and includes extinct birds like
Ectopistes migratorius, Nestor productus and
Conuropsis carolinensis; also, 300 egg sets and
a few skeletons

Graz Steiermarkisches Landesmuseum
Joanneum (LMJ), Raubergasse 10, A-8010
Graz, Austria. Tel #-43-316-8017 9760, fax #-
43-316-8017 9800, e-mail post @Imj-
zoo.stmk.gv.at, webpage www.museum-
joanneum.at. Manager of bird coll.: Peter
Sack]; a former curator A. von Mojsisovics.
Founded 1811, belongs to the Steiermark
government. Includes 1,756 skins (700
species), 150 skeletons (60 species), 350 eg
sets, and 100 nests, including parts of the
former colls. of von Spix, Tschusi zu
Schmidhoffen, Worofka, Johann Natterer,
Schiebel and Neunteufel, both from Austria
and abroad, of which part is on computer;
increase c.20 skins annually, from local birds
skinned by own taxidermist. See Marktanner-
Turneretscher (1911) and Mecenovic (1969) for
history and contents of the coll.

C.S. Roselaar

Greifswald Zoologisches Institut und Museum,
Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universitat Greifswald,
Johann-Sebastian-Bach-Strabe 11-12, D-17489
Greifswald, Germany. Tel. #-49-3834-864271,
fax — 864252, e-mail zool.museum @uni-
greifswald.de. Curator: Dr Dietmar Schittek.
Includes an important number of bird skins.

Harnosand Lansmuseet Murberget, S-87102
Harnosand, Sweden. Tel. #-46-611-23240. Has
a small bird coll.

Heusden-Zolder The large coll. of mounted
birds of Pater Landewald Jansen is exhibited in

Heusden-Zolder, prov. Limburg, Belgium. Info:

Stichting Limburgs Landschap, tel. #-32-11-
530250.

Hildesheim Roemer-Museum, Am Steine 1-2,
D-31134 Hildesheim (near Hannover),
Germany. The coll. is mostly archaeological,
but a small coll. of birds is available. See
Schoppe (1987) for history and contents.

Hradec Kralové Muzeum Vychodnich Czech,
Nat. Hist. Dept., Eliscino nabrezi 465, CZ-
50001 Hradec Kralové, Czech Rep. Tel. #-42-
49-5514631, fax #-42-49-5512899. Curator Dr
Karel Lohnisky, former curator V. Balthasar.
Includes 450 skins (300 species, 55 bird
families), 450 skeletons (300 species), and 50
egg sets, largely from Czech Rep. and Slovakia

Innsbruck Institut fiir Zoologie und Limnologie
(IZUD), Abt. Terrestische Okologie und
Taxonomie, Universitat Innsbruck,
Technikerstrafie 25, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria.
Head of Institute: Dr Konrad Thaler. The coll.
of the institute was founded in about 1860, and
now includes c.330 mounts, at least 12
skeletons, and a few birds in alcohol, skulls,
egg sets, and nests.

Istanbul Robert’s College (Istanbul Amerikan
Robert Liseri), PK 1 Arnavutkai, TR-80820
Istanbul, Turkey. Contains 266 mounted birds
(174 species), presumed to be largely of local
origin. Based on the private coll. of T. Robson
(an inhabitant of Istanbul 1861-1871), with
later additions by Mathey-Dupraz and others.
In poor condition, with at least 265 specimens
lost between 1924 and 1996. See Mathey-
Dupraz (1920-1924) and Kirwan (1997).

Jelenia Géra The suburb Cieplice of this town
in SW Poland has a small natural history
museum which includes 922 skins and mounts
of birds (370 species), 541 eggs, and 30 nests.

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Jokkmokk Ajtte Svensk Fjiill- och
Samemuseum, S-96040 Jokkmokk, Sweden.
Tel. #-46-971-17070. Has a small bird coll.

Jonkoping Ornithological Museum, Town Park,
J6nkd6ping, Sweden. Open May—August;
owned by Jonk6ping Municipality. Contains
1,458 mounts and skins (of 341 species) and
2,580 eggs (of 281 species), largely of birds
from Sweden. Based on donations of H.
Nyqvist in 1914 (mounts & skins) and E.
Wibeck in 1943 (eggs). See Berlin (1988).

Kassel Naturkunde Museum im Ottoneum,
Steinweg 2, D-34117 Kassel, Germany. Tel. #-
49-561-7874014, fax —7874058. Info: Dr Franz
Malec or Dr Peter Mansfeld. Founded 1884.
Includes a small bird coll., with material of,
e.g., J. Gundlach (Cuba) and Matzko, and with
extinct birds like Ectopistes migratorius and
Conuropsis carolinensis.

Kazan Zoological Museum of the Kazan State
University, Tatarstan, Russia. Curator: Tatyana
Vodolazskaya (e-mail: Tatjana. Wodolazskaya@
soros.ksu.ru). Founded 1804, with K. Fuchs as
first head, later succeeded by E. F. Eversmann.
Has 500 skins and 1,000 mounts of birds from
the colls. of E. A. Eversmann, M. D. Ruzskiy,
A. A. Ostroyumoy, E. Pelzmann, etc.

Kendal Kendal Museum, Station Road, Kendal
LA9 6BT, Cumbria, U.K. Tel.: #-44-1539-
721374, fax —722494. Ass. Keeper: Morag
Clement. Founded 1796, owned by local
government. Has large dioramas with mounted
birds, both local (Lake District) and exotic;
also, a small egg coll.

Kiev The coll. of the Zoological Museum of
Kiev University (ZMKU) was destroyed in
World War II and the museum apparently does
not function as such now. The other museum in
Kiev, the Zoological Museum of National
Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (ZMAU), is
in the ‘A’ list.

Kosice Vychodoslovenské Muzéum Kosice
(VSM), Prirodovedné oddelenie,
Hviezdoslavova 3, 04136 Kosice, Slovakia.
Curator: Dr Miroslav Fulin. Founded 1955;
state-owned. Specialised in the Carpathian
region of Slovakia. Includes 2,000 bird skins,
1,000 mounts, 3,000 (partial) skeletons, 50
birds in liquid, and 1,200 egg sets, to which
c.20 are added annually; includes the coll. of
A. Mosansky. For details and catalogues of the
coll. see various issues of Zbornik

C.S. Roselaar

Vychodoslovenského Muzea (e.g. 1977 and
1978) or Matousek & Mutkovic (1985).
Kothen Naumann Museum, Kothener Schloss,
SchlofBplatz 4 (P.O. Box 181), D-06366
Kothen, Germany. Tel. #-49-3496-212074. A

large mounted coll., obtained mainly in the first

half of the nineteenth century and still in its
original setting. Founded by J. A. & J. F.
Naumann, acquired by August Herzog von
Anhalt-K6then in 1821, with J. F Naumann as
first director, later on succeeded by Edmund
Naumann. Also, includes the feather coll. of
W.-D. Busching, many birds from G. Garlepp
(South America), etc. See W. Zimdahl (1980)
Falke 27: 42-44.

Kristiansand Agder Naturmuseum og Botanisk
Hage, Gimlegard, Gimleveien 23, N-4687
Kristiansand, Norway. Tel. #-47-380-92388,
fax —92378. Head curator Roar Solheim
(roar.solheim @agder-natur.museum.no). Has a
small bird coll.

La Rochelle Museum d’ Histoire Naturelle de La

Rochelle (MHNLR), 28 Rue Albert 1l-er, F-
17000 La Rochelle, France. Tel. #-33-546-
41825, fax —506365. A small historical coll.,
which includes extinct birds like Rhodonessa
caryophyllacea, Ectopistes migratorius, and a
skeleton of Raphus cucullatus.

Leeuwarden Fries Natuurmuseum (FNM),
Schoenmakersperk 2, NL-8911 EM
Leeuwarden, Netherlands. Curator: Johannes
Fokkema. Tel. #-31-58-2129085, e-mail
info @friesnatuurmuseum.nl. Includes 3,500
birds and c.1,000 eggs, virtually all from the
province of Friesland.

Le Havre Muséum du Havre, Le Havre, France.

Includes 744 birds of the coll. Dubois/Hemery,
obtained by Maury; Lesueur was curator in the
1840s, but his and other historical colls. were
lost after bombing in 1944.

Leicester New Walk Museum, Leicestershire
Museums, 53 New Walk, Leicester LE] 7EA,
U.K. Tel.: #-44-116-2554100, fax —2473057.
Curator of biology: Derek Lott. Includes a
small bird and egg coll.

Livorno Museo di Storia Naturale del
Mediterraneo (formerly Museo Provinciale di
Storia Naturale di Livorno), Via Roma 234, I-
57127 Livorno, Italy. Tel. #-39-586-802294. A
small coll., including c.1,000 bird skins,
mainly from Tuscany. Catalogue: E. Arcamone
& E. Meschini (1981) Quaderni Mus. Stor. nat.
Livorno 2, 65-94.

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Ljubljana Prirodosloveni Muzej Slovenije
(ML), Presernova 20, p.p. 290, SI-1001
Ljubljana, Slovenia. Curator for birds: Janez
Gregori (gregori@pms-lj.si; tel. 01-2410947.
Founded 1905, government-owned. The bird
coll. has 3,500 skins and 125 eggs, to which
100-150 birds are added anually; most birds
are from Slovenia, but some recent colls. from
Macedonia, Dalmatia, and Nepal. It includes
colls. of Lojze Smuc, Janez Dovic, and Dare
Sele:

London Grant Museum of Zoology and
Comparitive Anatomy (formerly: Zoology
Museum), Biology Dept, Darwin Building,
University College London, Gower Street,
London WCIE 6BT, U.K. Tel #-44-171-387-
7050 or -2647, fax#-44-171-380-7096. Curator
Ms Helen Chatterjee (h.chatterjee @ucl.ac.uk),
lecturer Dr Adrian Lister; former curator Ms
Rozina Down. Founded 1828 when the private
coll. of Robert E. Grant was added to that of
the Imperial College; now part of University
College London. Contains 550 bird skeletons
and anatomical specimens.

London Museum of the Royal College of
Surgeons of England (RCSB), 35-43 Lincoln’s
Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PN, U.K. Curator
of vertebrates: Barry Davis (tel. ##-44-171-
973-2190, fax ##-44-171-405-4438, e-mail
museums @rcseng.ac.uk or
bdavis @rcseng.ac.uk). Founded in 1799 when
the British Government purchased the coll. of
John Hunter, becoming the Royal College of
Surgeons in 1800; coll. opened to the public in
1813. Heavily damaged in World War IJ, but
some 500 anatomical bird specimens remain,
mostly in spirit, many from the eighteenth
century. All bird items on computer (F.
Steinheimer in Jitt.).

Ltibeck Naturhistorisches Museum Libeck,
Miihlendamm 1-3, D-23522 Liibeck, Germany.
Head: Dr Wolfram Eckloff. Includes a small
bird coll. Formerly had material from North
America and SE Asia, e.g. the coll. of Hugo
Storm, but this was destroyed in 1942.

Ludlow Shropshire County Museum Service
(SHRCM), Ludlow Museum Office, 47 Old
Street, Ludlow SY8 INW, Shropshire, U.K.
Tel: #-44-1584-873857, fax —872019, e-mail
ludlow.museum @shropshire-cc.gov.uk.
Curator of Natural Sciences: Ms Katherine J.
Andrew. Founded 1833; has 550 mounted
birds, a further 40 cases of mounted birds, 10

C.S. Roselaar

(partial) skeletons, and 3,000 eggs, including
material from the Whitchurch Museum, the
Ludlow Nat. Hist. Soc., and the John Rocke
private museum (Clungunford), mostly from
the Shropshire region (W England) and the
British Isles generally.

Luxembourg Musée National d’ Histoire
Naturelle de Luxembourg (MNHNL), 25 Rue
Minster, L-2160 Luxembourg. Tel. #-352-
462233-200 or —462233-414. Curator of the
zoological section: E. Engel
(eengel@mnhn.lu), scientific assistant J.-
M.Guinet Gmguinet@mnhn.lu; tel -462240-
209); former curator V. Ferrant. Has 2,500
mounts (many with full data), 104 skins, 55
skeletons/skulls, c.300 eggs, 240 nests, and 81
feather sets; includes colls. of H. Linden, E.
Holub, H. Princess von Schwartzenberg, and J.
Saur, both of local origin and from Africa and
South America (e.g. from Brazil). See Ferrant
(1912) and Guinet (1999) for catalogues.

Lyon Musée Guimet d’ Histoire Naturelle
(MGHNL), Museum de Lyon, 28 Boulevard
des Belges, F-69006 Lyon, France; tel. #-33-
472-690519. Curator: M. Clary, G. Pacaud.
Founded 1772 and containing many mounts of
birds. The Centre de Paléontologie
Stratigraphique et Paléoecologie, ERS 2042,
Université Claude Bernard-Lyon 1, 27-43
Boulevard du 11 Novembre, F-69622
Villeurbanne Cedex, France, has an enormous
coll. of (sub)fossil and recent bird bones
(curator: Dr Cécile Mourer-Chauviré).

Maastricht Natuurhistorisch Museum
Maastricht (NHMM), Postbus 882, NL-6200
AW Maastricht, the Netherlands (visitors
address: De Bosquetplein 6-7, NL-6211 KJ
Maastricht). Tel. #-31-43-3505477, fax —
3505475. Head curator: Ms Drs F. N.
Dingemans-Bakels. Founded 1912, owned by
local government; includes colls. of A. W. P.
Maessen, pater Nillesen, and Mr Knapen
(eggs). Has 2,000 skins and mounts, 30 skulls,
and 1,370 eggs, largely from the Limburg
province, not all yet on card or computer.

Madrid The Universidad Autonoma de Madrid
has an important avian skeleton coll.

Mainz Naturhistorisches Museum Mainz
(NHMMZ), Landessammlung fiir Naturkunde
Rheinland-Pfalz, ReichklarastraBe 10, D-51116
Mainz, Germany. Tel #-49-6131-122647, e-
mail snhmmz@mail.uni-mainz.de. Curator: Dr
Ulrich Schmidt. Founded 1834; owned by city

303

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

of Mainz. Has 2,875 skins and mounts, 1,025
(partial) skeletons, 1,875 egg sets, and 216
nests, all on card/computer; 10-50 skins are
added annually. Regionally specialised
(Rheinland-Pfalz), but also birds from
elsewhere in C Europe and from Ruanda;
includes birds of, e.g., O. Natorp.

Malmo Malmo Museer, Natural History

Department, Malmohus Castle,
Malmohusvagen, S-20104 Malmo, Sweden.
Tel. #-46-40-344400. Founded 1841. Curator:
Sverker Wadén (sverker.waden@malmo.se).
Includes an important number of bird skins,
mostly Swedish.

Marseille Muséum d’ Histoire Naturelle de

Marseille (MMNH), Palais Longchamp, F-
13004 France. Has a small bird coll.

Melitopol State Pedological Institute, Melitopol,

Crimea, Ukraine. A small bird coll. Curator
Aleksander I. Koshelev
(station @ melitopol.net)

Monaco Musée Oceanographique (MOM),

Avenue Saint-Martin, MC-98000, Monaco-
ville, Monaco. Has fewer than 200 skins,
mostly of sea-birds. Catalogue: C. Carpine
(1986) Bull. Inst. Oceanogr. Monaco 1436: 1-
130

Montauban Muséum d’ Histoire Naturelle de

Montauban, Palais de la Cour des Aides, Place
A. Bourdelle, F-82000 Montauban, France.
Founded 1854, containing c.1,500 mounted
local and exotic birds.

Moscow Biological Faculty of Moscow State

University MGU, dept of Vertebrate Zoology.
Includes colls. of bird skins and specimens in
spirit. Curators: Maksim N. Dementiev (skins;
demmaks @apexmail.com), Prof Felix Ya.
Dzerzhinski (spirit specimens;

dzer @soil.msu.ru)

Moscow Dept of Zoology and Ecology,

Zoological-Chemistry Faculty, Moscow
Pedagogical State University MPSU. Tel #-7-
(0)95-283 1634. Curator: Vladimir T. Butiev.
Founded 1959. Includes c.3,500 skins (c.600
species) from a wide area of the former USSR,
all registered on a card system, with regular
additions from own expeditions, local
collectors, etc.

Moscow Geography Faculty, Dept of

Zoogeography, Moscow State University
MGU. Includes nearly 1,000 skins and c.400
clutches with nest. Curator: Dr Vladimir N.
Kalyakin.

C.S. Roselaar

Moscow Private coll. of the late Dr L. S.
Stepanyan [formerly associated with the
Institute of Ecology and Evolution (former A.
N. Severtzov Institute) (IOAN), Russian
Academy of Sciences, Leninskii Prospekt 33,
117071 Moskva V-71, Russia. Staff: A. V.
Filchagov]. This private coll., whose fate is
unknown following the death of Stepanyan in
2002, was started in 1953 and includes 2,784
birds (c.600 species) obtained during
expeditions to many sites in the former Soviet
Union (especially the Caucasus and the Far
East), as well as Mongolia, Vietnam, and the
SW Pacific; 4 types are included. Catalogue:
Stepanyan (2001).

Nancy: Muséum-Aquarium de Nancy (MAN),
34 rue Sainte-Catherine, F-54000 Nancy,
France. Tel #-33-383-329997. Coll. manager:
Dr Alain Philippot (alain.philippot @ man.uhp-
nancy.fr). Formerly named Museé de zoologie
de I’ Université et de la ville de Nancy (MZN),
now belongs to the Communauté Urbaine du
Grand Nancy. Founded in 1854; former staff
members Mr Godron and L. Cuénot, includes
the coll. of Charon and with large recent
acquisitions as a depot of the Paris Museum
(MNHN). Includes 3,000 mounts, a few skins
and skeletons, and a fairly large number of egg
sets. Mounts of worldwide provenance, all on
computer.

Naples/Napoli Centro ‘Musei delle Scienze
Naturali’ of the Istituto e Museo di Zoologia,
Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II,
Via Mezzocannone 8, I-80134 Napoli, Italy.
Curator: Nicola Maio. Founded in 1811 by G
Murat, now containing 2,230 skins and mounts,
from Italy, Brazil, E Africa, etc.; includes colls.
of Luigi Petagna, Achille Costa, Elena d’ Aosta,
and Mario Schettino. See Maio & Nappi (2001)
Avocetta 25: 154, and Avocetta 23: 193 (1999).

Nice Musée d’ Histoire Naturelle (Musée Barla),
60 Bd Risso, F-06300 Nice, France. Tel. #-33-
4-93551524, fax —93558196. Has a small bird
coll.

Nottingham Nottingham Natural History
Museum, Wollaton Hall, Wollaton Park,
Nottingham NG8 2AE, U.K. Tel: #-44-115-
9153900, fax —0153932. Has a large egg coll.

Norwich Castle Museum, Nat. Hist. Dept.,
Norwich, Norfolk NR1 3JU, England, tel#-44-
1603-493642, fax -765651. Curator of Natural
History Dept: Dr A. G (Tony) Irwin, e-mail
tony.irwin.mus @norfolk.gov.uk. Includes large
bird dioramas.

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Novi Sad Institute for Protection of Nature of
Serbia, Radnicka 20, 21000 Novi Sad,
Yugoslavia. Tel #381-21-421144, e-mail
ZZPSNS @eunet.yu. Curator Slobodan Puzovic
MSc; 2 taxidermists. Founded 1947,
government-owned. Includes 2,500 bird skins
(200 species), 45 skeletons, 405 egg sets, 50
nests.

Novy Jicin This town in N Moravia (E Czech
Republic) has a museum which contains 519
birds of 287 species.

Odessa Odessa State University, Odessa,
Ukraine. Includes a small bird coll. Curator:
Anatoli I. Korzyukov (olegk @te.net.ua)

Olomouc Vlastivedne Muzeum v Olomouci
(regional Museum of Olomouc), Namesti
Republiky 5, 77173 Olomouc, Czech Rep.
Curator Zdenék Vermouzek (tel. #-420-68-
5515116/ 0605-578746; fax #-420-68-
5222743, e-mail verm@vmo.cz). Founded by
fusion of some smaller colls. 1873-1908;
former curator Zdenék Rumler. Has 3,000
skins, 1,500 (partial) skeletons, and 273 egg
sets, to which up to 20-30 are added annually.
Most items are from Moravia or the Czech
Republic generally, a few exotic; all are on
card, part also on computer. See also Varga
(97s):

Opava Slezské Zemské Muzeum, Prirodovedni
oddeleni, Tyrsova 1, 74646 Opava, Czech
Republic. Includes 4,000 bird skins (Varga
1973).

Oporto see Porto

Oradea Muzeul ‘Tarii Crisurilor’, Str.
Stadionului 2, 3700 Oradea, Romania.
According to a catalogue (Kovats et al. 1970),
the coll. contains 1,315 birds of 207 species.
Also an egg catalogue is available (Beczy
19 77al0):

Padua/Padova Museo di Zoologia, Universita
degli Studi di Padova, Via Jappelli 1/A, I-
35121 Padova, Italy. Tel #-39-49-8275410, fax
—8275064. Curator: Paola Nicolosi
(paola.nicolosi@ unipd.it); scientific staff:
Prof. M. Turchetto, Prof. R. Sandra Casellato
(for all zoology). Founded 1734 with the
donation of the coll. of Antonio Vallisneri to
the university; includes colls. of G Nardo and
C. Acerbi from Italy, USA, and Egypt. Has at
least 680 mounts (without data on stands, but
perhaps to be traced from available ancient
catalogues), 21 skeletons & skulls, 340 eggs
and 98 nests (425 species), mostly from the

C.S. Roselaar

local area (Veneto) but with some from
elsewhere; not yet on computer. See also
Nicolosi & Turchetto (2001).

Panagyurishte Town Historical Museum
(NHMP), Panagyurishte, Bulgaria. Curator:
Yasen Hristov. Founded 1970. Includes c.200
bird skins, mainly from nearby localities in C
Bulgaria; all on card. See Hristov (1982).

Pavia Dip. Biologia Animale, Universita di
Pavia, Piazza Botta 9-10, I-27100 Pavia, Italy.
Curator: Dr Carlo Violani. The coll. includes
c.4,000 birds skins and mounts.

Pécs Janus Pannonius Museum, University of

Pécs, Pécs, Hungary. Includes a small bird coll.

For history, see: B. Solti ((1991’=1992) J. P.
Mus. Evkonyve 36: 59-66.

Perpignan Muséum d Histoire Naturelle, 12
Rue Fontaine Neuve, F-66000 Perpignan,
France. Has a small bird coll.

Pleven Natural History Museum, 3 Stoyan
Zaimov Str., 5800 Pleven, Bulgaria. Tel. #-
359-64-23569. Curator: Ivan Raychev, former
staff I. Iliev, G. Slavchev, V. Dimitrov.
Founded 1958, belongs to Municipality of
Pleven. Includes c.1,000 bird skins and 576
mounts, including rarities from the nearby
region of NC Bulgaria; all in a card system.
See Dimitrov (1981).

Plovdiv Natural Science Museum (NSMP), 34
Hristo G. Danov Str, 4000 Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
Tel. #-359-32-264474. Curator: Prof. Tseno
Petrov; former head Boris Kaltchev. Founded
1918, belongs to the Municipality of Plovdiv.
Includes the former coll. of the College St.
Augustin (Philipopol), obtained 1955. Includes
662 skins (250 species), largely from S
Bulgaria. Card system available. See Petrov
(1983).

Plzen Zapodoceske Muzeum, Knohova vymen,
Kopeckého Sady 15, CZ-30000 Plzen, Czech
Rep. Includes 500 skins. For the zoological
coll., see: L. Hurka (1982) Sbornik
Zapodoceske Mus. Plzni 41: 1-63.

Porto Museu de Historia Natural — Zoologia
(MZP), Faculdade de Ciéncias do Porto, Praca
Gomes Teixeira, P-4050 Porto, Portugal. Tel #-
351-2-310290, fax #-351-2-2004777. Coll.
manager Luzia Sousa, other staff Maria José
Cunha. Founded in 1900 by Prof. Augusto
Nobre; former staff Reis Junior, J. R. dos
Santos Junior. Includes 200 bird skins and
4,000 other items.

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Pristina Muzej Kosova 1 Metohije (500 PRI),

Prirodnjacko Od., Trg. Kralja Milutina 13,
38000 Pristina, Kosovo, Yugoslavia. Tel. #-
381-38-20611. Curator: Ms Basanovic.
Founded 1951, government-owned. Includes
1,000 skins (157 species) from the Kosovo &
Metohija region. The present status and future
of the coll. is unknown; in late 1999, it was
apparently unattended, as the curator was as a
refugee in Beograd.

Randazzo A museum in Catania province, Italy.

Includes the coll. of A. Priolo, with 2,250

mounted birds (389 species), mainly from E
Sicily; see: Suppl. Ric. Biol. Selvaggina 22,
1995. Catalogue: Priolo & Di Palma (1995).

Ravenna Museo Ornitologico di Scienze

Naturali del Comune di Ravenna (MOESN),
Via Rivaletto 25, I-48020 Sant’ Alberto
(Ravenna), Italia (office address: Loggeta
Lombardesca, Via di Roma 13, I-48100
Ravenna). Tel. #-39-544-482054, fax —212092,
e-mail museo.ornitologico @
comune.ravenna.it). Curator Dr Linda Kniffitz
(tel. -482761), former curator Dr Azelio Ortali.
Founded in 1906 by Alfredo Brandolini;
donated to the Comune di Ravenna in 1967,
together with the large ornithological library.
Includes 2,000 birds of 69 families, 330 eggs,
and 91 nests, mainly of regional origin (Emilio
Romagna), but also a wide scatter of exotic of
birds; several Numenius tenuirostris. See
Brandolini (1961) and Ortali (1974) for a
catalogue.

Regensburg Naturkunde Museum Regensburg,

Am Prebrunntor 4, D-93047 Regensburg,
Germany. Tel.: 00-49-941-5073446. Director
and curator: Dr Hansj6rg Wunderer. A small
coll. of (mainly) local birds.

Reghin Lyzeum Nr 2, RO-4225 Reghin (Mures
Co.), Romania. Former curator Istvan Kohl.
The coll. includes 3,516 birds of 386 species,
of which 149 exotic, the remainder largely
local, often in fairly large series; also includes
many (partial) skeletons present. See Kohl
(1990-1991). Also in Reghin is the private
coll. of Laszlo V. Kalabér (26 Eminescu Str.,
RO-4225 Reghin; tel/fax #-40-65-520590),
which includes 27 skins, 40 birds in alcohol,
2,217 eggs, and 471 nests of 125 European bird
species.

Rennes Muséum National d’Histore Naturelle,
Université de Rennes, Campus Beaulieu, F-

C.S. Roselaar

35042 Rennes, France. Curator: Dr L. Marion.
Includes a small bird coll.

Rimini Riserva Naturale Orientata e Museo
Naturalistico di Onferno, Comune di
Gemmano, Piazza Roma 1, I-48855 Gemmano,
Rimini, Italia. Curator: Dino Scaravelli.
Includes 660 mounted birds, mainly from the
region but with some from elsewhere in Italy
or Europe. See Scaravelli (2001)

Rostock Zoologischen Sammlung der
Universitat Rostock (ZSRO), Institut fiir
Allgemeine und Spezielle Zoologie, Rostock,
Germany. Head of institute: Prof. Dr R. K.
Kinzelbach. Founded 1775 by O. G. Tychsen,
includes colls. of A. Ch. Siemssen, G.
Lembcke, H. Wachs, R. Kuhk, F. Hamann
(eggs), and F. J. H. von Miiller; contains c.800
bird objects, mainly mounts and eggs
(catalogue: www.biologie.uni-rostock.de/
zoologie/sammlung/voegel). See: Kinzelbach
et al. (1997).

Rouen Museum d Histoire Naturelle de Rouen,
198 rue Beauvoisine, F-76000 Rouen, France.
Founded 1828 by E.-A. Pouchet; fairly large (1
million zoological items), but closed for
security reasons by 2001.

Rudolstadt Thiiringer Landesmuseum
Heidecksburg zu Rudolstadt, beim Landkreis
Saalfeld-Rudolstadt, SchloBbezirk 1, D-07407
Rudolstadt, Germany. Formerly Rudolstadter
Naturhistorischen Museum. Curator: Dr
Eberhard Mey. Founded 1757 by Prince
Friedrich Carl von Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt;
former curators Julius Speerschneider, Otto
Schmiedeknecht, Gustav Kalbe, Gerhardt Jahn,
Siegfried Kuss, Wilhelm Ennenbach (Moller
2000). Includes local colls. (Thiiringen), but
also from Palestine, E Asia, and (on loan) those
of Emil Weiske from (e.g.) Hawaii, Australia,
etc

Ruse Natural History Museum (NHMRB), 8
Nish Str., Ruse, Bulgaria. tel #-359-82-444754,
fax #-359-82-272397. Includes c.400 skins
(150 species) from the Ruse region in NE
Bulgaria, all on system cards.

Salzburg, Haus der Natur, Museumplatz 5, A-
5020 Salzburg, Osterreich/Austria. Tel. #-43-
662-842653, fax —-847905, e-mail
office @ hausdernatur.at. Head Prof Dr
Eberhard Stiiber, curator of vertebrate coll. Dr
Robert Lindner
(robert.lindner @ hausdernatur.at). Founded in
the 1930s; owned by private charity (Verein fiir

306

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

darstellende und angewandte Naturkunde Haus
der Natur). Former curator E. P. Tratz. Includes
c.2,000 birds skins (e.g. from the coll. of V.
Tschusi zu Schmidhoffen), hundreds of mounts
(largely without proper labels), and a small but
unknown number of skeletons, skulls, egg sets,
nests, and feathers. The skins are mostly from
Austria (esp. the Salzburg region), but the coll.
includes birds also from S Germany, the
Afrotropics, and C & S America

San Gimignano Museo Ornitologico di S.
Gimignano, Siena prov., Italy. The former coll.
of the Marchioness M. Paulucci, who had
1,260 mounted birds at her death in 1911, of
which 696 (253 species) remain. See Massi
(1990 & undated).

Sankt Gallen Naturmuseum Sankt Gallen,
Museumstrabe 32, CH-9000 Sankt Gallen,
Switzerland. Tel. #-41-71-2420670, fax -
2420672. Head: Dr Toni Biirgin
(tbuergin@naturmuseumsg.ch). A small coll. of
local and exotic birds, e.g. from Ussuriland
(Russian Far East)

Saratov Zoological Museum of Saratov State
University (ZMSSU), Astrakhanskaya, 83,
Saratov 410026, Russia. Tel #-7-8452-519228,
e-mail anikinvv @info.sgu.ru,
yakushevnn @info.sgu.ru. Head of bird dept
Gennady V. Shlyakhtin, coll. managers Vasili
V. Anikin, Mikhail V. Ermokhin, Evgeny V.
Zavyalov, also 4 other staff members; past staff
members I. B. Volchanecky and L. A.
Lebedeva. Specialised in the Volga-Ural
region, but a large coll. was lost in fire; the
present coll. of 1,900 bird skins was formed
after 1991 and is registered on card and
computer; c.200 species are represented. The
average increase at present is 1,000 skins
annually, from own expeditions.

Schlag] Schlag] Institut, Osterreich. A small bird
coll. See Petz (1984).

Sheffield Sheffield City Museum, Weston Park,
S10 2TP Sheffield, U.K. Tel #-44-114-
2782600. Keeper of Natural History: Derek
Whiteley. Includes a small bird coll.: see D.
Whiteley (1984) Magpie 3: 47-53.

Siracusa Liceo Classico “T. Gargallo’. Hosts the
Riza coll., originally of 2,700 mounts (of
which only 330 survive). Former curator: Prof.
G. Sturniolo. See Naturalista Siciliano 18: 297-
DDD.

Southend-on-Sea Southend Central Museum
(SOUMS), Victoria Avenue, Southend-on-Sea

C.S. Roselaar

SS2 6EW, Essex, U.K. Tel.: #-44-1702-
215640, fax -215631. Senior Keeper of Natural
History: John Skinner

(john.skinner @bigfoot.com). Includes 30
skins, c.500 mounts (mainly from the colls. of
C. Parsons and J. D. Hoy), and 300 egg sets,
mostly of local origin (Essex); see Pollitt
(c.1925).

Split Prirodoslovnog Muzeja, 58000 Split,
Croatia. Curator Dr G. Piasevoli; contains
1,161 birds of 230 species: see Larus 43: 89-
119:

Stettin see Szczetin

Stia Collezione ornitologica ‘Carlo Beni’, Stia,
Arezzo prov., Italy. Includes c.500 mounts
collected around 1900 in Tuscany. Is moving to
the visitor centre of the Parco Nazionale
Foreste Casentinesi. See G. Tellini Florenzano
(1997).

Suceava Museum Departamental, Suceava,
Romania. For the small bird coll., see M.
Vasiliu, A. Ulsamer, D. Zaharia, & D. R.
Maxim (1983) Anuarul Muz. jud. Fasc. Stiint.
Nat. 7: 75-95

Swansea Swansea Museum, Victoria Road,
Maritime Quarter, Swansea SA2 OJE,.U.K.
Tel.: #-44-1792-653763, fax —652585. Curator:
Bernice Cardy. Founded 1834, owned by
Swansea City Council. Includes c.200 mounts,
a few skeletons, and 200 eggs sets, mostly
British, e.g. of the colls. of John Naylor (1860)
and W. G. Percy Player.

Sykkylven Sykkylven Naturhistorisk Museum ,
Kulturkontoret, N-6230 Sykkylven, Norway.
Tel. #-47-7025-1500, fax —1501. Has a small
bird coll.

Szczetin (Stettin) This Polish city once housed
a museum which, among others, contained the
coll. of its former founder and curator H.
Dohrn, with birds of, e.g., the Cape Verde Is.
After 1945 this coll. was transferred to
Warszawa, but many of the Dohrn specimens
seem to have been lost. See Hazevoet (1995).

Tallinn Eesti Loodusmuuseum/ Estonian
Museum of Natural History, Lai tn. 29A,
Tallinn 10133, Estonia (work address of
zoology dept.: Kopli tn. 76, 10416 Tallinn).
Tel. #-372-6-411738, e-mail
museum @online.ee. The bird coll. includes
material of V. Russow, A. Rauch, and P.
Wasmuth.

Tbilisi Zoological Institute (ZIT), Georgian
Academy of Sciences, 31 Chavchavadze pr.,

307

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

380030 Tbilisi, Georgia. Founded by G. Radde,
now part of the Georgian Academy of
Sciences. Includes the large coll. of G Radde
and others, mainly from the Caucasus area,
Crimea, NE Turkey, Soviet Far East, etc. The
Tbilisi coll. was in poor condition in c.1985,
when it was stored undergroud.

Tessenderlo Bosmuseum Gerhagen, Zavelberg
10, B-3980 Tessenderlo, Belgium. Tel & fax #-
32-13-3673844/ -3663448, e-mail
bosmuseum @ village.uunet.be. Contact: Jos
Thijs. Founded 1968 as part of the Werkgroep
Ecologie Tessenderlo (WET), a volunteer
association (secretary: Herman Vermeulen,
hvermeulen @skynet.be). Includes a coll. of
c.330 mounted birds, mostly local and recently
acquired.

Thessaloniki Zoological Museum (LZUT),
University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki,
Greece. Director: Dr Elena Voultsidou-
Koukoura. Includes a small bird coll.

Timisoara A museum in this W Romanian city
has a small bird coll. Curator: D. Lintia

Torino see Turin

Tournai Musée d Histoire Naturelle et
Vivarium, Cour d’Honneur de |’ Hotel de Ville,
B-7500 Tournai (Doornik), Belgium. Tel. #-32-
69-322345, fax —233939, e-mail
mushn @swing.be. Conservateur Dr Philippe
Brunin, conservateur-adjoint Christophe Remy;
former curator Paul Simon. Founded 1828,
with most acquisitions before 1860. Of the
4,700 bird skins and mounts only 1,000—2,000
have proper labels; the other original labels
were inadvertently thrown away in the 1960s.
The coll. includes a small number of skeletons
(c.20) and eggs (c.30).

Trieste Museo Civico do Storia Naturale
(MSNT), Piazza Hortis 2, I-34123 Trieste,
Italy. A small bird coll., which includes some
exotic ones. A catalogue of all birds is
available.

Tubingen Zoologische Sammlung der
Universitat Tiibingen (ZST), Tiibingen,
Germany. Curator: Dr Erich Weber
(Erich. Weber @uni-tuebingen.de; tel. #-49-
707 1-29-4634). A coll. founded c.1841 and
now part of the Zoologisches Institut der
Eberhard-Karls-Universitat Tibingen. Includes
about 2,000 bird skins and mounts, 1,300
(partial) skeletons, 500 egg sets, and a small
feather coll., to which 20-50 items are added
annually (mainly feather sets and skeletons);

C.S. Roselaar

includes part of the coll. of Herzog Paul von
Wiirttemberg. All items on card, newer ones on
computer.

Turin/Torino The Collegio San Giuseppe in
Turin (CSGT) includes a large coll. of c.1000
mounted hummingbirds, totalling 226 species,
brought together by Pietro Franchetti (1878—
1964). See Aimassi & Levi (1999) for a
catalogue.

Turku Zoological Museum (MZT), Centre for
Biodiversity, University of Turku, FIN-20014
Turku, Finland. Contact person: Ari Karhilahti
(taxidermist) (arikar@utu.fi). Past curator P.
Voipio; incl. a skin coll. from K. S. Ehnberg.
The MZT has 1,726 skins, 700 mounts, 1,000-—
1,500 egg sets, 160 spread wings, and fewer
than 100 skeletons and birds in alcohol, all
largely from Finland, to which 50-150 birds
are added annually. All are on computer. For a
catalogue, see www.utu.fi/ML/biologia/
elainmuseo.

Turnhout Natuurhistorisch Museum van
Natuurvereniging De Wielewaal, Graatakker
11, B-2300 Turnhout, Belgium. Includes a
small coll. of mounted birds

Udine Museo Friuliano di Storia Naturale, Via
Grazzano 1, I-33100 Udine, Italy. Has a small
bird coll., curated by a taxidermist. Skin
catalogue available. For the egg catalogue, see:
R. Parodi et al. (1988) Mus. Friulano Stor. Nat.
Pubbl. 34: 1-30.

Varna Museum of Natural History (MNHYV),
P.O. Box 173, 9000 Varna, Bulgaria. Tel #-359-
52-601891, fax #-359-52-681025. Curator:
Georgi Raychev, former curator Ivan Peshev.
Founded 1960, owned by Municipality of
Varna. Contains 350 bird skins of c.140
species, all on card; c.20 added annually,
mainly birds from the Varna area (NE
Bulgaria).

Vercelli (Italy) Includes a small coll. of 580
mounted birds, made by Mr. Ferrero (see
Suppl. Ric. Biol. Selvaggina 22, 1995).

Vienna/Wien The Vienna University has a small
bird coll., which for instance includes 2
Heteralocha acutirostris.

Winterthur Naturwissenschaftliche
Sammlungen Stadt Winterthur, Museumstrabe
52, CH-8400 Winterthur, Switzerland. Tel. #-
41-52-2675166, fax —2675319. Includes a
small coll. of local birds.

Witney Oxfordshire County Council Museums,
Oxfordshire Museums Store, Cotswold Dene,

308

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Standlake, Witney, Oxon OX29 7QG, U.K.
Tel.: #-44-1865-300639, fax —300519. Curator
of Biological Records Centre: John Campbell
(john.campbell@ oxfordshire.gov.uk). From
Aug 2000, includes the egg coll. of the
Jourdain Society, which started from 1964 with
the donations of older colls. of deceased
members. The most important contributors
were K. J. Pickford, C. J. Pring, J. W.
Mullholland, and S. A. R. Smith (but not F. C.
R. Jourdain himself: his egg coll. is in Tring).
Has 12,000 egg sets, mostly on card, 5,000 on
computer, from the entire W Palearctic. The
museum store also includes a coll. of over 300
eggs of Theed Pearce, donated by Bruce
Campbell.

Yerevan Zoological Institute (ZIA), Armenian
Academy of Sciences, Yerevan, Armenia. Has
a bird coll. of unknown size.

York Yorkshire Museum, Museum Gardens,
York, North Yorkshire YO1 7ER, U.K. Tel.: #-
44-1904-629745, fax -651221. Asst. Curator of
Natural Science: Stuart Ogilvy. Contains 3,073
bird skins and c.2,000 eggs (Denton 1995).

Please note the addresses of 2 other institutions
interested in zoological/ ornithological collections:

(1) the ornithological collections survey of the
International Ornithological Committee, c/o
Walter J. Bock, Dept. of Biological Sciences,
Box 37, Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia
University, New York NY 10027, USA;

the ESF Network of Systematic Biology,
secretary Ms Nicola Donlon, The Natural
History Museum, Cromwell Road, London
SW7 5DB, U.K.

(2)

Not listed above but not unimportant are the
collections specialising in vocalisations of birds:

(1) National Sound Archive of the British Library
(Curator of Wildlife Sounds: Richard Ranft),
96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, U.K. (tel
#-44-171-4127402, e-mail richard.ranft@
bl.uk);

The Boris N. Veprintsev Phonotheca of
Animal Voices (Olga D. Veprintseva, V. V.
Leonovich, S. A. Boukreev), Inst. of
Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics of
Russia, Academy of Sciences, 142292
Pushchino, Russia. See Veprintseva (1999).

(2)

Many other museum collections also contain bird
sound libraries.

C.S. Roselaar 309 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Acknowledgements
This list largely originated from data supplied by the curators of the various collections mentioned.
They receive my most sincere thanks, especially those who also provided data on collections from
which no response was received or who supplied literature on these. I hope that these combined efforts
will benefit all and will lead to a better use of European bird collections and an increasing mutual
cooperation of their staff and students. Many additional data and comments were received from Jérn
Scharlemann and Frank Steinheimer during the final stages of this paper.

References:

These are mainly on the history, catalogues, or type lists of European bird collections, as supplied by
respondents to the questionnaires. The data were in part supplied incompletely, but no attempt has been
made to improve them, nor were the texts of the referred articles checked to see whether the questionnaires
were filled in correctly. This is not a complete list of all existing literature on type catalogues; for a more
full list of these, see Wiktor & Rydzewski (1991) below. Literature cited in the introduction and elsewhere
is given here also.

Aimassi, G., & Levi, L. 1999. The Hummingbird Collection in Collegio San Guiseppe (Turin, Italy).
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Almaga, C. 1993. Bosquejo hist6rico da zoologia em Portugal. Museu Nacional de Historia Natural,
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Bocage), Lisboa.

Almaga, C. (ed.) 1994. Professor Germano da Fonseca Sacarrdo (1914-1992). Museu Nacional de
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Anonymous [= H. Gretzer] 1907. Collections du Musée d’Histoire naturelle de Son Altesse Royale
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Ansorge, H. 1987. Die Vogelsammlung des Staatlichen Museums fiir Naturkunde Gorlitz—Belege zur
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C.S. Roselaar 318 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

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Address: C. S. Roselaar, Zoological Museum Amsterdam, Instituut voor Biodiversiteit en Ecosysteem
Dynamica (IBED), University of Amsterdam, P.O. Box 94766, 1090 GT Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Email: roselaar@science.uva.nl

C.S. Roselaar 321 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Appendix 1

European museums by country. Countries are listed alphabetically, but museums within countries are
listed in order of the number of specimens they possess. The third column indicates which list the
museum is treated under.

Country — City List Denmark Copenhagen/Kgbenhavn A
Arhus B
Armenia Yerevan B
Estonia Tartu A
Austria Vienna/Wien (NMW) A Tallinn B
Linz A
Salzburg B Finland Helsinki A
Graz B Turku B
Innsbruck B f
France Paris A
Schlag B —_ is
Vienna/Wien (Univ) B ames
Strasbourg A
Belgium Tervuren iN Toulouse A
Brussels/Bruxelles A Lille A
Tournai B Grenoble A
Heusden-Zolder B Nancy B
Turnhout B Montauban B
Tessenderlo B Le Havre B
Monaco B
Bosnia Sarajevo A Dijon B
IL B
Bulgaria Sofia A you
Pl B Rouen B
oe - La Roghelllc B
ae a B Autun B
aa B Bordeaux B
see Marseille B
Varna B :
é Nice B
Dobrich B :
Panagyurishte B Perpignan E
ey Rennes B
Eacatiay © Zagreb a Georgia _Tiflis/Tbilisi B
Split B
G Berli A
Czech Rep. Prague/Praha A areca Coen
P iN Bonn A
en Frankfurt a/M A
Brno A
Stuttgart A
Olomouc B
0 B Dresden A
pee Munich/Miinchen A
Budisov B
Hamburg A
Plzen B ‘
Kiel A
Hradec Kralove B :
Braunschweig A
Bitov B
N Jicj B Bremen A
ny ee B Halberstadt A
cate Halle A
Coburg A

C.S. Roselaar

Greece

Hungary

Iceland

Ireland

Italy

Hanover/Hannover

Wiesbaden
Leipzig
Gorlitz
Wilhelmshaven
Magdeburg
Miinster
Karlsruhe
Mainz
Altenburg
Tiibingen
Gottingen
Bamberg
Bad Durkheim
Rostock
Greifswald
Darmstadt
K6then
Rudolstadt
Augsburg
Bielefeld
Chemnitz
Dortmund
Erlangen
Hildesheim
Kassel
Liibeck
Regensburg

Athens/Athinai
Thessaloniki

Budapest
Pécs

Reykjavik
Akureyri

Dublin

Milan/Milano
Genoa/Genova

Turin/Torino (MRSN)
Florence/Firenze

Rome/Roma
Pisa

Bologna (INFS)
Terrasini
Verona

Pavia

Forli

WDWrrrrrrr rr DB Wr Br DPF DPOB OP eee eee rwerrrrer rey Ee

322

Lithuania

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Venice/Venezia
Siena

Randazzo
Naples/Napoli
Ravenna

Ferrara

Livorno
Casalnuovo Monterotaro
Bologna (MZUB)
Turin/Torino (CSGT)
Padua/Padova
San Gimignano
Rimini

Vercelli

Stia (Arezzo)
Fermo

Siracusa

Bari

Brescia

Cagliari (Sardinia)
Catania

Chieri

Trieste

Udine

Kaunas

Luxemburg Luxembourg

Netherlands Leiden

Norway

Poland

Amsterdam
Rotterdam
Leeuwarden
Maastricht

Oslo

Bergen
Troms6
Stavanger
Trondheim
Elverum
Kristiansand
Sykkylven

Warsaw/Warszawa
Wroclaw

Krakow

Jelenia Géra -
Bialywieza

Bytom
Czestochowa

eel yeh loo) feel yi yea ae loo) fou) (oo) ae 9 a pn 1 ae loo|ilos|ie ey Saleclee at Boe] Lovfileofitert aloe) eof lool (es loch tor) lerf lent los) leoftes| (eslaloot leel orl jor! [ex rel pmo ym

C.S. Roselaar

Portugal

Romania

Russia

Slovakia

Slovenia

Spain

Sweden

Szczecin/Stettin

Lisbon/Lisboa (CZ/IICT)
Coimbra

Lisbon/Lisboa (MB)
Porto

Funchal (Madeira)

Cruz Quebrada

Ponta Delgada (Azores)

Bucharest
Sibiu
Reghin
Bacau
Oradea
Cluj-Napoca
Suceava
Timisoara

St Petersburg (ZISP)
Moscow (ZMMU)
Moscow (SDM)

St Petersburg (ZM/SPBU)
Moscow (PIN/RAS)
Moscow (MPSU)

Moscow (Stepanyan)
Saratov

Moscow (Fac Geogr MGU)
Moscow (Fac Biol MGU)

Bardejov
Kosice
Bratislava

Ljubljana

Madrid
Seville/Sevilla
Barcelona

Stockholm
Gothenburg/G6teborg
Lund

Uppsala

Jénkdping

Malmo

Harnosand

Jokkmokk

Switzerland Genéve

Basel
Bern

ge> Je > (esl [eel lee) lee) pe pes = a= de es [ee} les) (eo) E> les) lus) (ep) los) leo} pie eo Ie es tes lee} les} jee) (es) les) les! Pe pe> lecl lus] lee} loo) > > eo)

323

Tatarstan

U.K.

Ukraine

Yugoslavia

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Neuchatel
Lausanne
Fribourg
Ziirich
Winterthur
Sankt Gallen

Kazan

Tring
Edinburgh
Liverpool
Cambridge
Cardiff
Brighton
Manchester
Newcastle
Oxford
Sevenoaks
Witney
Bolton
Bristol
Exeter
Glasgow
Leeds
Carlisle
Birmingham
York
Saffron Walden
Coventry
Ludlow
Birchington
Southend-on-Sea

London (Grant Mus.)
London (Surgeons Coll.)

Swansea
Kendal
Norwich
Nottingham
Leicester
Sheffield

Kiev
Lviv
Melitopol
Odessa

Belgrade/Beograd
Novi Sad
Pristina

DWr DWF PF DWWDWWWTDWDWT TWIT Prrrrrwmrrrrrrrrrr DTD BDWBPrrre

C.S. Roselaar 324 Bull. B.O:G22003123%

Appendix 2

Index of persons named in the lists above, with museums where collections of these persons are
housed (if they had any). (*) denotes persons at present active in the museum mentioned

Abbot, J. (Liverpool); Abel (Bremen); Absolon, Karel (Brno); Acerbi, C. (Padova); Achtelig,
Michael (Augsburg)*; Adams, Jeremy M. (Brighton)*; Adams, Leith (Edinburgh, Tring); Adams,
Mark (Tring)*; Adelborg (Stockholm); Agassiz, Louis (Neuchatel); Aguilar-Amat (Barcelona); Aimassi,
G. (Chieri); Aitchison, James (Tring); Ajola (Terrasini); Alexander, Boyd (Tring); Alleon, Amedé
(Sofia); Almaga, Carlos (Lisboa-MB)*; Almasy von Zsadany und Torékszent, George Graf (Budapest,
Miinchen, Wien); Altner, H.-J. (Halle)*; Altobelli, Anna (Firenze)*; Altobello, G. (Bologna INFS,
Bologna MZUB); Altum, Bernhard (Minster); Anchieta (Bremen); Andersen (Elverum)*; Andersen,
Knut (Sofia); Andersen, Th. (Basel, Bonn, Bremen, Karlsruhe, Kgbenhavn, Leiden, Miinchen, Stuttgart);
Anderson, J. G (Bremen, Stockholm); Anderson, John (Tring); Andersson, Carl J. (Stockholm);
Andreevsky, V. (St Petersburg ZM SPBU); Andrew, Katherine (Ludlow)*; Angele, Theodor (Linz);
Anhalt-Kothen, August Herzog von (K6then); Anikin, Vasili V. (Saratov)*; Ansorge, Hermann (G6rlitz)*;
Ansorge, W. J. (Tervuren); Antinori, Orazio Marquis (Genova, Roma, Torino); Aosta, Elena Duchess
of (Napoli); Aplin, Oliver V. (Oxford); Arbuthnot, Robert (Glasgow); Arcamone, E. (Livorno);
Armstrong, F. B. (Tring); Arnone, Marcello (Terrasini); Arrigoni degli Oddi, Count Ettore (Roma);
Arthur, Ms Jane (Birmingham)*; Ashmole, Elias (Oxford); Askew, Capt. (Cambridge); Askeyev, Oleg
V. (Kazan)*; Aubrecht, Gerhard (Linz)*; Austria, Franz II, Emperor of (Wien); Ayres, Thomas (Bremen,
Liverpool);

Babault, Guy (Paris); Baccetti, Baccio (Siena)*; Baccetti, Nicola (Bologna INFS, Siena)*;
Backstrom, K. (Stockholm); Baddeley, M. O. E. (Bonn); Bahrmann, Udo (Dresden); Bailly (Grenoble);
Bairlein, Franz (Wilhelmshaven)*; Balat, Frantisek (Brno); Baldamus, W. (Coburg); Baldassarri, G.
(Siena); Baldi, A. (Budapest); Balfour (Bremen); Balthasar, Vladimir (Hradec Kralové); Bamberg,
Otto (Amsterdam, Bonn, Stockholm); Banaduc, Doru (Sibiu)*; Bangert, C. (Stockholm); Bankovics,
Attila (Budapest)*; Banks, Joseph (see Mus. Leverianum); Bannerman, David A. (Tring); Barbagli,
Fausto (Firenze)*; Barboza du Bocage, José V. (Lisboa-MB); Barej, Thomas (Warszawa); Barentsz
Exped. (W. Bierman, H. van der Lee) (Amsterdam); Barnett, Ray (Bristol)*; Baron, Oskar T. (Frankfurt);
Barreiro, Josefina (Madrid)*; Barrett, Robert (Troms6)*; Barrow, Sir John (Oxford); Bart, André
(Lille); Bartels Sr., Max E. G (Braunschweig, Leiden); Barth, C. von (Stuttgart); Barth, Edvard K.
(Oslo); Basanovic, Ms (Pristina); Bates, George L. (Liverpool, Tervuren, Tring); Bates, Paul
(Sevenoaks)*; Baud, Francois J. (Genéve)*; Baudin, Nicolas (Paris); Bauer, Ferdinand L. (Wien);
Bauer, Kurt M. (Wien); Bauernfeind, Ernst (Wien)*; Baxter, Evelyn V. (Edinburgh); Bayern, Maximilian
III K6nig von (Miinchen); Bayern, Prinzessin Therese von (Miinchen); Beale, Charles (Birmingham);
Beaufort, Lieven F. de (Amsterdam); Beavan, Robert C. (Tring); Beccari, Odoardo (Genova, Milano,
Torino); Bechet, George (Luxembourg)*; Becker, Peter R. (Bielefeld*, Bremen); Beczy, Toma L.
(Oradea); Beddall-Smith (Coventry); Beeyner, Nelo (Coimbra); Behn, Friedrich (Frankfurt); Behn,
Wilhelm FG (Kiel); Beick, Walter (Berlin, Kobenhavn); Bellgrove (Coventry); Bengtson, Sven-Axel
(Lund)*; Benson, Constantine W. (Cambridge); Bentz, Per-Goran (Malm6)*; Beretzk, Peter (Budapest);
Berezowskii, M. M. (St Petersburg ZISP); Berg, Bengt (Dresden); Berg, Giinther H. D. Freiherr von
(Strasbourg); Berg, Hans-Martin (Wien)*; Berger (Strasbourg); Berger, Arthur (Berlin); Bergman,
Goran (Helsinki); Bergman, Sten (Stockholm); Berlepsch, Hans H. C. L. Graf von (Frankfurt); Berlin,
A. (JOnk6ping); Berlioz, Jacques (Paris); Bernier, Chevalier J.A. (Paris); Bernis, Francisco (Madrid);
Bernoft-Osa, Anders (Oslo, Stavanger); Bernoulli, Hieronymus (Basel); Bernstein, Heinrich A. (Leiden);
Berry, Kathryn (Bolton)*; Besaucéle, V. (Toulouse); Bessi (Firenze); Betteridge (Coventry); Bewick,
Thomas (Newcastle); Bianki (Bianchi), Valentin L’ vovich (St Petersburg ZISP, St Petersburg ZM SPBU);
Biddulph, John (Tring); Bielewicz, M. (Bytom); Bielz, Eduard A. (Sibiu); Bierman, Willem H.
(Amsterdam); Bilkevich, S. I. (St Petersburg ZM/SPBU); Binder, Jon. Fr. & Franz (Sibiu); Bingham,
C. T. (Tring); Bisacco Palazzi, Giacomo (Venezia); Black, M. A. (Glasgow); Blackie, Churchill (Exeter);
Blanc, M. (Amsterdam, Roma); Blanchet, A. (Grenoble); Blandin (Nantes); Blanford, William (Tring);
Blasius, Johann H. (Braunschweig); Blasius, Wilhelm (Braunschweig); Blewitt, W. T. (Tring); Blezard,
E. (Carlisle); Blumenbach, Johann F. (Gottingen); Blyth, Edward (Cambridge); Bochenski, Zbigniew

C.S. Roselaar B25 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

(Krakow)*; Bochenski, Zygmunt (Krakow)*; Bock, Carl (Tring); Boenigk, Gerhard (Braunschweig)*;
Boetsscher, Hermann (G6rlitz); Boetticher, Hans von (Coburg, Frankfurt, Halberstadt, Halle, Sofia);
Boev, Nikolay (Sofia NMNHS); Boev, Zlatozar (Sofia NMNHS)*; Bogdanoyv, Modest Nikolaevich
(Moscow ZMMU, St Petersburg ZM SPBU); Bohm, Richard (Berlin); Boie, F. (Kiel); Boie, Heinrich
(Leiden); Bojer, Wenzel (Wien); Bokotei, A. A. (L’vov); Bolau, Heinrich & Hermann (Hamburg);
Bolton, David (Exeter)*; Bon, Mauro (Venezia)*; Bondesen, Paul (Arhus); Bonelli, Franco A. (Torino);
Bonjour (Nantes); Bonnevie (Tervuren); Bonsdorff, E. J. (Helsinki); Bonvalot, G. (Paris); Booth,
Edward Thomas (Brighton); Borelli, A. (Torino); Borivoje, Zuza (Sarajevo)*; Borrer, William
(Brighton); Bostanzhoglo, V. N. (Moscow ZMMU); Bottego, V. (Genova); Boucard, Adolphe (Madrid,
Paris, Stuttgart); Bourcier, Jules (Paris); Bourret, R. (Toulouse); Bouteille (Grenoble); Bouvier, Maison
(Berlin, Milano, Paris); Bovallius, Dr (Stockholm); Bracker-Braun, Cordula (Hamburg)*; Brandolini,
Alfredo (Ravenna); Brandt, Johann F. von (St Petersburg ZISP); Brandt, Johann G. W. (Halberstadt,
Halle); Brandt, T. T. (St Petersburg ZISP); Branicki, Alexander, Konstantin, & Xaver Graf von
(Warszawa); Braun, Horst (Bremen)*; Braunschweig und Liineburg, Herzog Carl I von (Braunschweig);
Braybrook, Lord Richard G. (Saffron Walden, Essex); Bregulla, Heinrich (Bonn) ; Brehm, Alfred E.
(Bonn, Braunschweig, Bremen, Halle); Brehm, Christian L. (Altenburg, Bonn, Braunschweig, Coburg,
Wien); Brendel (Halle); Brichetti, Pierandrea (Brescia)*; Bridges, T. (Liverpool); Brisson, Mathruin-
Jacques (Paris); Brogi, Sigismondo (Siena); Brooke, Michael de L. (Cambridge)*; Brooks, W. E.
(Liverpool, Tring); Brown, Henry (Glasgow) ; Briiggemann, Friedrich G.F. (Darmstadt, Dresden, Tring);
Bruhl, L. (Halle); Bruijn, A. A. (Leiden, Milano, Paris, Torino, Wiesbaden); Brunin, Philippe (Tournai);
Bryant, Henry (Bremen); Bub, Hans (Wilhelmshaven); Buch, Pere A. (Fribourg); Buchanan, Angus
(Tring); Biichi, Othmar (Fribourg); Buchner, E. (St Petersburg ZM SPBU); Buckley, T. E. (Cambridge);
Buda, Adam & Alexius (Sibiu); Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de (Paris); Bulgaria, Boris III of
(Sofia); Bulger, Capt. (Bremen); Buller, R. Hughes (Exeter); Buller, Walter (Liverpool, Tring); Bullock,
William/Mus Leverianum (Berlin, Edinburgh, Leiden, Liverpool, Paris, Torino, Wien); Burchell, William
J. (Oxford); Bureau, Louis (Nantes); Buresch, Ivan (Sofia); Burg, Gustav von (Roma); Biirger, Hermann
(Leiden); Burger, O. (Dresden); Biirgers, Joseph (Berlin); Burgin, Toni (Sankt Gallen)*; Burke, J.
(Liverpool); Burmeister, Karl Hermann C. (Halle); Busch, Rudolf (Halberstadt); Biisching, W.-D.
(Kothen); Butiev, Vladimir T. (Moscow MPSU)*; Butler, Arthur L. (Tring); Butler, Edward A. (Tring);
Biittikofer, Johann (Leiden); Buturlin, Sergei Aleksandrovich (Moscow ZMMU); Buturovic, Denana
(Sarajevo)*; Bybartas, K. (Kaunas); Bykov (St Petersburg ZISP); Byrkjedal, Ingvar (Bergen)*;
Cabanis, Jean L. (Berlin, Halberstadt); Cabot Nieves, José (Sevilla)*; Cagnolaro, Luigi (Milano)*;
Caley, G. (Tring); Campbell, Bruce (Witney); Campbell, J. M. (Glasgow); Campbell, John (Witney)*;
Cancelli, Fabrizio (Siena)*; Canesi (Miinchen); Capek, Vaclav (Brno); Cardy, Bernice (Swansea)*;
Carlini, R (Roma)*; Carlos III, King of Spain (Madrid); Carlsson, Von (Stockholm); Carpine, C.
(Monaco); Carraro (Verona); Carreira, Isabel M.G. (Coimbra)*; Carruccio, A. (Roma); Carruthers,
Alexander Douglas M. (Tring); Carvalho, Luis de (Coimbra); Casellato, Sandra (Padova)*; Castroviejo,
J. (Sevilla); Cederholm, Lennart (Lund); Chambers, W. T. H. (Exeter); Chapin, James P. (Tervuren);
Chapman, Frank M. (Bremen); Charon (Nancy); Chase, Robert W. (Birmingham); Chatterjee, Helen
(London Univ. Coll.)*; Cheesman, Robert E. (Tring); Chen, K. H. (Leiden); Cherrie, George (Frankfurt);
Cherubini, Giuseppe (Venezia)*; Chevalier (Stuttgart); Chigi della Rovere, F. (Roma); Chill, W. N.
(Tring); Chiozzi, Giorgio (Milano)*; Chorinsky, Friedrich (Brno); Christie, Major (Glasgow) ;
Christison, A. F. Philip (Tring); Christy, C. (Tervuren); Chrostowski, T. (Warszawa); Cignini, B.
(Roma); Cikovic, Davor (Zagreb)*; Cipolla (Verona); Clancey, Philip A. (Amsterdam, Bonn, Edinburgh);
Clark, A. S. (Edinburgh); Clark, William Eagle (Edinburgh); Clarke, Joseph & Joshua (Saffron Walden,
Essex); Clary, M. (Lyon)*; Clement, Morag (Kendal)*; Clot-Bey, Antoine B. (Grenoble); Cochrane,
Capt. H. L. (Glasgow) ; Cockburn, Miss (Tring); Cockerell, James (Tring); Coles, A. (Newcastle)*;
Collett, Robert (Oslo, Roma); Colston, Peter (Tring); Condé, Bruno (Nancy)*; Conrad, Capt. Paul
(Bremen, Tring); Constancia, J. S. (Cambridge); Cook, James (see Mus. Leverianum); Coomans de
Ruiter, Louis (Leiden); Cooper, Jo (Tring)*; Cossaune, G. (Toulouse); Costa, Achille (Napoli); Coulon,
Louis (Neuchatel); Cowan, W. D. (Liverpool, Tring); Coward (Manchester); Coxen, Charles & S.
(Tring); Crabbe, Major Bingham (Brighton); Crampton, W. T. (Leeds); Crawford-Cabral, Joao (Lisboa-
CZ/AICT); Cretzschmar, Philipp J. (Frankfurt); Cripps, J. N. (Tring); Crnkovic, R. (Zagreb); Cross,
Capt. Donald (Glasgow); Crowley, Philip (Tring); Cruz, Teodoro J. (Coimbra); Csorba, G. (Budapest);

C.S. Roselaar 326 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Csorgey, Titus (Budapest); Csorgé, Tibor (Budapest)*; Cuénot, L. (Nancy); Cuming, Hugh (Liverpool,
Tring); Cumming, Walter (Exeter, Tring); Cunha, Maria José (Porto)*; Cursham, C. W. (Dresden);
Curtis-Edwards, L. A. (Brighton); Cuvier, Frédéric (Paris); Czekelius sen., D. (Sibiu);

D’ Urban, William S. M. (Exeter); Dainelli (Firenze); Dal Fiume, Camillo (Verona); Dal Nero,
Vittorio (Roma, Verona); D’ Albertis, Luigi M. (Genova, Milano, Torino); Dalgleish, James G. (Brighton);
Dalmas, Comte R. de (Miinchen); Dalous, Pierre (Toulouse)*; Dam, D. C. van (Leiden); Darwin,
Charles R. (Tring); David, Pere Armand (Paris); David-Beaulieu, A. (Paris); Davis, Barry (London
RCSE)*; Davison, C. (Tring); Davison, William R. (Liverpool, Tring); Day, Francis (Cambridge); De
Betta (Verona); De Boccard, Raymond (Fribourg); De Buman, Charles & Joseph (Fribourg); De
Bussy, Louis P. le Cosquino (Amsterdam) ; De Cristoforis, Giuseppe (Milano); De Faveri, Adriano
(Bologna INFS)*; De Filippo, G. (Napoli); De Mons, Count Br. (Wiesbaden); De Romita (Bari); De
Roo, A. (Tervuren); De Selys-Longchamps (Brussels); De Witte, G. F. (Tervuren); De Wylder, G
(Stockholm); Decken, Karl Claus Freiherr Von der (Berlin); Degland, COmte Damien (Lille); Dei,
Apelle (Siena); Dekker, René W. R. J. (Leiden)*; Delacour, Jean (Paris, Tring); Delalande, Pierre A.
(Paris); Delibes, M. (Sevilla); Dementiev, Georgii Petrovich (Moscow SDM, Moscow ZMMU);
Dementiev, Maksim N. (Moscow — Biol. Fac. MGU)*; Demidov, P. G. (Moscow ZMMU); Deniger, K.
(Miinchen); Denton (Yorkshire); Deppe, Ferdinand (Wien, Berlin); Derby, Earl of: see Lord Stanley
(Liverpool); Derjugin, K. (St Petersburg ZM SPBU); Dernedde, Karl (Bonn); Desfayes, Michel
(Neuchatel); Detharding, Georg G. (Rostock); Devillers, Pierre (Brussels); Diard, Pierre M. (Leiden,
Paris, Tring); Diesener, Ruth (Miinchen)*; Diesselhorst, Gerd (Miinchen); Dietrich, Amalie (Bamberg,
Bremen, Hamburg); Dimitrov, Velik (Pleven); Dinesen, G. B. (Amsterdam, Roma); Dingemans-Bakels,
F. N. (Maastricht)*; D6dbel (Frankfurt); Déderlein, Ludwig H. P. (Strasbourg); Doflein, Franz J. T.
(Miinchen); Dohrn, Heinrich (Bremen, Frankfurt, Szczetin); Domaniewski, Janusz (Warszawa);
Dombrowski, Robert Ritter von (Amsterdam, Bucharest, Wien) ; Domeier, Hans (Hannover); Doménech
(Barcelona); Donchev, Stefan (Sofia); Doria, G (Genova)*; Doria, Marquis Giacomo (Genova, Torino);
Dorries, Friedrich C.G. (Braunschweig, Hamburg, Tring); Dorst, Jean (Paris); Dovic, Janez (Ljubljana);
Down, Rozina (London Univ. Coll.); Drescher, E. (Bytom); Dresser, Henry E. (Manchester); Dreyer,
Wolfgang (Kiel)*; Drost, Rudolf (Wilhelmshaven); Droste-Hiilshoff, Ferdinand Freiherr von (Minster);
Du Bus de Ghisignies, V. Bernard L. (Brussels); Du Chaillu (Bremen); Du Petit-Thouars, Abel A.
(Paris); Dubois (Le Havre); Dufresne, L. (Edinburgh, Paris); Dumont d’Urville, Jules S.C. Vicomte
(Paris); Dunajewski, Andreas (Warszawa); Duncker, Hans (Bremen); Dunlop, E. B. (Carlisle); Duoc
(Stuttgart); Duperrey, L. (Paris); Dupond, Charles (Brussels); Dupont, Maison (Paris); Diirck, H.
(Miinchen); Durnford, Henry (Tring); Dutton, T. P. (Edinburgh); Duvaucel, Alfred (Paris); Duve
(Stuttgart); Dybowski, Benedikt I. (Warszawa, Lviv); Dzerzhinski, Felix Ya. (Moscow — Biol. Fac.
MGU)*;

Earl of Derby (Liverpool); Eck, Siegfried (Dresden)*; Eckloff, Wolfgang (Ltibeck)*; Edelstam,
Carl (Stockholm)*; Edinburg Univ. Museum (Edinburgh); Edwards, W. H. (Birmingham); Ehlers
(G6ttingen); Ehnberg, K. S. (Turku); Ehrenberg, Christian G. (Berlin, Wien); Eisenhofer (Stockholm);
Eisentraut, Martin (Bonn); Elliot, Daniel G (Stuttgart); Elliot, Major-General (Exeter); Ellis, Willoughby
(Birmingham); Elpatev, V. S. (St Petersburg ZISP); Emin Bey: see Emin Pasha; Emin Pasha/Pascha (=
Eduard Schnitzer, Arthur Schnitzler) (Berlin, Bremen, Milano, Tring, Wien); Engel, E. (Luxembourg)*;
Engelbach, Pierre (Paris); Ennenbach, Wilhelm (Rudolstadt); Erard, Christian (Paris)*; Erckel, Theodor
(Frankfurt); Ericson, Per (Stockholm)*; Erikkson, A. W. (Uppsala); Erikkson, Mats (Uppsala)*; Eriks,
Arie (Amsterdam); Erlanger, Carlo Freiherr von (Frankfurt); Ermokhin, Mikhail V. (Saratov)*; Erthal,
Franz Ludwig von (Bamberg); Escalera, de la (Barcelona); Etchécopar, Robert D. (Paris); Euler, Carl
(Berlin); Everett, Alfred H. (Tring); Eversmann, E. A. (Kazan, St Petersburg ZISP); Eversmann,
Eduard F. (Berlin, Kazan); Exped. Filchner (Miinchen); Exped. Pacifico 1862-1866 (Madrid); Exped.
St6tzner (Dresden); Eykman, C. (Rotterdam); Eyres (Leeds);

Faber, Friedrich von (Berlin, Dresden, Leiden); Fadeev, Igor V. (Moscow SDM)*; Falk, Johann P.
(St Petersburg ZISP); Farafontov, A. P. (Dresden); Farr, W. B. (Cambridge); Farren (Roma); Fasel,
André (Fribourg)*; Fatio, Victor (Genéve); Fayard, Armand (Grenoble)*; Fea, Leonardo (Genova,
Torino); Feilden, Henry W. (Cambridge, Tring); Feldegg, Christoph Freiherr von (Praha); Feldmann,
Carl (Wiesbaden); Ferrant, Victor (Luxembourg); Ferreira, Ms M. E. (Bonn); Festa, Enrico (Torino);
Fetzer, Christian (Wiesbaden); Fiebig, Jiirgen (Berlin); Filchagov, A. V. (Moscow Severtz. Inst.)*;

C.S. Roselaar O27) Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Filippi, Filippo De (Torino); Finsch, F. H. Otto (Berlin, Braunschweig, Bremen, Leiden, Wien); Firsova,
L. V. (St Petersburg ZISP)*; Fischer von Waldheim, Johann G (Moscow ZMMU); Fischer, Anton
(Bonn, Miinchen, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden); Fischer, Georg (Bamberg); Fischer, Gustav A. (Berlin,
Hamburg); Fisher, Clemency T. (Liverpool)*; Fitzgerald (Bremen); Fjeldsa, Jon (K@benhayn)*; Fleurian
(Grenoble); Flint, Vladimir E. (Moscow ZMMU); Floericke, Curt (Bonn, Budapest, Sarajevo); Fliikiger,
Ernst (Bonn, Sevenoaks); Focke, Eberhard (Bremen, Hamburg); Fokkema, Johannes (Leeuwarden)*;
Fomin, V. E. (Moscow ZMMU); Fontaine, Charles-Aloyse (Fribourg); Forbes, Henry O. (Liverpool,
Tring); Forbes-Watson, Alec (Tring); Forsten, Eltio A. (Leiden); Forster, Johann George (see Mus.
Leverianum); Forster, Johann Reinhold (Halle, and see Mus. Leverianum); Forsyth, Douglas (Tring);
Forthuber, Michaela (Braunschweig)*; Foschi, F. (Forli, Roma); Foschi, U. F. (Forli)*; Frade, F.
(Lisboa-CZ/IICT); Frahnert, Sylke (Berlin)*; Fraissinet, M. (Napoli); Franchetti, Pietro (Torino CSGT;
Franco Davila, Pedro (Madrid); Franeker, Jan-Andries van (Amsterdam): Frank, G A. (Amsterdam,
Dresden, Halberstadt, Halle, Strasbourg, Stuttgart, Leiden); Franzisket, Ludwig (Minster); Fraser,
Louis (Liverpool, Tring); Freycinet, Louis C. D. de (Paris); Freyreif, George W. (Berlin, Frankfurt,
Leiden, Stockholm, Uppsala, Wien); Fric, Antonin (Praha); Friday, A. E. (Cambridge)*; Frisch
(Braunschweig); Frisk, Géran (Stockholm)*; Fritsche, Karl (Bonn, Stuttgart); Fritze, Ernst A.
(Wiesbaden); Frivaldszky von Frivald, Emerich & Johann (Budapest); Fuchs/Fuks, Karl (Kazan);
Fuhrer, Ludwig von (Cluj, Sarajevo, St Petersburg ZISP, Wien); Fuisz, T. (Budapest)*; Fulin, Miroslav
(Kosice)*; Fulleborn, Friedrich (Berlin); Fiirbringer, Max (Amsterdam); Fuss, K. (Sibiu);

Gadow, Hans F. (Cambridge); Gaimard, Joseph P. (Paris); Galathea Exp. (K@benhavn); Galbraith,
Ian C. J. (Tring); Gallardo (Roma); Gamauf, Anita (Wien)*; Garavini, E. (Bologna INFS); Garcia
Franquesa, Eulalia (Barcelona)*; Gargallo, T. (Siracusa); Garlepp, Gustav & Otto (Frankfurt); Garnett,
Marjory (Carlisle); Garnot, Prosper (Paris); Garrett, A (see Mus. Godeffroy); Gatke, Heinrich
(Wilhelmshaven); Gatter, Wulf & Peer (Stuttgart); Gavetti, Elena (Torino)*; Gay, Arthur B. (Exeter);
Gedroyc (Bytom); Gehringer, Fritz (Neuchatel); Geisler, Bruno (Dresden); Geller-Grimm, Fritz
(Wiesbaden)*; Gené, Giuseppe (Torino); Gengler, Josef (Miinchen); Geoffroy de St Hilaire, E. & I.
(Paris); Gerber, Emanuel (Fribourg)*; Gerrard, Edward (Liverpool, Tring); Gerrard, W. T. (Liverpool);
Gerschik, Jend (Budapest); Geyr von Schweppenburg, Hans Freiherr (Bonn); Gherardesca, della
(Firenze); Gherghel, P. (Cluj-Napoca); Ghigi, Alessandro (Bologna INFS); Gibson, Francis & Jabez
(Saffron Walden, Essex); Giebel, Christoph Gottfried (Halle); Giglioli, Enrico H. (Firenze, Torino);
Gil Lletget, Augusto (Madrid); Gilbert, John (Exeter, Leiden, Liverpool, Tring); Giriddes, Albino
(Coimbra); Gladkov, Nikolai Aleksevich (Moscow ZMMU); Glowacinski, Zbigniew (Krakow); Gmelin,
J. C. (Karlsruhe); Gmelin, Samuel G. (St Petersburg ZISP); Godeffroy, Johann Cesar (Bamberg, and
see Mus. Godeffroy); Godet, Paul (Neuchatel); Godlewski, Viktor (Warszawa); Godman, Frederick D.
(Tring); Godman, Percy (Brighton); Godron (Nancy); Godwin-Austen, Henry H. (Tring); Goeldi,
Emil A. (Bern); Goethe, Friedrich (Wilhelmshaven); Goldhagen, Johann F. G (Halle); Goldie, A.
(Tring); Gomez, Leopoldo (Barcelona, Hamburg); Goodfellow, Walter (Tring); Goodwin, Derek (Tring);
Gorban, I. (Lviv); Gorton, Eric (Bolton); Gosse, Phillip A. (Cambridge, Tring); Gottingen Mus.
(Hannover); Gould, John (Bern, Cambridge, Exeter, Leiden, Liverpool, Saffron Walden [Essex], Torino,
Tring); Gourdon, M. (Toulouse); Grabert, M. (Stuttgart); Grabowsky, Friedrich (Berlin, Braunschweig);
Graffe, Eduard (see Mus. Godeffroy); Grant, Claude H. B. (Tring); Grant, Robert E. (London Univ.
Coll.); Granvik, Sven H. (Stockholm); Grauer, Rudolf (Berlin, Wien); Gravenhorst, Johann L. C.
(Wroclaw); Gray, George R. (Tring); Gray, John E. (Tring); Grayson, A. J. (Bremen); Gretzer, Hermann
(Sofia); Griffith, A. F. (Brighton); Griffoli (Firenze); Grill, J. W. (Stockholm); Grimm, Hugo Oskar
(Leipzig); Groh, Giinter (Bad Diirkheim); Gromer, J. (Sibiu); Grote, Hermann (Berlin); Ground
(Coventry); Grouw, Hein van (Leiden)*; Grube, E. (Wroclaw); Grum-Grzhimailo, G. E. & M. E. (St
Petersburg ZISP); Griin, Hermann (Amsterdam, Dresden, Bonn, Frankfurt, K6ln, Miinchen, Stuttgart);
Gude, Hermann (Dresden, Stuttgart); Gudmundsson, Finnur (Reykjavik); Gueinzius, Wilhelm (Dresden,
Leipzig); Guillemard, F. H. H. (Cambridge); Guinet, J.-M. (Luxembourg)*; Giildenstadt, Johann A.
(St Petersburg ZISP); Gundlach, Johannes (Berlin, Bremen, Darmstadt, Kassel); Gunnerus, J. E.
(Trondheim); Gunning, Jan W. B. (Dresden); Giintert, Marcel (Bern)*; Gurney, John H. (Cambridge,
Liverpool, Tring); Gyldenstolpe, Count Nils (Stockholm); Gyseghem, Roland van (Bad Diirkheim)*;

Haag, Holger (Stuttgart)*; Haan, Giinther A. L. de (Amsterdam) ; Haast, J. F Julius von (Bremen,
Frankfurt, Miinchen, Wien); Haberer, Karl A. (Karlsruhe, Miinchen); Hablizl, Carl L. (St Petersburg

C.S. Roselaar 328 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

ZISP; Habsburg, Ludwig S. Duke of (Praha); Hachler, Emil (Brno); Haffer, Jiirgen (Bonn, Miinchen);
Haftorn, Svein (Trondheim); Hagen, Bernhard (Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, Leiden); Hagen, Bruno (Miinchen);
Hagen, Yngvar (Oslo, Trondheim); Hagenbeck Zoo (Hamburg); Hajmassy, P. (Braunschweig); Hala,
Jan & Jaroslav (Brno); Hald-Mortensen, Poul (Kgbenhavn); Halifax Mus. (Leeds); Hall, B. Pat (Tring);
Hamann, Franz (Rostock); Hammonville (Toulouse); Hanak, Frantisek (Prerov)*; Hancock, John
(Newcastle); Handrinos, George (Athinai)*; Handtke, K. (Halberstadt); Hannover, George V King of
(Hannover); Hantzsch, A. Bernhard (Dresden); Hanzak, Jan (Praha); Hargitt, Edward (Tring); Harington,
Herbert H. (Tring); Harms, Michael (Bonn, Roma, Tartu); Harold Olsen, Karen & Svend (Kgbenhavn);
Harris, Charles (Liverpool); Harris, J. W (Carlisle); Harrison, Colin J. O. (Tring); Harrison, David
(Sevenoaks); Harrison, James M. (Sevenoaks); Harrison, Jeffery (Sevenoaks); Hartert, Ernst J. O.
(Berlin, Braunschweig, Frankfurt, Tring); Hartlaub, Gustav (Bremen, Berlin, Halle); Hartmann, Gabriel
(Hamburg); Hartwig, Waldemar (Bonn); Harvie-Brown, John A. (Edinburgh); Hasselt, Johan C. van
(Leiden, Miinchen); Haupt, Andreas (Bamberg); Hausmann, W. (Sibiu); Haverschmidt, Fran¢gois (Bonn,
Leiden, Miinchen); Haviland, G. D. (Cambridge); Hay, Peter (Glasgow) ; Hazelwood, Alfred (Bolton);
Hazevoet, Cornelis J. (Lisboa-MB)*; Heckel, Johann J. (Wien); Hector, James (Wien); Hedenborg,
Johan (Stockholm); Hegelbach, Johann (Ziirich)*; Heidecke, Dietrich (Halle)*; Heidemann, G
(Hamburg); Hei, C. J. (Kees) (Rotterdam)*; Heilfurth, Friedrich P. (Berlin, Dresden); Heine Sr. & Jr.,
Ferdinand (Halberstadt); Heinrich, Gerd (Bonn, Hamburg); Heinroth, Oskar (Berlin); Heinsohn, Capt.
(see Mus. Godeffroy); Heinze, Gerd-Michael (Braunschweig, Hamburg); Hejl, Frantisek (Brno, Prerov);
Hellmayr, Carl E. (Frankfurt, Miinchen, Wien); Hemery (Le Havre); Hemmingsen, A. M. (K@benhavn);
Hemprich, August (Halberstadt); Hemprich, Wilhelm F. (Berlin, Wien); Henderson, George (Liverpool,
Tring); Hendricks, Alfred (Miinster)*; Henrici, J. & Paul (Bern); Henry, G M. (Brighton); Hens,
Petrus A. (Leiden); Henshaw, Henry W. (Dresden, Tring); Hepburn, James E. (Cambridge); Hermann,
Johann (Strasbourg); Herremans, Marc (Tervuren)*; Herroelen, Paul (Tervuren)*; Hesse, Erich (Berlin,
Leipzig); Heuglin, Theodor von (Bremen, Coburg, Stuttgart, Wien); Heurn, Jonkheer Frans C. van
(Leiden); Hewitt, Stephen (Carlisle)*; Hewitt, Vivian (Cardiff); Heyst, A. F.C. A. van (Amsterdam) ;
Hildebrandt, Hugo (Altenburg); Hildebrandt, Johann M. (Berlin, Milano); Hilden, Martti (Helsinki)*;
Hilgert, Carl (Berlin, Bonn, Frankfurt); Hinkelmann, Christoph (Bremen, Braunschweig); Hinsche, M.
(Dresden); Hirst, J.C. (Leeds); Hladunko, Ivan I. (Lviv); Hochstetter, Ferdinand von (Stuttgart, Wien);
Hodgson, Brian H. (Cambridge, Leiden, Tring); Hoedt, D. S. (Amsterdam, Leiden, Wien);
Hoerschelmann, Heinrich (Hamburg)*; Hoesch, Walter (Bonn, Bremen); Hoffmansegg, Johann C.
Graf von (Berlin); Hofsten, G. von (Stockholm); Hogstad, Olav (Trondheim)*; Hohmann, Herbert
(Bremen)*; Holderer, Julius (Berlin, Karlsruhe); Holgersen, Holger (Stavanger); Holinger (Prerov);
Hollis (Exeter); Holst, D. von (Bonn, Hamburg); Holst, P. A. (Stockholm, Tring); Holub, Emil
(Bucharest, Luxembourg, Praha, Sofia); Holub, L. (Prerov); Holz, Riidiger (Halberstadt)*; Hombron,
Jacques B. (Paris); Homeyer, Alexander von (Frankfurt); Homeyer, Eugen F. von (Braunschweig);
Hoogerwerf, Andries (Leiden); Hope, L. E. (Carlisle); Hopke, Gustav (Frankfurt); Hora, Jan (Praha);
Horice, Alfréd (Praha); Horsfield, Thomas (Cambridge, Genéve, Tring); Horstadius, Sven (Uppsala);
Horvath, Lajos (Budapest); Hose, Charles (Cambridge, Oxford); Hose, E. (Oxford); Hdser, Norbert
(Altenburg)*; Hounsome, Michael V. (Manchester)*; Howes, C. A. (Exeter); Howlett, Peter (Cardiff)*;
Howse, Richard (Newcastle); Hoy, G. (Bonn, Stuttgart); Hoy, John D. (Southend); Hristov, Yasen
(Panagyurishte)*; Hromada, Martin (Bardejov); Hromadka, Frantisek (Praha); Hiibner, Franz (see
Mus. Godeffroy); Htibner, Max (Halberstadt); Hiiesker, Carl (Berlin); Hiigel, Carl A. Freiherr von
(Cambridge, Wien); Humboldt, F. W. K. H. Alexander Baron von (Halle); Hume, Allan O. (Tring);
Hunstein, Carl (Dresden, Berlin); Hunter, John (London RCSE); Hiising, Johannes O. (Halle); Hutsebaut
(Tervuren); Huyn, Ludwig J. G. H. Graf von (Bonn);

Igalffy, K. (Zagreb); Ihering, Hermann von (Berlin, Frankfurt); Ilic, A. (Zagreb); Iliev, Iliya
(Pleven); Ilisson, Rainer (Tartu)*; Illiger, Johann C. W. (Berlin); Immelmann, Klaus (Ziirich); India
Mus. (Liverpool, Tring); Inglis, Charles M. (Liverpool); Ingram, Collingwood (Tring); loganzen,
German Eduardovich: see Johansen, Hermann; Ivanauskas, L. & Tadas (Kaunas); Ivanov, A. (St
Petersburg ZISP); Ivison, Tessa (Bristol)*; Ivkovic, S. (Zagreb); Ivovic, Milica (Beograd)*;

Jabouille, Pierre (Paris); Jackson, Annie C. (Edinburgh); Jackson, Frederick J. (Tervuren, Tring);
Jacobi, Arnold F. V. (Dresden); Jacobsen, Edward R. (Leiden); Jacquin, Joseph F. Freiherr von (Wien);

C.S. Roselaar 329 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Jacquinot, Charles & Honoré (Paris); Jagerskidld, L. A. (Uppsala); Jahn, Gerhardt (Rudolstadt); Jakubiec,
Z. (Krakow); James, Harry B. (Tring); Jan, Giorgio (Milano); Janda, Pavel (Praha)*; Jankowski,
George & Michael (Warszawa); Jannizzetto, Matteo (Terrasini); Jantra, Silke (Firenze)*; Jardine,
William (Cambridge, Edinburgh, Liverpool); Jarocki, Felix P. (Warszawa); Jaszay, Tomas (Bardejov)*;
Jelski, Konstantin (Krakow, Warszawa); Jerdon, Thomas C. (Cambridge, Liverpool, Tring); Jeschke,
Diana (G6rlitz)*; Jessat, Mike (Altenburg)*; Jessop, L. (Newcastle)*; Jezerskas, L. (Kaunas); Jickel,
C. F. (Sibiu); Jirsik, Josef (Praha); Johansen, Hans (Kgbenhavn); Johansen, Hermann (K@benhavn);
Johnsen, S. (Bergen); Johnson, A. W. (Brighton); Johnston, Henry H. (Tring); Johnstone, Edwin G.
(Tring); Jordans, Adolf von (Bonn); Jouanin, Christian (Paris); Jourdain, Francis C. R. (Swansea,
Tring); Junge, George C. A. (Leiden); Junghuhn, J. W. (Halle); Juska, V. (Kaunas);

Kaiser, Alfred (Berlin, Bonn); Kalabér, Laszlo V. (Reghin); Kalbe, Gustav (Rudolstadt); Kalby,
M. (Napoli); Kalela, Olavi (Helsinki); Kalinowski, Jan (Frankfurt, Warszawa); Kaltchev, Boris (Plovdiv);
Kalyakin, Mikhail V. (Moscow ZMMU)*; Kalyakin, Vladimir N. (Moscow Geogr Fac MGU)*;
Kamenik, Pavel (Praha)*; Kamner, Alfred (Sibiu); Kanellis, A. (Athinai); Kappler, August (Stuttgart);
Karasek, Jaroslav (Brno); Karavaev, V.A. (Kiev); Karhilahti, Ari (Turku)*; Karhu, Aleksandr A.
(Moscow PIN RAS)*; Kashkarov, P. (St Petersburg ZM SPBU); Kate, Cornelis G. B. ten (Amsterdam);
Kaup, Johann J. (Darmstadt); Keerl (Miinchen); Kelm, Hans (Bonn, Hamburg); Kelsall, H. J. (Tring);
Kemp, Tom (Oxford)*; Kenyon, Sarah (Saffron Walden, Essex)*; Kerschner, Theodor (Linz); Kessler,
Karl (St Petersburg ZM SPBU); Kethulle, C. M. de la (Tervuren); Keve, Andras (Budapest); Keyserling,
Alexander Graf (Braunschweig, Tartu); Khakhlov, V. A. (Amsterdam, Dresden, Moscow SDM, Moscow
ZMMU); Khomyakov, A. M. (Moscow SDM); Khrishtov, Ya. (Grad); King, Bernard (Bolton); King,
Philip P. (Edinburgh); Kinnear, Norman (Tring); Kinsky, Bedrich K. (Praha); Kinzelbach, Ragnar K.
(Rostock)*; Kirby, F. H. (Liverpool); Kirchhoff, Heinrich (Gottingen, Hannover); Kirk, John (Bremen,
Tring); Kistjakovsky, A. (Kiev); Kitchener, Andrew C. (Edinburgh)*; Kittlitz, Friedrich H. Freiherr
von (Berlin, Frankfurt, St Petersburg ZISP); Klaesi, C. (Leiden); Klages, S.M. (Miinchen); Klapperich,
J. (Bonn, Dresden); Kleiner, Endre: see Keve, Andras; Kleinschmidt, Adolf (Braunschweig);
Kleinschmidt, Otto (Bonn, Dresden, Frankfurt); Kleinschmidt, Theodor (Berlin, Bonn; see also Mus.
Godeffroy); Kleiweg de Zwaan, J. P. (Amsterdam) ; Klement, Robert (Sibiu); Kloss, Cecil Boden
(Tring); Kluz, Zdenek (Prerov); Knapen (Maastricht); Knezourek, Karel (Praha); Kniffitz, Linda
(Ravenna)*; Knipper, H. (Bremen, Karlsruhe); Knoblecher, P. (Wien); Knopfler, Wilhelm (Sibiu);
Knox, Alan (Tring); Kobayashi, Keisuke (Sevenoaks); Koblik, Eugene A. (Moscow ZMMU)*; Koch,
Adam (Frankfurt); Koch, Albert (Berlin); Koch, August C. (Brno, Frankfurt); Koch, Karl L. (Frankfurt,
Miinchen); Koch, Louis (Berlin); Koch, Oskar von (Tartu); Koch, Rudolph (Minster); Koenig,
Alexander F. (Bonn); Koenig, Paul (Strasbourg); Koepcke, Maria (Bonn); Kohl, Istvan (Stefan) (Reghin);
Kohts (Coats), Aleksandr Fedorovich (Moscow SDM); Kolb, Anton (Bamberg); Kollibay, Paul R.
(Wroclaw); Kolthoff, G. (Stockholm, Uppsala); Kolthoff, K. (Goteborg); Kompanje, Erik J. O.
(Rotterdam)*; Konig, Claus (Stuttgart)*; Konig, H. (Halberstadt); Koren, Johan (Oslo); Korn, Werner
(Coburg)*; Korte, Jacobus de (Amsterdam) ; Korzyukov, Anatoli I. (Melitopol)*; Kosswig, C.
(Hamburg); Kostin, I. O. (Kiev); Kotrosan, Drazen (Sarajevo)*; Kotschy, T. (Wien); Kovacs (Kovats),
Lajos (Budapest); Kovacs, Andor (Amsterdam, Genéve, Uppsala); Kovacs, Edmund (Budapest); Kovats,
Ludovic (Oradea); Kowalski, J. (Nantes); Kozlov, Petr Kuzmich (St Petersburg ZISP); Kozlova,
Elisabet Vladimirovna (St Petersburg ZISP); Krabbe, Niels (Kgbenhavn); Kralj, Jelena (Zagreb)*;
Krause, A. (Bremen); Krause, Georg (Berlin); Krebs, Karl (St Petersburg ZISP); Krebs, Ludwig
(Berlin); Kreuger, Ragnar (Helsinki); Krezschmar, Johann G. (Gorlitz); Krieg, Hans (Miinchen);
Kroneisl-Rucner, Renate (Zagreb); Kriiper, Theobald J. (Athinai, Bern, Leiden); Krzeminski, Wieslaw
(Krakow); Kubary, Johann S. (Berlin, Dresden; see also Mus. Godeffroy); Kuhk, Rudolf (Rostock);
Kuhl, Heinrich (Leiden, Miinchen); Kiihn, Heinrich (Berlin); Kumari, Erik (Tartu); Kumerloeve, Hans
(Bonn); Kumlien, Thure L. T. (Leiden, Uppsala); Kummer, J. (Halberstadt); Kunkel, P. (Bonn, Miinchen);
Kiinzel (Bonn); Kurochkin, Evgeny N. (Moscow PIN RAS)*; Kuschel, Maximilian (Dresden); Kuss,
Siegfried (Rudolstadt); Kutorga, Stephan (St Petersburg ZM/SPBU); Kux, Zdenek (Brno); Kuzyakin,
Aleksandr Petrovich (Moscow SDM, Moscow ZMMU);

La Touche, John D. D. (de) (Tring); Lacroix, A. (Toulouse); Ladygin, A. V. (Halle); Laenen, J. R.
(Amsterdam, Bonn, Brussels) ; Lagerstrom, M. (Uppsala); Laglaize, L. (Dresden, Milano); Lahusen

C.S. Roselaar 330 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

(Bremen); Laman, K. E. (Stockholm); Lampe, E. (Wiesbaden); Landois, Hermann (Minster); Landbeck,
Christian L. (Tring); Lane, Steve (Coventry)*; Lang, Elisabeth (Strasbourg)*; Langhelle, Gunnar
(Bergen)*; Langrand, Olivier (Grenoble, Strasbourg); Langsdorff, Georg H. Baron von (Berlin, Moscow
ZMMU, St Petersburg ZISP); Langston, Herbert (Brighton); Lantz (Strasbourg); Largen, Malcolm J.
(Liverpool)*; Latella, Leonardo (Verona)*; Latham, John (Liverpool, Wien); Laubmann, Alfred
(Miinchen); Lavauden, Louis (Grenoble); Layard, C. Leopold (Liverpool, Tring); Layard, Edgar L.
(Liverpool, Tring); Leach, William E. (Tring); Leadbeater, John & Benjamin, Sr. & Jr. (Liverpool,
Saffron Walden (Essex)); Lear, Edward (Liverpool); Lebedeva, L. A. (Saratov); Lee, Henk van der
(Amsterdam); Legakis, A. (Athinai)*; Léger, Louis (Grenoble); Legg, Gerald (Brighton)*; Lembcke,
Georg (Rostock); Lenglet, Georges (Brussels)*; Lepechin, Ivan (St Petersburg ZISP); Lepiksaar, J.
(Tartu); Lepri (Roma); Leschenault de la Tour, Jean B. L. C. T. (Paris); Leskovar, K. (Zagreb); Lesson,
René P. (Paris); Lesueur, Charles-Aiexandre (Le Havre); Leuchtenberg, Herzog M. von (Miinchen);
Levaillant, Francois (Leiden, Paris); Lever, Ashton (see Mus. Leverianum); Leverkiihn, Paul (Sofia);
Levi, L. (Chieri); Lewis, Stanley (Bristol); Leybold, F. (Miinchen); Leys, Peter (Glasgow) ; Licherdopol,
P. J. (Bucharest); Lichtenstein, Martin Hinrich C. (Berlin,. Wien); Lid, Gunnar (Oslo); Lidth de Jeude,
Theodoor G. van (Leiden); Lifjeld, Jan (Oslo)*; Lilleleht, Vilju (Tartu); Lilljeborg, W. (Uppsala);
Linden, Hubert (Luxembourg); Linder, Dionysius (Bamberg); Lindermayer, Anton Ritter (Athinai);
Lindner, Robert (Salzburg)*; Lindorfer, J (Linz); Linné/Linnaeus, Carl von /Carolus (Stockholm,
Uppsala); Linnean Society of London (Tring); Lintia, Dionysius (Timisoara); Lipecky, O. (Prerov);
Lister, Adrian (London Univ. Coll.)*; Lister, J. J. (Cambridge, Tring); Livingstone, Charles (Tring);
Lloyd, W. L. (Tring); Loche, Capt. (Milano); Loddiges, George (Tring); Loebenstein, Alexander R.
von (Gorlitz); Logmina, V. (Kaunas); Lohnisky, Karel (Hradec Kralové)*; Lonnberg, A. J. Einar
(Stockholm); Lontkowski, Jan (Wroclaw)*; Lorentz, Hendrik A. (Leiden); Lorentz, Theodor (Fedor)
K. (Moscow SDM); Lorenz von Liburnau, Ludwig Ritter (Wien); Loria, Lamberto (Genova, Roma,
Torino); Lorraine, Grand Duke Peter Leopold of (Firenze); Loskot, Vladimir M. (Kiev, St Petersburg
ZISP)*; Lossin, R. (Bonn); Lott, Derek (Leicester)*; Loudon, Harald Baron (Amsterdam) ; Louette,
Michael (Tervuren)*; Lovén, Sven (Stockholm); Lowe (Exeter); Lowe, Percy R. (Tring); Lowe,
Willoughby P. (Exeter, Tring); Lowegren, Yngve (Lund); Lucas, Frederick W. (Brighton); Ludlow
Nat. Hist. Soc. (Ludlow); Ludlow, Frank (Tring); Ludwig, Carl F. H. Freiherr von (Darmstadt, Frankfurt,
Stuttgart); Ludwig, L. (Halle); Luig, Jaan (Tartu)*; Lumbholtz, Carl (Oslo); Lumsden, Sir James
(Glasgow) ; Lund, P. W. (K@benhavn); Lupton, F. G. (Bolton); Lynes, Hubert (Tring); Lynn Allen, Lt
Col. B. F. (Brighton); Lyon, Barnet (Wiesbaden); Lysaght, W. R. (Birmingham); Lyster, Ian H. J.
(Edinburgh);

Maak, Richard Karlovich (St Petersburg ZISP); MacGillivray, John (Liverpool, Tring); Machado,
Carlos (Acores); Macikunas, Algimantas (Kaunas)*; Mackenzie, Col J. M. D. (Glasgow); Mackevicius,
V. (Kaunas); Macklot, Heinrich C. (Leiden); MacNaught Campbell, J. (Glasgow); Macpherson, Rev.
H. A. (Carlisle); Madarasz, Julius/Gyula von (Budapest); Maessen, A. W. P. (Maastricht); Maio,
Nicola (Napoli)*; Makatsch, Wolfgang (Bonn, Dresden); Malchevsky, A. (St Petersburg ZM SPBU);
Malec, Franz (Kassel)*; Malherbe, A. (Milano); Mandelli, L. (Liverpool, Tring); Mansfeld, Peter
(Kassel)*; Marcel, Roger (Lille)*; Marche (Paris); Marini, M. (Bologna INFS); Markl, W. & M.
(Basel); Marle, Johann G. van (Amsterdam) ; Marmora, Alberto Marchese de La (Torino); Marshall,
C. H. T. (Tring); Martens, Gustav H. (Hamburg); Martens, Jochen (Bonn, Mainz); Martin, Ludwig
(Miinchen); Massa, Bruno (Terrasini); Massi (San Gimignano); Mastrovic, Anton (Zagreb); Mathey-
Dupraz, A. (Istanbul, Neuchatel); Mathiasson, Sven (G6teborg); Matousek, Branislav (Bratislava)*;
Matschie, Paul (Berlin); Mattes, Severine (Stuttgart)*; Matvejev, Sergje D. (Beograd); Mauersberger,
Gottfried (Berlin); Maugé de Cely, René (Paris); Maury, André (Le Havre); Mauser, Matthias
(Bamberg)*; Mavromonstakis, G. A. (Amsterdam) ; Maxwell (Exeter); Maydell, G A. von (Hamburg);
Mayer, G. Th. (Linz); Maynard, George N. & Guy (Saffron Walden, Essex); Mayo, A. L. W. (Bolton);
Mayr, Gerald (Frankfurt)*; Mazotti, S. (Ferrara); McClelland, John (Tring); McConnell, Frederick V.
(Tring); McCouch (Cardiff); McGowan, Robert (Edinburgh)*; McGregor (Dresden); Medard-Blondel,
Anne (Grenoble)*; Mees, Gerlof F. (Leiden); Meiffren Laugier de Chartrouse, Baron (Paris);
Meinertzhagen, Richard (Tring); Meise, Wilhelm (Dresden, Hamburg); Meisner, Karl Friedrich A.
(Bern); Melin, D. (Uppsala); Melisca, Carl (Sibiu); Mell, Rudolf (Berlin); Meller, C. J. (Bremen);
Meloni, Amalia (Roma); Menden, J. J. (Berlin, Dresden); Mendes, Luis (Lisboa CZ/IICT)*; Menegaux,

C.S. Roselaar 333) Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

A. (Paris); Menzbir, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (Moscow SDM, Moscow ZMMU, St Petersburg ZISP);
Merck, Carl H. (St Petersburg ZISP); Merzbacher, Gottfried (Berlin, Miinchen); Meschini, E. (Livorno);
Meurgey, Francois (Nantes)*; Meuron, Charles-Daniel de (Neuchatel); Meves, Friedrich W. (Stockholm,
St Petersburg ZM/SPBU); Mey, Eberhard (Rudolstadt)*; Meyer, Adolf B. (Dresden, Milano, Tring,
Wien); Meyer, Bernard (Frankfurt); Meyer, M. (Leipzig)*; Michahelles, Karl (Miinchen); Middendorff,
Alexander T. von (St Petersburg ZISP); Milne-Edwards, Alphonse (Paris); Milner, Sir William (Leeds);
Mitrea, Hilarius (Bucharest); Mittmann, Hans-Walter (Karlsruhe)*; Myoberg, Erik P. (Stockholm);
Mlokosiewicz, Ludwik F. (Warszawa); Mobius, Karl A. (Kiel); Mocek, Frantisek (Praha); Modigliani,
Elio (Genova, Torino); Moeliker, Cees W. (Rotterdam)*; Mojsisovics, A. von (Graz); Molleson, Maria
Ivanova & V. S. (Warszawa); Moltoni, Edgardo (Milano); Monk, T. J. (Brighton); Monsell (Leeds);
Montagu, George (Tring, Wien); Monteiro, Joachim J. (Bremen); Moore, T. J. (Liverpool); Moreira
Inacio, Aldina (Cruz Quebrada-Dafundo); Moreno, Eulalia (Madrid)*; Morgan, P. J. (Liverpool, Cardiff);
Morner, B. (Uppsala); Morozov, V. V. (Moscow ZMMU); Morton, E. (Newcastle)*; Morton, W.
(Lausanne); Mosansky, Aristid (Kosice); Moschler, Heinrich B. & Heinrich F. (Braunschweig, Dresden,
Hamburg, Kgbenhavn, Paris, Milano, Stuttgart, Wien, Ziirich); Moseley, H. (Tring); Mougin, J.-L.
(Paris)*; Mourer-Chauviré, Cécile (Lyon)*; Mrazek, Jindrich (Brno); Mulhauser, Blaise (Neuchatel)*;
Miiller, A. (Sibiu); Miiller, C. (Halberstadt); Miiller, Ferdinand J. H. von (Rostock, Stuttgart); Miiller,
John W. Baron von (Bonn, Wiebaden); Miiller, Lorenz (Miinchen); Miller, Salomon (Leiden);
Mullholland, J. W. (Witney); Murat, Gioacchino (Napoli); Murray, J. (Tring); Mus. Berlin (Halberstadt,
Wien); Mus. Godeffroy (Hamburg, Bremen, Liverpool); Mus. Leiden (Wien); Mus. Leverianum/
Bullock coll. (Berlin, Edinburgh, Leiden, Liverpool, Paris, Torino, Wien); Mus. Melbourne (Uppsala);
Mus. Saint-Denis de Réunion (Strasbourg); Mus. Zagreb (Roma); Mus. Zangheri (Verona); Musilek,
Josef (Praha); Musschenbroek, S. C. J. W. van (Amsterdam, Dresden) ; Musy, Maurice (Fribourg);
Muzinic, Jasmina (Zagreb)*;

Nagel, Rolf (Wilhelmshaven)*; Nagy, A. von (Bonn); Nardo, Giandomenico (Padova); Nathorst
(Stockholm); Natorp, Otto (Bonn, Bytom, Mainz, Wroclaw); Natterer Sr. & Jr, Joseph (Wien); Natterer,
Johann (Bamberg, Bremen, Graz, Miinchen, Wien); Naumann, Johann A., Johann F., & Edmund (K6then,
Halle); Naurois, Abbé René de (Bonn, Lisboa-CZ/IICT, Paris); Navasaitis, M. (Kaunas); Nehrkorn,
Adolph (Berlin, Braunschweig); Nesterov, Eugene V. (Moscow SDM)*; Neubaur, Fritz (Wiesbaden);
Neufeldt, Irene (St Petersburg ZISP); Neugeboren, A. & K. (Sibiu); Neumann, Oscar (Berlin, Miinchen);
Neumann, Ulrike (Coburg)*; Neunteufel, A. (Graz, Miinchen); Newton, Alfred (Bremen, Cambridge);
Newton, Edward (Cambridge, Tring); Neijssel, Coenraad J. (Amsterdam); Nicholls (Coventry); Nicholls,
R. P. (Exeter); Nichols, J. B. (Brighton); Nicolai, Bernd (Halberstadt)*; Nicolin, R. (Stockholm);
Nicoll, M. J. (Brighton); Nicolosi, Paola (Padova)*; Niesky Padagogium (G6rlitz); Niethammer,
Giinther (Bonn); Nieuwenhuys, A. W. (Leiden); Nikolaus, Gerhard (Bonn, Stuttgart); Nikolsky, A. (St
Petersburg ZM SPBU); Nillesen, pater (Maastricht); Nilson, G6ran (Goteborg)*; Nilsson, Sven (Lund,
Stockholm); Ninni, Conte A. P. (Venezia); Nisbet, F. (Bolton); Nistri, Annamaria (Firenze)*; Nitzsch,
Christian L. (Halle); Nobre, Augusto (Porto); Nonev, Stoyan (Dobrich); Noona Dan Exped.
(K@gbenhavn); Nordenskidld (Stockholm); Nordmann, Alexander von (Helsinki); Norris, Adrian
(Leeds)*; Northcote, Sir Stafford (Exeter); Nouhuys, Capt. J. W. van (Leiden); Nunn, J. P. (Brighton);
Nyqvist, Herman (Jonkoping);

Oates, Eugene W. (Liverpool, Tring); Obratil, Svjetoslav (Sarajevo)*; Ochapovsky, V. (Kiev);
Odernheimer, F. (Wiesbaden); Ogilvie-Grant, William R. (Tring); Ogilvy, Stuart (York)*; Ogney,
Sergei I. (Moscow ZMMU); Oles, T. (Krakow); Oliveira, Paulino de (Coimbra); Ollala, A. M.
(Kgbenhavn, Stockholm); Olsen, @rjan (Oslo); O’Mahorey (Dublin); Oort, Eduard D. van (Leiden);
Orcés, Gustavo (Basel); Orendi, C. (Sibiu); Orlando, Carlo (Terrasini); Orlando, Vittorio E. (Terrasini)*;
Ortali, Azelio (Ravenna); Ostroyumov, A. A. (Kazan); Oustalet, Emile (Paris); Owston, Alan (Roma,
Tring);

Pacaud, Gilles (Autun, Lyon)*; Pallas, Peter S. (Berlin, St Petersburg ZISP); Palmar, C. E.
(Glasgow); Palmén, Johan Axel (Helsinki); Palmer, H. (Dresden); Palmer, Merwyn G (Miinchen);
Palmgren, Pontus (Helsinki); Paludan, Knud (Kgbenhavn); Panteleev, A. V. (St Petersburg ZISP)*;
Papadopol, Aurel (Bucharest); Parker, Tony (Liverpool)*; Parkin, Thomas (Brighton); Parodi, R.
(Friuli); Parrot, Karl (Miinchen); Parry (Edinburgh); Parsons, Christopher (Southend); Parsons, W.
(Genéve); Parzudaki, Emile (Paris, Wien); Pascoe, F. P. (Oxford); Pasquet, Eric (Paris)*; Passerini,

C.S. Roselaar 387 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Carlo (Firenze, Siena); Patev (Pateff), Pavel (Sevenoaks, Sofia); Paulucci, Marchesa Marianna
Panciatichi Ximenes d’ Aragona (San Gimignano); Pauwels, Capt. (Tervuren); Pavliv, Zenoviy I. (Lviv);
Paykull, Baron Gustav P. (Stockholm); Payn, William A. (Sevenoaks); Peaples, F. W. (Bolton); Pearce,
Theed (Witney); Pedro V, King of Portugal (Coimbra); Peek, Sir Wilfred (Exeter); Peklo, Alexander
(Kiev)*; Pel, H. S. (Bremen, Leiden); Pellmann, Hans (Magdeburg)*; Pelzeln, August E. von (Wien);
Pelzmann, E. (Kazan); Pemberton, Capt. (Tring); Pennington Thomasson, John (Bolton); Perini
(Verona); Perkins, R. C. L. (Liverpool); Péron, Francois (Paris); Pershouse (Exeter); Peshev, Ivan
(Varna); Petagna, Luigi (Napoli); Petényi, Salamon J. (Budapest); Peters, Capt. (Bremen); Peters, D.
Stephan (Frankfurt)*; Peters, E. (Frankfurt); Peters, Nicolaus (Hamburg); Peters, Wilhelm K. H.
(Berlin); Petersen, Aevar (Reykjavik)*; Petit, Louis (Paris); Petrescu, Angela (Bucharest)*; Petrov,
Tseno (Plovdiv)*; Pettersson, B. (Uppsala); Petz, E. (Schlagl); Pevtsov, M. V. (St Petersburg ZISP);
Pezzo, Francesco (Siena)*; Pfeiffer, Ida (Wien); Philby, H. (Tring); Philippi, Rudolf A. (Halle); Philippot,
Alain (Nancy)*; Piasevoli, G. (Split); Pickering, Jane (Oxford)*; Pickford, K. J. (Witney); Piechocki,
Rudolf (Halle); Pierotti, T. (Bologna INFS); Piiper, J. (Tartu); Pillette, A. (Tervuren); Pinwill, Stackhouse
(Tring); Plachetka, Karel (Brno, Praha); Plass, Jiirgen (Linz)*; Platen, Carl C. (Berlin, Braunschweig);
Pleske, Theodor (Fedor) D. (St Petersburg ZISP, St Petersburg ZM SPBU); Plessen, G. von (Kiel);
Plessen, Viktor Baron von (Berlin, Bonn, Leiden); Plompen, W. (Tervuren)*; Pochelon, Gilbert (Bern);
Poggesi, Marta (Firenze)*; Pojer, Frantisek (Praha); Polatzek, Johann (Tring, Wien); Polis, Rozalia
(Oradea); Pollen, Francois (Bremen, Leiden); Polyakov, Grigorii Ivanovich (Moscow ZMMU); Popescu,
Cornel (Sibiu); Popp (Miinchen); Poppig, Eduard (Leipzig); Portenko, Leonid A. (St Petersburg ZISP);
Potanin, G. N. (St Petersburg ZISP); Potapov, F. L. (St Petersburg ZISP); Pouchet, Felix-Archiméde
(Rouen); Pougnet (Strasbourg); Pouillet (Strasbourg); Powell-Cotton, C. (Birchington); Pownall, L.
A. (Bolton); Praeger, W. E. (Glasgow); Prager, M. (Miinchen); Prasek, Vaclav (Brno)*; Prazny,
Rudolf (Praha); Prévost, Florent (Paris); Price, Lloyd (Bolton); Prigogine, Alexandre (Tervuren);
Prigogine, E. (Brussels); Pring, C. J. (Witney); Prins, Tineke G (Amsterdam)*; Profus, P. (Krakow);
Prostov, Alexander (Burgas); Pryer, Henry (Liverpool, Tring); Prys-Jones, Robert (Tring)*; Przhevalskii,
Nikolai M. (St Petersburg ZISP, Wien); Pucheran, Jacques (Paris); Pulcher, Claudio (Torino)*; Puzovic,
Slobodan (Novi Sad)*; Quoy, Jean R. C. (Paris);

Raalten, Gerrit van (Leiden); Raap, Hugo (Braunschweig); Rabor, Dioscoro S. (Hamburg); Radde,
Gustav (Frankfurt, Miinchen, St Petersburg ZISP, Tbilisi); Radovic, Dragan (Zagreb)*; Raffles, Thomas
Stamford (Tring); Ragazzi, V. (Torino); Ragioneri, Cesare & Renzo (Amsterdam, Dresden); Rallo
(Venezia); Ramsay, J. (Glasgow); Rang, Catalin & Violeta (Bacau); Rasajski, J. (Beograd); Rattemeyer,
Volkert (Wiesbaden)*; Rau, Otto (Wiesbaden); Rauch, A. (Tallinn); Raychev, Georgi (Varna)*; Raychey,
Ivan (Pleven)*; Réaumur (Paris); Reboussin (Toulouse); Reeker, Hermann (Miinster); Rehurek, J.
(Prerov); Reichenbach, Heinrich G. Ludwig (Dresden); Reichenow, Anton (Berlin, Hamburg); Reichert,
Robert (Dresden); Reichholf, Josef H. (Miinchen)*; Reichling, Hermann (Minster); Reid, Savile G
(Tring); Reinhardt, Johannes T. (K@benhavn); Reinwardt, Caspar G C. (Leiden); Reis Junior (Porto);
Reischek, Andreas (Linz, Wien); Reiser, Othmar (Beograd, Sarajevo, Wien); Remane, Adolf (Halle);
Rendell, P. (Liverpool); Renesse van Duivenbode, L. D. W. A. van (Leiden); Rensch, Bernhard (Miinster);
Rheinwald, Goetz (Bonn); Ribbe, C. (Dresden); Ricasoli, Baron B. (Siena); Ricca, Massimiliano
(Siena); Richards, GE. (Liverpool); Richardson, John (Cambridge, Edinburgh); Richardson, W. B.
(Tring); Rickett, Charles B. (Tring); Ridolfi (Firenze); Riebeck, E. (Bremen); Riedel, Johan G F.
(Braunschweig, Dresden, Karlsruhe, Leiden, Miinchen, St Petersburg ZISP); Riggenbach, Fritz W.
(Berlin); Rintoul, Leonora J. (Edinburgh); Riocour, Comte de (Tring); Rippon, George (Tring); Robert,
S. (Neuchatel); Robinson, H. C. (Liverpool, Tring); Roborovskii, Vladimir I. (St Petersburg ZISP;
Robson, T. (Istanbul); Rocke, John (Ludlow); Rockstroh, Prof. (Hamburg); Rodigois, Bertrand (Lille)*;
Roehl, Karl (Berlin); Roepstorff, A. W. (Tring); Roggeman, Walter (Brussels)*; Rohu, H. S. (Oxford);
Roi, Otto le (Bonn); Rokitansky, G. Freiherr von (Wien); Rolle, C. (Dresden, Exeter); Romer, August
(Wiesbaden); Rosa Pinto, A. A. da (Lisboa-CZ/IICT); Roselaar, Kees (C. S.) (Amsterdam)*; Rosenberg,
Karl B. Hermann Baron von (Braunschweig, Bremen, Leiden); Rosenberg, W. FE. H. (Bonn, Leiden,
Tring).; Ross, Francis W. L. (Exeter); Ross, James C. (Edinburgh); Rossi, Domenico (Roma); Roundell
(Leeds); Roux, Francois (Paris); Rowan, Mrs H. N. (Exeter); Rowan, W. (Liverpool); Rucner, Dragotin
(Zagreb); Rudatis , A. GH. (Linz); Rudebeck, G (Lund); Ruedi, M. (Genéve)*; Rufo, S. (Verona);
Rumbutis, Saulius (Kaunas)*; Rumler, Zdenék (Olomouc); Runde, Olav J. (Stavanger)*; Rtippell,

C.S. Roselaar 3)3)2) Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Eduard (Berlin, Frankfurt, Leiden, Torino, Tring); Ruspoli, E. (Genova); Ruspoli, Prince (Roma)*;
Russia, Alexis Prince of (St Petersburg ZM/SPBU); Russow, Valeri (Tallinn, Tartu); Ruzskiy, M. D.
(Kazan); Ryabitsev, Vadim K. (Ekaterinburg )*;

Sacarrao, Germano da Fonseca (Lisboa-MB); Sachsen Coburg-Gotha, Albert Prince of & Ernst II
Duke of (Coburg); Sachsen Coburg-Gotha, Ferdinand I of -, King of Bulgaria (Coburg, Sofia);
Sachtleben, Hans (Miinchen); Sackl, Peter (Graz)*; Sajdl, V. (Prerov); Salmaso, Roberta (Verona)*;
Salm-Salm zu Anholt, Leopold Fiirst zu (Miinster); Salomonsen, Finn (Kgbenhavn); Salt, H. (Liverpool);
Salvadori, A. Tommaso (Firenze, Genova, Milano, Torino); Salvin, Osbert (Bremen, Cambridge,
Liverpool, Tring); Salzmann, W. (Stuttgart); Sammalisto, Lasse (Helsinki); Sandeberg, H. (Stockholm);
Santos Junior J. R. dos (Porto); Santos, Pedro (Lisboa-CZ/IICT)*; Sarasin, Fritz & Paul (Basel, Dresden);
Sarg, F. (Stuttgart); Sassi, Moriz (Wien); Saunders, Howard (Tring); Saur, Jules (Luxembourg); Saurola,
Pertti (Helsinki)*; Saussure, de (Genéve); Savi, Paolo (Pisa, Siena, Torino); Savinich, Irene B. (St
Petersburg ZM SPBU)*; Scaravelli, Dino (Rimini)*; Schaanning, Hans Tho. L. (Stavanger); Schaanning,
Theo (Oslo); Schafer, Ernst (Berlin, Bonn); Schaller, F. (Strasbourg)*; Schalow, Herman (Berlin);
Schauinsland, H. (Bremen); Schettino, Mario (Napoli); Schiebel, Guido (Bonn, Graz, Wien); Schiede,
C. J. W. (Wien); Schierbrandt (Dresden); Schifter, Herbert (Wien)*; Schilling von Canstatt, Karl
Freiherr (Sarajevo); Schilling, Christiane (Hannover)*; Schillinger, FR (Wien); Schimper, W. (Wien);
Schigler, E. Lehn (Kg@benhavn); Schittek, Dietmar (Greifswald)*; Schlagintweid, A., H. & R. (Miinchen);
Schlatter, Rudolf (Leipzig)*; Schlegel, Gustav (Leiden); Schlegel, Hermann (Leiden, Wien); Schlegel,
Martin (Leipzig)*; Schlegel, Richard (Dresden, Leipzig, Miinchen); Schliiter, Wilhelm & Willy
(Bamberg, Bonn, Halberstadt, Halle, Leiden, Miinchen, Roma, Stuttgart); Schmacker, B. (Bremen,
Frankfurt); Schmacker, G. P. (Bremen); Schmidt, Ulrich (Mainz)*; Schmiedeknecht, Otto (Rudolstadt);
Schmitz, Ernst (Amsterdam, Funchal); Schneid, Theodor (Bamberg); Schneider, C. (Dresden);
Schneider, Gustav (Basel, Braunschweig, Strasbourg); Schnitzer, Eduard: see Emin Pasha; Schnitzler,
Arthur: see Emin Pasha; Schomburgk, Robert H. (Berlin, Paris, Tring); Schodnlein, Johann Lukas
(Bamberg); Sché6nwetter, Max (Halle); Schoppe, R. (Hildesheim); Schouteden, Henri (Tervuren);
Schrader, Leopold & Gustav (Athinai, Bonn, Braunschweig, Wien); Schreibers, Carl Ritter von (Wien);
Schrenck, Leopold von (St Petersburg ZISP); Schubotz, Hermann (Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg);
Schuchmann, Karl-Ludwig (Bonn)*; Schultze, Arnold (Bremen, Frankfurt, Hamburg); Schulz, W.
(Hamburg); Schiiz, Ernst (Stuttgart); Schwab, Adolf (Brno, Budisov); Schwaner, L. A. C. M. (Leiden);
Schwartzenberg, Princess Hilda von (Luxembourg); Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Friedrich Carl Prince
von (Rudolstadt); Sclater, Philip L. (Tring); Scortecci, Giuseppe (Milano); Scot. natl. Antarctic Exp.
(Edinburgh); Scott, W. E. D. (Leiden, Tring); Scovil, Capt. F. H. (Brighton); Scully, J. (Tring); Sebela,
Miroslav (Brno)*; Seebohm, Henry (Edinburgh, Tring); Segarra, Ignaci de (Barcelona); Seilern und
Aspang, Josef Graf von (Brno, Budisov, Miinchen, Praha, Wien); Selby (Cambridge); Sellow, Friedrich
(Berlin, Wien); Semenzato, Massimo (Venezia)*; Senoner, Adolf (Sibiu); Sere, Dare (Ljubljana);
Serle, William (Edinburgh, Tring); Serra, Lorenzo (Bologna INFS)*; Severtzov, Nikolai Alekseevich
(Moscow ZMMU, St Petersburg ZISP); Shackelton, E. (Birchington); Sharleman, Nikolai Vasil’ evich
(Kiev); Sharpe, Richard Bowdler (Manchester, Tring); Shaw Mayer, Fred W. (Tring); Shaw, George
(Tring); Shaw, Robert (Tring); Shcherbak, N. N. (Kiev); Shelley, George E. (Tring); Sherriff, G.
(Tring); Shimkevich, W. (St Petersburg ZM SPBU); Shlyakhtin, Gennady V. (Saratov)*; Shulpin, L.
(St Petersburg ZM SPBU); Shulpin, L. M. (St Petersburg ZISP); Shydlovskyy, Ihor (Lviv)*; Sicard
(Strasbourg); Sick, Helmut (Bonn); Siebold, Carl T. E. von (Bamberg); Siebold, Philipp F. von (Leiden,
Miinchen); Siemssen, Adolf Ch. (Rostock); Siemssen, Gustav Th. (Hamburg); Sijaric, Dr (Sarajevo);
Silber, K. (Karlsruhe); Sillem, Jérome A. (Amsterdam); Silver, S. W. (Oxford); Simon, Paul (Tournai);
Sin, S. S. (Berlin); Sitko, Jiljfi (Prerov)*; Sjéstedt, Bror Yngve (Stockholm); Skinner, John (Southend-
on Sea)*; Skipnes, Kolbjgrn (Stavanger); Slagsvold, Tore (Oslo); Slater, Henry H. (Tring); Slavchey,
Georgi (Pleven); Sleen, Wicher G. N. van der (Amsterdam) ; Sloane, Hans (Tring); Smee, General
Walter N. T. (Exeter); Smilova, Dimitrina (Burgas)*; Smith, Andrew (Cambridge, Edinburgh, Liverpool,
Tring); Smith, H. E. (Saffron Walden, Essex); Smith, Herbert (Tring); Smith, S.A. R. (Witney); Smitt,
Fredrik A. (Stockholm); Smuc, Lojze (Ljubljana); Smyth, Greville (Bristol); Sneidern, K. von (Genéve);
Snouckaert van Schauburg, René C. E. G. J. Baron (Amsterdam, Roma) ; Snow, David (Tring); Soares,
A. A. (Lisboa-MB); Sobania, S. (Bytom); Séderbom, K. G. (Stockholm); Sdéderstrom, L. (Stockholm);
Sokolov, A. M. (St Petersburg ZISP)*; Sokolov, E. P. (St Petersburg ZISP)*; Solander, Daniel (see

C.S. Roselaar 334 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Mus. Leverianum); Solaroli, Count (Torino); Solheim, Roar (Kristiansand)*; Solti, B. (Pecs);
Sommerfeld, Lt. (Miinchen); Sousa, Luzia (Porto)*; Sowerby, Laurence (Tring); Spangenberg, Evgenii
Pavlovich (Moscow SDM, Moscow ZMMU); Sparrman, Anders (Stockholm); Spatz, Paul (Bonn,
Stockholm); Speerschneider, Julius (Rudolstadt); Speke, John (Bremen); Spief, August von (Sibiu);
Spix, Johann B. von (Bamberg, Graz, Miinchen); Spriingli, Daniel (Bern); Srebrodolska, Natalia I.
(Lviv); St Helen’s Mus. (Liverpool); St John, Oliver B. (Tring); Stalker, William (Tring); Stampfli,
Franz X. (Leiden); Stanescu, Dan (Sibiu); Stanford, John K. (Tring); Stanley, Lord (= Earl of Derby)
(Liverpool); Stawarczyk, Tadeusz (Wroclaw)*; Stechow, Eberhard (Miinchen); Stegman, Boris (St
Petersburg ZISP); Stein, G. H. W. (Berlin, Lisboa-CZ/IICT); Stein, H. (Sibiu); Steinbacher, Joachim
(Frankfurt); Steindachner, Franz (Wien); Steiner, Hans (Ziirich); Steinheimer, Frank (Tring, Berlin*);
Steller, George W. (St Petersburg ZISP); Stenhouse, John H. (Edinburgh); Stepanyan, Leo S. (Moscow
Stepanyan coll.); Stephan, Burkhard (Berlin); Stetter, Friedrich W. (Sibiu); Stevens, Herbert (Newcastle):
Stevens, Samuel (Cambridge, Tring); Stewart, Alexander Bannatyne (Glasgow); Stjernberg, Torsten
(Helsinki)*; Stoliczka, Ferdinand (Bremen, Tring, Wien); Stolz, Johannes W. (Gorlitz); Storm, Hugo
(Liibeck); Strachey, R. (Tring); Strautman, Fedir I. (Lviv); Streich, F. K. Ivo (Stuttgart); Stresemann,
Erwin F. T. (Berlin, Miinchen); Strickland, A. (Cambridge); Strickland, Hugh E. (Cambridge); Strickland,
N. C. (Cambridge); Stuart Baker, Edward C. (Brighton, Sofia, Tring); Stubbe, Michael (Halle); Stiiber,
Eberhard (Salzburg)*; Studer, Theophil (Bern); Stuhlmann, Franz (Hamburg); Sturm, J. Wilhelm
(Miinchen); Sturm, Johann H. C. Friedrich (Bamberg, Miinchen); Sturniolo, G (Siracusa); Sturt,
Charles (Edinburgh, Tring); Styan, Frederick W. (Tring); Sudilovskaya, Angelina Mikhailovna (Moscow
ZMMU); Sundevall, Carl J. (Stockholm); Sushkin, Petr Petrovich (Moscow SDM, St Petersburg ZISP);
Susic, Goran (Zagreb)*; Sutcliffe, Richard (Glasgow)*; Sutorova, Helena (Brno)*; Sutter, Ernst (Basel);
Swainson, William (Cambridge, Liverpool, Wien); Swindon Mus. (Leeds); Swinhoe, Charles (Tring);
Swinhoe, Robert (Leiden, Liverpool, Torino, Tring, Wien); Sykes, William H. (Tring); Symonds, Ray
(Cambridge)*; Sztolcman/Stolzmann, Jan (Warszawa);

Taczanowski, Ladislaus (Warszawa); Talandis, B. (Kaunas); Talpeanu, Matei (Bucharest); Talsky,
Josef (Brno); Tancré, A. (Braunschweig); Tancré, Rudolf (Amsterdam, Bonn, Braunschweig); Tangier-
Smith coll. (Tring); Taschenberg, O. (Halle); Tauern, O. (Miinchen); Teixeira, Maria José (Lisboa-CZ/
IICT)*; Temminck, Coenraad J. (Leiden, Torino, Wien); Tenckhoff, Adolf (Miinster); Ter Meer, Hans
H. (Leiden, Leipzig); Terlutter, Heinrich (Miinster)*; Tesar, Josef (Brno); Tetens, A. (see Mus.
Godeffroy); Teysman, J. E. (Leiden); Thaler, Konrad (Innsbruck)*; Thanner, Rudolf von (Amsterdam,
Bonn, Miinchen, Roma) ; Theil, Paul (Sibiu); Themido, Antonio A. (Coimbra); Thoma, Carl
(Wiesbaden); Thomas, R. H. (Oxford); Thome, Johan (Oslo); Thorpe, D. L. (Carlisle); Thorpe, W. H.
(Cambridge); Thunberg, C. P. (Uppsala); Ticehurst, Claude B. (Sevenoaks, Tring); Tichy, V. (Prerov);
Tickell, Samuel R. (Tring); Tiemann, F. (Halberstadt, Wroclaw); Tobias, Robert (G6rlitz); Tomek,
Teresa (Krakow)*; Tomialojc, Ludwik (Wroclaw)*; Tomkovich, Pavel S. (Moscow ZMMU)*; Toschi,
Augusto (Bologna INFS); Toufar, Jiri (Prerov); Tozzi (Firenze); Tradescant, John (Oxford); Tratz,
Eduard P. (Salzburg); Treacher, W. H. (Oxford); Trense, W. (Hamburg); Treskow, Arthur von (Berlin);
Trischitta, Antonino (Terrasini); Tristram, Henry B. (Liverpool, Tring); Trojan, Przemslav (Warszawa)*;
Troster, Gert (G6ttingen)*; Tschudi, Johann J. von (Neuchatel, Wien); Tschusi zu Schmidhoffen, Viktor
von (Graz, Miinchen, Roma, Salzburg, Wien); Tugarinov, A.Ya. (St Petersburg ZISP); Tuke, W. M.
(Saffron Walden, Essex); Tullberg, Tycho F. (Stockholm); Tunstall, Marmaduke (Newcastle); Turati,
Count Ercole (Milano); Turchetto, M. (Padova)*; Turov, S. S. (Moscow-ZMMU): Tutis, Vesna
(Zagreb)*; Tweeddale, Marquis of (Tring); Tychsen, Oluf G (Rostock);

Ulianovsky, A. (Lviv); Underwood (Wien); Unger, Jakob (Bonn, Frankfurt, Karlsruhe); Urbanek,
Josef (Praha); Uribe, Francesc (Barcelona)*; Ursch (Strasbourg); Uspenskii, Savva Mikhailovich
(Moscow-ZMMU); Ussher, H. T. (Bremen, Tervuren):

Vach, Miloslav (Praha); Vader, Wim (Tromsg)*; Vaisanen, Risto A. (Helsinki)*; Vallisneri, Antonio
(Padova); Valverde, Jose A. (Sevilla); Van den Elzen, Renate (Bonn)*; Van Someren, Robert A. L.
(Edinburgh); Van Someren, Victor G. L. (Edinburgh); Vandelli, Domingos (Coimbra, Lisboa-MB);
Vasic, Vaslav (Beograd)*; Vasiliu, M. (Suceava); Vaskelis, J. (Kaunas); Vaucher, A. (Genéve); Vazvari,
Nikolaus (Budapest); Venezia, Francesco (Terrasini); Verbis, Z. (Prerov); Verheyen, René & Rudolf
(Brussels); Vermouzek, Zdenék (Olomouc)*; Veron, Géraldine (Paris)*; Verreaux, Edouard & Jules P.

C.S. Roselaar 8335 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

(Bremen, Halberstadt, Leiden, Liverpool, Milano, Paris, Wien); Vian (Nantes); Vick, G. (Brighton);
Victorin, J. F. (Stockholm); Vieillot, Louis J. P. (Paris); Vieire, Lopez (Coimbra); Vierthaler, Richard
(Bremen, Bonn); Vigors, Nicholas A. (Tring); Vik, Rolf (Oslo); Vilmarest-de Cossette coll. (Lille);
Vincent, J. (Tring); Violani, Carlo (Pavia)*; Vitale, Antonino (Terrasini)*; Vitalis (Grenoble); Voboril,
Jan V. (Praha); Vodolazskaya, Tatyana (Kazan)*; Vogelschutzwarte Neschwitz (Gorlitz); Voinstvensky,
M. (Kiev); Voipio, Paavo (Helsinki, Turku); Voisin, Claire (Paris)*; Voisin, Jean-Frangois (Paris)*;
Volchanecky, I. B (Saratov); Volponi, S. (Ferrara); Volz, Walter (Bern, Wroclaw); Voous, Karel H.
(Amsterdam); Vorderman, A. G. (Leiden); Vouga, Claude (Lausanne); Voy. Alert (Tring); Voy. Astrolabe
& Zélée (Paris); Voy. Astrolabe (Paris); Voy. Beagle (Liverpool, Tring); Voy. Blossom (Tring); Voy.
Challenger (Tring); Voy. Coquille (Paris); Voy. Endeavour (see Mus. Leverianum); Voy. Erebus &
Terror (Tring); Voy. Eugenie (Stockholm); Voy. Gazelle (Berlin); Voy. Géographe (Paris); Voy. Herald
(Tring); Voy. Magenta (Firenze, Torino); Voy. Maud (Stavanger); Voy. Nadezhda (St Petersburg ZISP);
Voy. Naturaliste (Paris); Voy. Novara (Wien); Voy. Rattlesnake (Tring); Voy. Resolution (see Mus.
Leverianum); Voy. Rosenberg (Tervuren); Voy. Senyavin (St Petersburg ZISP); Voy. Sulphur (Tring);
Voy. Urania (Paris); Voy. Vega (Stockholm); Voy. Vénus (Paris); Voznesenski, I. G. (St Petersburg
ZISP); Vraz, Enrico Stanko (Brno, Prerov);

Wachs, Horst (Rostock); Wadén, Sverker (Malm6)*; Wagler, Johann G. (Miinchen); Wagner,
Andreas (Miinchen); Wagner, H. O. (Bremen); Wagstaffe, Reginald (Liverpool); Wahlberg, Johan A.
(Bremen, Stockholm, Uppsala); Wahnes, Carl (Dresden); Wakefield Mus. (Leeds); Waldeck Sr., Carel
(Amsterdam) ; Wallace, Alfred R. (Liverpool, Tring); Wallenstein de Vella, T. Carol (Karl Walstein)
(Bucharest); Wallrow, J. (Bolton); Walrond, Sir John (Exeter); Walters, Michael (Tring); Wandhammer,
Marie-Dominique (Strasbourg)*; Wandres (Karlsruhe); Ward, A. E. (Tring); Wardlaw-Ramsay, Robert
G (Edinburgh, Tring); Warga, Kalman (Budapest); Wasmuth, Paul (Tallinn); Wassenius, Ernst (Helsinki);
Waterhouse, G. R. (Tring); Waterstradt, Johannes (K@benhavn, Tring); Watkins, H. & C. (Miinchen);
Wattel, Jan (Amsterdam); Weber (Geneve); Weber, Erich (Tiibingen)*; Weber, G. A. (Bremen); Weber,
Max (Amsterdam); Webster, Frank B. (Liverpool); Wechsler, Klaus (Bremen)*; Wehrung (Strasbourg);
Weigl, Stefan (Linz)*; Weigold, Max Hugo (Berlin, Dresden, Miinchen, Wilhelmshaven); Weiler, Justus
(Wiesbaden); Weiske, Emil (Bamberg, Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Rudolstadt, Tring, Wien); Wei, Karl
(Bremen, Halberstadt, Hamburg); Weisz, Tibor (Bardejov); Werner, Emil (Sofia); Wertheim, C. J. M.
(Amsterdam); Westin, General (Stockholm, Uppsala); Wettstein, Otto Ritter von (Wien); Weyns, Lt.-
Col. A. E.G. (Tervuren); Whistler, Hugh (Edinburgh, Tring); Whitaker, Joseph I. S. (Edinburgh, Tring);
Whitchurch Mus. (Ludlow); White, C. M. N. (Oxford); Whitehead, Charles H. T. (Tring); Whitehead,
John (Tring); Whiteley, D. (Sheffield); Whitfield (Liverpool); Whitmee, Samuel (Liverpool); Whyte,
Alexander (Liverpool, Tring); Wibeck, Edward (Jonk6ping); Wickevoort Crommelin, Jan P. van (Leiden);
Wiedenfeld, Lothar von (Miinchen); Wied-Neuwied, Maximilian A. P. Prinz zu (Bremen); Wieninger,
George (Linz); Wiglesworth, Lionel W. (Cambridge, Dresden); Willgohs, Johan F. (Bergen); Williams,
A. E. (Uppsala); Williams, J. B. (Birmingham); Williams, John G. (Liverpool, Uppsala); Willmann,
Rainer (Gottingen)*; Wills, M. A. (Oxford)*; Wilson, Edward (Tring); Wilson, S. B. (Cambridge);
Wingate, A. W. S. (Tring); Winge, Herluf (K@benhavn); Winkler, Raffael (Basel)*; Wirth, V.
(Karlsruhe)*; Witherby, Harry F. (Tring); Witting, E. (Sibiu); Wollaston, A. F. R. Sandy (Tring);
Wolters, Hans E. (Bonn); Woodford, Charles M. (Tring); Woog, Friederike (Stuttgart)*; Worofka
(Graz); Worthen, Charles K. (Tring); Wright, Magnus von (Helsinki); Wunderer, Hansjorg
(Regensburg)*; Wiirdinger, I. (Sibiu); Wiirttemberg, Carl-Eugen Herzog von (Stuttgart); Wiirttemberg,
Paul W. Herzog von (Bremen, Stuttgart, Tiibingen); Wyrwich, P. (Hamburg);

Xantus, Johann (Bremen, Budapest); Yen, K.Y. (Paris); Yerbury, John W. (Tring); Yudin, K. A. (St
Petersburg ZISP); Zaffagnini (Bologna MZUB); Zarudny, Nikolai A. (St Petersburg ZISP); Zavyalov,
Evgeny V. (Saratov)*; Zdobnitzky, Franz (Brno); Zedlitz und Triitzschler, Otto Graf von (Stockholm);
Zelebor, Johann (Wien); Zenatello, Marco (Bologna INFS)*; Zenker, E. (Wiesbaden); Zenker, Georg
(Berlin); Zielinski, S. (Warszawa); Zimmer, Carl (Miinchen, Wien, Wroclaw); Zimmermann (Bremen);
Zimmermann, Robert (Berlin); Ziswiler, V. (Ziirich)*; Zittwitz, Julius von (Gorlitz); Zoological Society
of London (Tring); Zoologisches Institut Freiburg (Karlsruhe); Zubarovsky, V. (Kiev); Zuffi, Marco
A. L. (Pisa)*; Zugmayer, Erich (Miinchen).

C.S. Roselaar 336 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Appendix 3

Numbers of bird skins, mounts and other items in scientific collections

(1) Numbers in collections in Europe, according to the data supplied by the curators, in sequence from
large to small as far as skins and mounts are concerned, omitting collections with fewer than 2,500 study
skins and mounts or fewer than 5,000 bird items. The number of all bird items available is often far from
exact and therefore is not used for establishing ranking order.

Rank Town Skins & *All bird 41 Oxford 19,000 23,000

mounts items 42 Florence/Firenze 18,000 28,000
l Tring 756,000 1,291,000 43 Halberstadt 18,000 26,000
2 Leiden 170,000 214,000 44 Manchester 16,500 28,000
3 St-Petersburg ZISP 170,000 190,000 45 Sofia 15,500 31,000
4 Paris 161,000 177,000 46 Rome/Roma 15,000 ?
5 Tervuren 150,000 = 167,500 47 Coburg 14,500 17,500
6 Berlin 142,000 157,000 48 Reykjavik 14,000 19,000
I Moscow ZMMU 117,000 131,000 49 Bern 13,200 23,500
8 Stockholm 105,000 146,000 50 Budapest 12,500 16,000
9 Vienna/Wien 104,300 125,000 51 Newcastle 12,000 23,200
10 Copenhagen/Kgbenhavn 97,000 138,000 52. Wroclaw 12,000 14,000
11 Frankfurt am Main 90,000 102,500 53 Moscow SDM 11,000 12,200
12 Bonn 76,000 136,000 54 Lille 11,000 11,000
13. Brussels 71,300 = 100,000 55 Sarajevo 10,234 11,500
14 — Stuttgart 70,000 95,000 56 ‘Brighton 10,000 28,500
15 Dresden 70,000 90,000 57 Neuchatel 10,000 12,000
16 Edinburgh 63,000 100,000 505. Bisa 10,000 12,000
17 ~~ Munich/Miinchen 60,000 61,000 59 Bologna 9,700 10,000
18 Amsterdam 53,000 60,000 60 Halle 9,100 21,000
19 Liverpool 51,500 64,500 61 Hanover/Hannover 9,000 16,500
20 Cambridge 40,000 50,500 62 Grenoble 9,000 9,300
21 Warszawa 40,000 50,000 63 Toulouse 8,900 12,200
My VEY 40,000 42,500 64 ~—- Tartu 8,500 13,600
23. ~~ Milan/Milano 34,000 36,000 65" Exeter 8,500 10,000
24 Hamburg 30,000 58,000 66 = Linz 8,200 12,500
25 Genoa/Genova 30,000 32,000 67 — Terrasini 8,000 9,000
26 —_- Helsinki 29,000 63,000 68 Brno 8,000 ?
27 ~_ Braunschweig 27,000 31,000 69 Kaunas 7,630 10,200
28 Gothenburg/Goteborg 25,000 43,000 70 Bristol 7,500 11,000
29 Genéve 25,000 34,000 71 Lausanne 7,000 8,800
30 ~— Oslo 25,000 33,000 72 Barcelona 7,000 8.400
31 ~— Basel 25,000 31,000 3. | ISS 7,000 57,000
32 Nantes 22,100 31,500 74.‘ Uppsala 6,900 ?
33.“ Prague/Praha 22,000 27,500 75 Wiesbaden 6,800 13,000
34 Seville/Sevilla 22,000 25,000 76 ~~ Gorlitz 6,800 9,800
35 Turin/Torino 21,000 22,000 HERE TERRES 6,700 7,300
36 ~—s Lund 20,000 31,000 78 Glasgow 6,400 9,300
37 ~— Cardiff 20,000 29,000 79 Lisbon CZ/ICT 6,340 6,700
38 Bremen 20,000 ? 80 Leipzig 6,250 11,600
39 Sevenoaks 19,500 19,500 81 Bergen 6,200 10,000
40 Madrid 19,000 29,000 82 Magdeburg 6,200 7,400

*skins, mounts, skeletons, in alcohol, egg sets, nests

C.S. Roselaar

83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
oi
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106

Prerov
Bardejov
Bucharest
Minster
Bratislava
Wilhelmshaven
Fribourg
Bolton
Belgrade/Beograd
Karlsruhe
Verona

Tournai

Leeds
St-Petersburg SPBU
Stavanger
Troms¢
Carlisle

Ziirich

Pavia

Opava

Forli

Altenburg
Reghin
Moscow MPSU

6,100
6,000
6,000
6,000
6,000
5,500
5,300
5,000
5,000
5,000
5,000
4,700
4,500
4,500
4,200
4,100
4,000
4,000
4,000
4,000
4,000
3,600
3,600
3,500

11,000
10,500
8,500
7,000
9

8,000
7,200
11,200
6,000
6,000
5,500
4,750
7,600
5,700
?
5,500
6,700
4,900
9

?
9

4,100
9

3,500

3)3)/)

107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130

Ljubljana
Leeuwarden
Lviv

Coimbra
Trondheim
York

Kosice
Olomouc
Nancy
Salzburg
Mainz

Moscow Stepanyan
Luxembourg
Siena

Sibiu

Turku

Novi Sad
Athens/Athinai
Venice/Venezia
Rotterdam
Krakow
Witney
Moscow (PINRAS)

The total number of skins in European collections is at least 4,000,000.

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

3,500
3,500
3,500
3,200
3,200
3,100
3,000
3,000
3,000
3,000
2,875
2,800
2,600
2,600
2,550
2,500
2,500
2,500
2,500
2,200
1,400

?

0

3,600
3,800
4,100
4,500
3,400
3,600
7,250
4,773
?

?
6,000
2,800
3,000
2,650
4,000
4,000
3,000
2,750
2,600
8,000
7,600
12,000
5,500

(2) Outside Europe. For comparison, some non-European collections have the following number of
bird skins and mounts (fide Banks et al. 1973, Davis and Jackson 1995, Mearns and Mearns 1998, Gill

2001), but note that some figures are rather outdated, especially those of Banks et al. (1973).

New York (American Mus. of Nat. Hist.)
Washington (Natl. Mus. of Nat. Hist.)
Chicago (Field Museum of Nat. Hist.)
Harvard (Mus. of Comparitive Zool.)

Ann Arbor (Univ. of Michigan)
Pittsburgh (Carnegie Mus.)
Philadelphia (Acad. Nat. Sci.)
Berkeley (Mus. of Vertebr. Zool.)
Ontario (Royal Ontario Mus.)

Baton Rouge (Mus. Nat. Sci. Louisiana)

Ottawa (Canadian Mus. of Nature)

Los Angeles (LA County Mus. Nat. Hist.)
Bulawayo (Nat. Hist. Mus. Zimbabwe)
San Francisco (California Acad. Sci.)
New Haven (Peabody Mus., Yale Univ.)
Caracas (Coleccién Ornitolégia Phelps)

Los Angeles (Moore Lab. of Zool.)
Lawrence (Univ. of Kansas)

900,000
600,000
390,000
320,000
180,000
170,000
163,000
160,000
134,000
133,500
120,000
95,000
90,000
83,000
80,000
76,000
67,000
55,000

Sydney (Australian Mus.)
Pretoria (Transvaal Mus.)
San Diego (San Diego Nat. Hist. Mus.)
Los Angeles (Univ. of California)
Melbourne (Museum of Victoria)
Denver (Denver Mus. of Nat. Hist.)
Ithaca (Cornell Univ., New York)
Adelaide (South Australian Mus.)
Durban (Durban Nat. Sci. Mus.)

Abiko (Yamashina Institute, Japan)
Nairobi (National Museums of Kenya)
Greenville (Delaware Mus. Nat. Hist.)
Salt Lake City (University of Utah)
Minneapolis (University of Minnesota)
Cleveland (Cleveland Mus. Nat. Hist.)
Blacksburg (Virginia Polytec. Inst. State Univ.) 20,060
Livingstone (Livingstone Mus., Zambia)
Wellington (Mus. of New Zealand)

48,000
40,000
37,000
36,500
36,000
35,000
34,200
30,446
30,140

30,000+

30,000
25,000
25,000
25,000
24,000

20,000
20,000

The total number of skins of all non-European collections is at least c.5,000,000, of which USA and
Canada have at least 4,000,000.

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

M. P Adams et al. 338 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Extinct and endangered (‘E&E’) birds:
a proposed list for collection catalogues

by M. RP Adams, Ff. H. Cooper & N. F. Collar

SUMMARY

Specimens of extinct and endangered (“E&E”) birds are often, and rightly, the subject of
elevated curatorial vigilance and care, and the publication of museum holdings of such
species is regarded as a valuable contribution to conservation information. However, the
definition of E&E species has varied over time and has in part been a matter of curatorial
discretion. Using the species listed in BirdLife International’s (2000) Threatened birds of
the world, but setting filters to eliminate species whose population levels are likely to
remain high, we derive a list of 481 species (129 extinct, 352 extant) which we propose as
core to any E&E list; local, national, regional or taxonomic interests might prompt
individual museums to include other taxa in their “E&E’ lists.

The publication of lists of museum specimens deemed to be rare, chiefly because
the species they represent are deemed to be rare, has been a preoccupation of curators
of museums for many years. In part this is a valuable public service, drawing attention
to material which may have relevance to an understanding of the conservation options
for the species in question, and possibly reducing the necessity for further collecting
of particular taxa by indicating the availability of material (Snow 1972); and in part
it is a practical means of demonstrating to the world the global significance of a
particular collection. Ever since the synthesis by Phillips (1929), but particularly
following the appearance of Greenway (1958, 1967) and the various editions of the
Red Data Books of ICBP (now BirdLife International) from the 1960s, opportunities
have arisen for museums to publish their holdings with respect to species identified
as extinct or as at risk of extinction (without pretending this to be an exhaustive list,
we know of: Berlioz 1935, Meyer de Schauensee 1941, Stresemann 1954, Mertens
& Steinbacher 1955, Steinbacher 1959, Jouanin 1962, Howes 1969, Benson 1972,
Fisher 1981, Violani et al. 1984, Torres-Mura 1991 and, of course, Knox & Walters
1994 and Boev 2003).

During discussions at the workshops (14-15 November 1999) following the
conference ‘Why Museums Matter’, the seeds were sown for two major inventory
projects: (i) a global database of avian type specimens, and (ii) a similar inventory
and catalogue covering international holdings of extinct and endangered (“E&E’)
species (Cooper & Steinheimer 2003). The first of these is now well under way,
founded on the amalgamated existing type catalogues of several major institutions,
which happily include some of the largest type collections in the world (Bruckert in
press); having such catalogues already in existence has proved a great advantage to
the type project. However, E&E collections are not yet covered to the same degree
and compilation of a global, or even European, catalogue will therefore, for the time
being, remain a longer-term prospect.

A fundamental problem raised at the meeting is that the world list of E&E birds
is by no means static—indeed it is unfortunately steadily on the increase—nor are

M. PR Adams et al. 630 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

there agreed criteria for what is most appropriate to include. Clearly, if an international
catalogue is to become a reality, it must be based on a standard, unifying species list.
By introducing such a list here, based on the publication of Threatened birds of the
world (BirdLife International 2000), we hope to provide an objective starting point
for any institution considering its own E&E catalogue and also for the integration of
such catalogues in the future. However, compilation of an E&E catalogue may prove
to be a time-consuming task, especially for larger collections. An initial step should
therefore be to use the list provided here to compile a simple inventory of numbers
of specimens held; such an inventory should ideally include all specimens—not
only skins, but also skeletons, fluid preserved material, and eggs.

The original Natural History Museum (Tring) catalogue of E&E bird species
(Knox & Walters 1994) was based on a species list generated from a combination of
publications, primarily the ICBP Red Data Books, using objective criteria where
possible. However, assimilating species data from multiple sources in this way is a
complex task, and in the absence of a comprehensive categorised source many
endangered taxa were omitted, as the authors pointed out (Knox & Walters 1994: 7).
A single source of information and a simple system of decision-making are therefore
preferable, and BirdLife International (2000) now offers a convenient, up-to-date
and objectively assessed solution to this problem with details of both endangered
and extinct species.

Specimens of extinct and endangered birds may be historically interesting or
scientifically important, but above all they are either irreplaceable or very nearly so.
In the preface of Knox & Walters (1994: 1), David Snow emphasised the continuing
‘need to conserve as carefully as possible and obtain the greatest possible amount of
information from specimens of extinct and threatened species that have already been
collected’. We fully endorse this need; for, put bluntly, new specimens of these species
are likely to reach collections only very infrequently, and we must therefore preserve
with particular care what material we already have. On the occasions that these
species do reach collections, we must be aware that we have a responsibility to
preserve them in the most suitable way and to maximise the material saved.

The extra care with which E&E specimens are treated normally means setting
them aside in restricted-access cabinets. However, while it remains important to
know what E&E material is held in any given institution, it is clearly impractical,
probably undesirable and often plainly unnecessary to place all globally threatened
species in a designated E&E collection. Some species will simply be too numerous
in the wild and/or in collections to warrant or even to allow removal to a separate
secure holding. Moreover, there are simply too many threatened species for a
comprehensive E&E security exercise: apart from the 128 extinctions since 1500,
BirdLife International (2000) documents no fewer than 1,186 species that are globally
threatened. Our aim has therefore been to reduce this list to those species whose
global populations are most numerically weak, and therefore least likely to yield
many (or any) new specimens in the foreseeable future. We have selected among the
IUCN criteria applied by and outlined in BirdLife International (2000), excluding
all species which qualify under category A (rapid decline irrespective of population

M. P Adams et al. 340 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

size) and including a subset of species on the basis of small range and/or small
population size, factors that indicate a species’s overall scarcity and therefore the
low likelihood of specimens having reached (or ever now reaching) museum
collections. A summary of all IUCN Red List categories—for the complete version
see IUCN (2001)—is given in Table 1; our chosen criteria (and their categories) are
given in Table 2. We use criteria triggering the categories Extinct, Extinct in the
Wild, Critically Endangered, Endangered and Vulnerable; we omit the categories
Conservation Dependent, Near Threatened and Data Deficient.

We include all 128 Extinct (EX) species listed by Brooks (2000) plus one extra
(see legend to Appendix). This comprises all those judged to have gone extinct since
1500, and is restricted to valid taxonomic entities and full biological species. Although
some published E&E lists, including Knox and Walters (1994), treat subspecies, we
resist doing so here, because it makes sense to maintain conformity with Brooks
(2000) and BirdLife International (2000), because there are no global lists of extinct
and/or endangered subspecies, and because there is little scope for generating such
lists with appropriate authority in the near future. Nevertheless, this is not at all to
imply that subspecies have no place in E&E collections: if curators use, at least as a
starting point, the subspecies treated in King (1978-1979)—-where these have not
been elevated to species level or where the taxa do not themselves already comprise
a threatened species—they have a valuable starting point.

We include all three Extinct in the Wild (EW) species listed in BirdLife
International (2000). These are species that are “known only to survive... in captivity
or as a naturalised population (or populations) well outside the past range’ (BirdLife
International 2000).

We select those Critically Endangered (CR) species that meet the criteria for
small declining range, small declining population and/or very small population (see
Table 2). Effectively, this filters out species that may be experiencing rapid population
declines but nevertheless still have relatively widespread and probably at least
moderate current populations, and are likely to be represented well enough in certain
collections, such as White-rumped Vulture Gyps bengalensis and Long-billed Vulture
G. indicus. Even so, the number of CR species only drops from 182 to 170.

We accept only those Endangered (EN) and Vulnerable (VU) species that are
numerically rare in the wild. Species classified as Vulnerable owing to very small

TABLE 1
IUCN Red List criteria for determining degree of threat (BirdLife International 2000).

Criterion Definition

A Rapid population reduction

B Small range and fragmented, declining or fluctuating
C Small population and declining

D1 Very small population

D2 Very small range

E Quantitative analysis

M. P Adams et al. 341 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

TABLE 2
IUCN Red List criteria used to determine species included in the proposed E&E list (edited from
complete set of criteria given in BirdLife International 2000: 22-23).

Threat category General criterion Main criterion
Extinct (EX) no reasonable doubt that last —
individual dead (since 1500)
Extinct in the Only known to survive in captivity —
Wild (EW)
Critically B small range and fragmented, extent of occurrence
Endangered (CR) declining or fluctuating estimated <100km/?
C small population and declining —_ population <250 mature individuals
D1 very small population population <50 mature individuals
Endangered (EN) D1 very small population population <250 mature individuals
Vulnerable (VU) D1 very small population population <1,000 mature individuals

range (typically <100 km?) are omitted, thereby removing from the list species whose
populations may still be relatively large, such as White-necked Petrel Pterodroma
cervicalis which, despite a breeding range of only 2 km?, has a stable population of
c.50,000 pairs. The effect of these filters is to reduce the EN list from 321 to 106 and
the VU list from 680 to 73. (Interestingly, the result is fewer VU species than EN
ones, despite the fact that the filter is more stringent on EN species, where the
numerical threshold is 250 individuals, than it is on VU species, where the threshold
is 1,000.)

By virtue of these filters, the basic list of E&E species reduces by almost two-
thirds, from 1,315 (1,186 + 129) to 481 (see Appendix). It needs to be stressed,
however, that the system used in deriving this figure cannot be expected to provide
for every circumstance. Among the excluded species are such notable ‘rarities’ as
Blue-billed Curassow Crax alberti, Bornean Peacock Pheasant Polyplectron
schleiermacheri, Moluccan Woodcock Scolopax rochussenii, Purple-winged Ground
Dove Claravis godefrida, Tolima Dove Leptotila conoveri, Madagascar Red Ow]
Tyto soumagnei, Flores Scop Owl Otus alfredi, Recurve-billed Bushbird Clytoctantes
alixii, Black-hooded Antwren Formicivora erythronotos, Slender Antbird Rhopornis
ardesiaca, Noisy Scrubbird Atrichornis clamosus, Van Dam’s Vanga Xenopirostris
damii, Grey-crowned Crocias Crocias langbianis and Biak Monarch Monarcha
brehmii. These are all long-recognised species which are now, and are very likely to
remain, extremely rare in museum collections. Nevertheless, all are species which
BirdLife International (2000) has reasonably assumed to be at least moderately
numerous in the wild. Other absentees are a host of relatively newly described species,
among them Udzungwa Forest Partridge Xenoperdix udzungwensis, Okinawa Rail
Gallirallus okinawae, Talaud Rail Gymnocrex talaudensis, El Oro Parakeet Pyrrhura
orcesi, Congo Bay Owl Phodilus prigoginei, Itombwe Nightjar Caprimulgus
prigoginei, Orange-bellied Antwren Terenura sicki, Grey-winged Cotinga Tijuca

M. P Adams et al. 342 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

condita, Kaempfer’s Tody-tyrant Hemitriccus kaempferi, Sidamo Lark Heteromirafra
sidamoensis, Appert’s Greenbul Phyllastrephus apperti, Apolinar’s Wren Cistothorus
apolinari, Rusty-throated Wren Babbler Spelaeornis badeigularis, Algerian Nuthatch
Sitta ledanti and Choc6 Vireo Vireo masteri, some of which are known by one or
two specimens only and (again) none of which is likely to be represented by large
series in the foreseeable future.

Such apparent anomalies are an inevitable consequence of the clear yet crude
filtering mechanism we apply, but we doubt whether further adjustment would
optimise the resulting list (which will in any case, as noted earlier, always be changing
with changes in the status of species over time). It is perfectly reasonable that museum
curators might want to adjust our proposed E&E list according to their own
perceptions and interests. This might be because they decide that certain additional
species treated in BirdLife International (2000), such as those listed in the preceding
paragraph, ought to be included; but it might also be because they hold specimens of
species that are in some way rare or threatened or indeed extinct at the local, national,
regional or taxonomic (subspecific) level; or because they are aware of ‘museum
rarity’, irrespective of the situation in the wild, and choose to act on that basis also—
a good example would be the White-winged Potoo Nyctibius leucopterus, which
probably occurs throughout Amazonia and is therefore not treated at all by BirdLife
International, but which apparently remains known from three specimens only
(Holyoak 2001). Rarity in collections irrespective of global conservation status is
clearly a valid criterion for extra curatorial care, but only when museum catalogues
are much more advanced and widely available will it be possible to establish a
moderately robust system for identifying such species.

Nevertheless, we propose that the 481 species in the Appendix serve as the basic
elements of new E&E initiatives in museums; whatever else might be added to this
number, we submit that, for the sake of clarity when information is ultimately
available to be pooled, nothing should at present be subtracted from it. Of course,
how the birds on this Appendix are to be treated must remain a matter of curatorial
discretion. In some cases they might simply be tagged as ‘E&E’ in a museum
catalogue database (it is, naturally, desirable to tag all globally threatened birds in
such a database), so that the information can at least be made more immediately
accessible and more widely available; in some cases they may be left where they are
but given some additional curatorial attention; and in some they may be removed to
separate, locked cabinets.

Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to Alison Stattersfield and Martin Sneary at BirdLife International for providing us
with a copy of the Threatened birds of the world database in order to edit and compile this list.

References:

Benson, C. W. 1972. Skins of extinct or near extinct birds in Cambridge. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 92: 59-68.

Berlioz, J. 1935. Notice sur les spécimens naturalisés d’ oiseaux éteints existant dans les collections du
Muséum. Arch. Mus. Hist. Nat. (6)12: 485-495.

M. P Adams et al. 343 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

BirdLife International 2000. Threatened birds of the world. Lynx Edicions & BirdLife International,
Barcelona & Cambridge, U.K.

Boev, Z. 2003. Specimens of extinct and threatened birds in the collections of the National Museum of
Natural History in Sofia, Bulgaria. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 123A: 234-245.

Brooks, T. 2000. Extinct. Pp.701-708 in Threatened birds of the world. Lynx Edicions & BirdLife
International, Barcelona & Cambridge, U.K.

Bruckert, R. In press. A relational data-base as a tool in ornithological taxonomy and comparative
systematics. Conference Proceedings of the 2" European Symposium ‘Bird collections in Europe —
the challenges of mutal co-operation’. Bonner Zoologische Beitrage

Cooper, J. H. & Steinheimer, F. D. 2003. Report from the workshops 14-15 November 1999: increased
co-operation between bird collections. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 123A: 355-360.

Fisher, C. T. 1981. Specimens of extinct, endangered or rare birds in the Merseyside County Museums,
Liverpool. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 101: 276-285.

Greenway, J. C. 1958. Extinct and vanishing birds of the world. American Committee for International
Wild Life Protection (Spec. Publ. 13), New York.

Greenway, J. C. 1967. Extinct and vanishing birds of the world. Second (revised) edition. Dover
Publications, New York.

Holyoak, D. T. 2001. Nightjars and their allies: the Caprimulgiformes. Oxford Univ. Press.

Howes, C. A. 1969. A survey of extinct and nearly extinct birds in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum,
Exeter. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 89: 89-92.

IUCN. 2001. UCN Red List categories and criteria, version 3.1. ({UCN-—The World Conservation Union,
Gland, Switzerland.

Jouanin, C. 1962. Inventaire des oiseaux éteint ou en voie d’extinction conservés au Muséum de Paris.
Terre et Vie 109: 257-301.

King, W. B. 1978-1979. Red Data Book, 2: Aves. Second edition. International Union for Conservation
of Nature and Natural Resources, Morges, Switzerland. [Reprinted 1981 as Endangered birds of the
world. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C.]

Knox, A. G & Walters, M. P. 1994. Extinct and endangered birds in the collections of The Natural
History Museum. British Ornithologists’ Club, Occasional Publications 1, Tring.

Mertens, R. & Steinbacher, J. 1955. Die im Senckenberg-Museum vorhandenen Arten ausgestorbener,
aussterbender oder seltener V6gel. Senckenbergiana Biologica 36: 241-265.

Meyer de Schauensee, R. 1941. Rare and extinct birds in the collections of the Academy of Natural
Sciences of Philadelphia. Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. Philadelphia 93: 281-324.

Phillips, J. C. 1929. An attempt to list the extinct and vanishing birds of the Western Hemisphere with
some notes on recent status, location of specimens, etc. Pp.503-534 in F. Steinbacher (ed.)
Verhandlungen des VI. Internationalen Ornitologen-Kongresses in Kopenhagen 1926.

Snow, D. W. 1972. A recommendation for cooperative action by museums and private ornithological
collectors, with the aim of preventing the overcollecting of rare and threatened species. Proc. XV
Internatn. Orn. Congr.: 21-22.

Steinbacher, J. 1959. Weitere Angaben iiber ausgestorbene, aussterbende und seltene V6gel im
Senckenberg-Museum. Senckenbergiana Biologica 40: 1-14.

Stresemann, E. 1954. Ausgestorbene und aussterbende Vogelarten vertreten im Zoologischen Museum
zu Berlin. Mitt. Zool. Mus. Berlin 30: 38-53.

Torres-Mura, J.C. 1991. Aves amenazadas de extinci6n conservadas en la coleccion del Museo Nacional
de Historia Natural. Noticiario Mensural Museo Nacional de Historia Natural (Santiago) 318: 7-
5:

Violani, C., Daturi, A. & Cagnolaro, L. 1984. Uccelli estinti e rari nei musei naturalistici di Milano,
Genova e Firenze. Riv. Ital. Orn. 54: 105-178.

Addresses: M. P. Adams & J. H. Cooper, Bird Group, Department of Zoology, The Natural History
Museum, Akeman Street, Tring, Herts, HP23 6AP, UK; N. J. Collar, BirdLife International, Wellbrook
Court, Girton Road, Cambridge CB3 ONA, UK.

M. P Adams et al.

344

Appendix

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Part A. Proposed list of extinct bird species for collections inventories and catalogues. In this tabulation,
information on range is added for convenience, along with date of last sighting, as given by Brooks in
BirdLife International (2000). Asterisked (*) entries indicate additions to the BirdLife database since
the publication of BirdLife International (2000). Sword-marked (7+) entries denote species that are known
only from fossils, paintings or traveller’s descriptions, not from ‘recent’ full or partial specimens, and
thus can only be expected to enter E&E collections as skeletal material.

Family
Dromaiidae
Podicipedidae
Procellariidae
Hydrobatidae

Phalacrocoracidae
Ardeidae

Threskiornithidae
Anatidae

Falconidae
Phasianidae

Rallidae

Scientific Name

Dromaius ater

+Dromaius baudinianus
Podiceps andinus
Podilymbus gigas

+ Bulweria bifax
+Pterodroma rupinarum
Oceanites maorianus
Phalacrocorax perspicillatus
Ixobrychus novaezelandiae
tNycticorax duboisi
+Nycticorax mauritianus

+ Nycticorax megacephalus
+Threskiornis solitarius

t+ *Alopochen kervazoi
tAlopochen mauritianus
+Anas marecula

7Anas theodori
Camptorhynchus labradorius
Mergus australis
Caracara lutosus
Argusianus bipunctatus
Coturnix novaezelandiae
tAphanapteryx bonasia
+Aphanapteryx leguati
Aramides gutturalis
tAtlantisia elpenor
tAtlantisia podarces
Cabalus modestus

+Fulica newtoni

Gallinula nesiotis
Gallirallus dieffenbachii
*Gallirallus pacificus
Gallirallus sharpei
Gallirallus wakensis
Nesoclopeus poecilopterus
Porphyrio albus
+Porphyrio coerulescens

Common Name

King Island Emu
Kangaroo Island Emu
Colombian Grebe

Atitlan Grebe

St Helena Bulwer’s Petrel
St Helena Gadfly Petrel
New Zealand Storm Petrel
Pallas’s Cormorant

New Zealand Little Bittern
Réunion Night Heron
Mauritius Night Heron
Rodrigues Night Heron
Réunion Flightless Ibis
Réunion Island Sheldgoose
Mauritian Shelduck
Amsterdam Island Duck
Mauritian Duck

Labrador Duck

Auckland Island Merganser
Guadalupe Caracara
Double-banded Argus

New Zealand Quail

Red Rail

Rodrigues Rail
Red-throated Wood Rail
Ascension Flightless Crake
St Helena Crake

Chatham Rail

Mascarene Coot

Tristan Moorhen
Dieffenbach’s Rail

Tahiti Rail

Sharpe’s Rail

Wake Island Rail
Bar-winged Rail

Lord Howe Island Swamphen
Réunion Gallinule

Red List
Category

EX
EX
EX
iB)
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX

Range

Australia
Australia
Colombia
Guatemala
St Helena

St Helena
New Zealand
Galapagos Islands
New Zealand
Mascarenes
Mascarenes
Mascarenes
Mascarenes
Mascarenes

Mascarenes
Amsterdam Island
Mascarenes
Canada & USA
Auckland Islands
Guadalupe
?Malaysia

New Zealand
Mascarenes
Mascarenes

Peru

Ascension Island
St Helena
Chatham Islands
Mascarenes
Tristan da Cunha
Chatham Islands
Tahiti

Indonesia

Wake Island

Fiji

Lord Howe Island
Mascarenes

Year
Last Seen

1850
1827
1977
1986
1550
1550
1850
1850
1900
1674
1700
1761
1750
1674
1698
1800
1710
1875
1902
1900
1900
1875
1700
1761
1850
1815
1550
1900
1693
1900
1872
1940
1900
1945
1973
1834
1730

M. P Adams et al.

Haematopodidae
Scolopacidae

Alcidae
Raphidae

Columbidae

Psittacidae

Cuculidae

+Porphyrio mantelli
+Porphyrio kukwiedei

7 Porzana astrictocarpus
Porzana monasa

+ Porzana nigra

Porzana palmeri

Porzana sandwichensis
Haematopus meadewaldoi
+Prosobonia ellisi
Prosobonia leucoptera
Pinguinus impennis

+ Pezophaps solitaria
Raphus cucullatus
Alectroenas nitidissima
7Alectroenas rodericana
*Columba duboisi
Columba jouyi

Columba versicolor
+Dysmoropelia dekarchiskos
Ectopistes migratorius
*Gallicolumba ferruginea
*Gallicolumba norfolciensis
Microgoura meeki
Ptilinopus mercierii
;Amazona martinicana
+Amazona violacea

7Ara atwoodi

Ara erythrocephala

TAra gossel

tAra guadeloupensis

Ara tricolor

tAratinga labati

Conuropsis carolinensis
Cyanoramphus ulietanus
Cyanoramphus zealandicus
+ Lophopsittacus bensoni
;Lophopsittacus mauritianus
Mascarinus mascarinus

+ Necropsittacus rodericanus
Nestor productus

Psephotus pulcherrimus
Psittacula exsul

Psittacula wardi

Coua delalandei
tNannococcyx psix

345

North Island Takahe
New Caledonia Gallinule
St Helena Rail

Kosrae Crake

Miller’s Rail

Laysan Crake

Hawaiian Crake

Canary Islands Oystercatcher
White-winged Sandpiper
Tahitian Sandpiper
Great Auk

Rodrigues Solitaire
Dodo

Mauritius Blue Pigeon
Rodrigues Pigeon
Réunion Pigeon

Ryukyu Pigeon

Bonin Woodpigeon

St Helena Dove
Passenger Pigeon

Tanna Ground Dove
Norfolk Island Ground Dove
Choiseul Pigeon
Red-moustached Fruit Dove
Martinique Parrot
Guadeloupe Parrot
Dominican Green-and-
yellow Macaw

Jamaican Green-and-
yellow Macaw

Jamaican Red Macaw
Lesser Antillean Macaw
Cuban Macaw
Guadeloupe Parakeet
Carolina Parakeet
Raiatea Parakeet
Black-fronted Parakeet
Mauritius Grey Parrot
Broad-billed Parrot
Mascarene Parrot
Rodrigues Parrot
Norfolk Island Kaka
Paradise Parrot
Newton’s Parakeet
Seychelles Parakeet
Snail-eating Coua

St Helena Cuckoo

EX
EX

EX
EX

EX

EX

EX

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

New Zealand 1850
New Caledonia 1860
St Helena 1550
Caroline Islands 1875
Tahiti 1800
Hawaiian Islands 1944
Hawaiian Islands 1884
Canary Islands 1950
Society Islands 1800
Tahiti 1800
North Atlantic 1852
Mascarenes 1770
Mascarenes 1662
Mascarenes 1840
Mascarenes 1750
Mascarenes 1750
Okinawa & Daito Is. 1936
Bonin Is. 1889
St Helena 1550
USA & Canada 1914
Vanuatu 1800
Norfolk Island 1800
Solomon Islands 1904
Marquesas Islands 1950
Martinique 1800
Guadalupe 1800
Dominica 1850
Jamaica 1850
Jamaica 1800
Guadalupe 1800
Cuba 1850
Guadalupe 1800
USA 1918
Raiatea 1773
Society Islands 1850
Mascarenes 1800
Mascarenes 1700
Mascarenes 1834
Mascarenes 1761
Norfolk Islands 1851
Australia 1927
Mascarenes 1875
Seychelles 1900
Madagascar 1834
St Helena 1800

M. P Adams et al.

Strigidae

Trochilidae

Upupidae
Acanthisittidae

Turdinae

Sylvitnae

Malurinae
Monarchinae

Pachycephalinae

Zosteropidae
Meliphagidae

Drepanididae

Icteridae
Fringillidae
Sturnidae

Callaeidae

{Mascarenotus grucheti
+ Mascarenotus murivorus
+Mascarenotus sauzieri
Sceloglaux albifacies
Chlorostilbon bracei
Chlorostilbon elegans

+ Upupa antaois

Xenicus longipes
Xenicus lyalli

Myadestes oahensis
Turdus ravidus

Zoothera terrestris
Bowdleria rufescens
Nesillas aldabrana
Gerygone insularis
Myiagra freycineti
Pomarea pomarea
Turnagra capensis
Turnagra tanagra
Zosterops strenuus
Anthornis melanocephala
Chaetoptila angustipluma
Moho apicalis

Moho bishopi

Moho braccatus

Moho nobilis

Akialoa ellisiana
Akialoa lanaiensis
Akialoa obscura

Akialoa stejnegeri
Ciridops anna

Drepanis funerea
Drepanis pacifica
Dysmorodrepanis munrot
Paroreomyza flammea
Psittirostra kona
Rhodacanthis flaviceps
Rhodacanthis palmeri
Viridonia sagittirostris
Quiscalus palustris

Chaunoproctus ferreorostris

Aplonis corvina

Aplonis fusca

Aplonis mavornata
Fregilupus varius

+ Necropsar rodericanus
Heteralocha acutirostris

346

Réunion Owl
Rodrigues Owl
Mauritius Owl
Laughing Owl
Brace’s Emerald
Gould’s Emerald

St Helena Hoopoe
Bush Wren

Stephens Island Wren
‘Amaui

Grand Cayman Thrush
Bonin Thrush
Chatham Island Fernbird
Aldabra Warbler
Lord Howe Gerygone
Guam Flycatcher
Maupiti Monarch
South Island Piopio
North Island Piopio
Robust White-eye
Chatham Island Bellbird
Kioea

O’ahu ‘O’o

Bishop’s ‘O’o

Kaua’i ‘O’o

Hawai'i ‘O’o

O’ahu ‘Akialoa
Maui Nui ‘Akialoa
‘Akialoa

Kaua’1 ‘Akialoa
Ula-’ai-hawane
Black Mamo

Hawai'i Mamo
Lana’i Hookbill
Kakawahie

Kona Grosbeak
Lesser Koa-finch
Greater Koa-finch
Greater ‘Amakihi
Slender-billed Grackle
Bonin Grosbeak
Kosrae Starling
Norfolk Starling
Mysterious Starling
Réunion Starling
Rodrigues Starling
Huia

EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX
EX

Mascarenes
Mascarenes
Mascarenes
New Zealand
Bahamas

Jamaica & Bahamas

St Helena

New Zealand
New Zealand
Hawaiian Islands
Cayman Islands
Bonin Islands
Chatham Islands
Seychelles

Lord Howe Island
Guam

Society Islands
New Zealand
New Zealand
Lord Howe Island
Chatham Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Mexico

Bonin Islands
Caroline Islands
Norfolk Islands
Cook Islands
Mascarenes
Mascarenes

New Zealand

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

1650
1726
1859
1970
1900
1900
1550
1972
1900
1825
1938
1889
1900
1983
1936
1983
1850
1963
1955
1928
1906
1900
1850
1981
1987
1934
1940
1900
1940
1969
1937
1907
1898
1920
1963
1894
1891]
1896
1901
1910
1900
1880
1923
1825
1860
1726
1907

M. P Adams et al. 347 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Part B. A proposed list of endangered bird species for collections inventories and catalogues. In this
tabulation, basic information on range—sometimes very generalised—is added for convenience, as given
in BirdLife International (2000), but largely excluding countries from which the species in question has
(or is thought to have) become extinct. Asterisked (*) entries indicate additions to the BirdLife database
since publication.

Family Scientific Name Common Name Red _ Range
List
Category
Tinamidae Crypturellus saltuarius Magdalena Tinamou CR Colombia
Nothoprocta kalinowski Kalinowski’s Tinamou CR Peru
Podicipedidae *Rollandia microptera Titicaca Flightless Grebe EN Peru
Tachybaptus rufolavatus Alaotra Grebe CR Madagascar
- Podiceps taczanowskii Junin Grebe CRerer bem
Diomedeidae Diomedea amsterdamensis Amsterdam Albatross CR Amsterdam Island
Phoebastria albatrus Short-tailed Albatross VU Japan
Thalassarche eremita Chatham Albatross CR New Zealand
Procellariidae Pseudobulweria aterrima Mascarene Black Petrel CR Mascarenes
Pseudobulweria becki Beck’s Petrel CR Papua New Guinea, Solomon
Islands
Pseudobulweria macgillivrayi Fiji Petrel CR Eiyi
Pterodroma axillaris Chatham Petrel CR Chatham Islands
Pterodroma magentae Chatham Island Taiko CR Chatham Islands
Pterodroma madeira Zino’s Petrel CR Madeira
Pterodroma cahow Bermuda Petrel EN Bermuda
Pterodroma caribbaea Jamaica Petrel CR Jamaica
Procellaria conspicillata Spectacled Petrel CR Tristan da Cunha
Puffinus auricularis Townsend’s Shearwater CR Revillagigedo Islands
Puffinus heinrothi Heinroth’s Shearwater VU __- Papua New Guinea, Solomon
Islands
Hydrobatidae Oceanodroma macrodactyla Guadalupe Storm Petrel CR Guadalupe (Mexico)
Sulidae Papasula abbotti Abbott’s Booby CR Christmas Island (Australia)
Phalacorcoracidae Phalacrocorax harrisi Galapagos Cormorant EN Galapagos Islands
Phalacrocorax carunculatus New Zealand King Shag VU New Zealand
Fregatidae Fregata andrewsi Christmas Island Frigatebird CR Christmas Island (Australia)
Ardeidae Ardea insignis White-bellied Heron EN Bhutan, India, Bangladesh,
Myanmar
Gorsachius magnificus White-eared Night Heron EN China
Gorsachius goisagi Japanese Night-heron EN _ Japan, Philippines
Cicontidae Ciconia stormi Storm’s Stork EN Malaysia, Indonesia
Leptoptilos dubius Greater Adjutant EN India, Cambodia
Threskiornithidae Bostrychia bocagei Dwarf Olive Ibis CR Sao Tomé
Geronticus eremita Northern Bald Ibis CR Morocco, Middle East
Pseudibis davisoni White-shouldered Ibis CR South-East Asia
Thaumatibis gigantea Giant Ibis CR Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam
Nipponia nippon Crested Ibis EN China
Platalea minor Black-faced Spoonbill EN _ North and South Korea
Anatidae Branta sandvicensis Hawaiian Goose VU __— Hawaiian Islands

Tadorna cristata Crested Shelduck CR Russia, South Korea, Japan

M. P Adams et al.

Cathartidae
Accipitridae

Falconidae
Megapodiidae

Cracidae

Phasianidae

Turnicidae

Gruidae
Rallidae

Cairina scutulata

Anas laysanensis

Anas bernieri

Anas aucklandica

Anas nesiotis
Rhodonessa caryophyllacea
Aythya innotata

Mergus octosetaceus
Gymnogyps californianus
Leptodon forbesi
Chondrohierax wilsonii
Haliaeetus sanfordi

Haliaeetus vociferoides
Eutriorchis astur
Circus maillardi
Circus maurus
Accipiter imitator

Accipiter gundlachi
Erythrotriorchis radiatus
Leucopternis occidentalis
Buteo ridgwayi

Buteo galapagoensis
Pithecophaga jefferyi
Aquila adalberti
Spizaetus bartelsi

Falco punctatus

Falco araea

Aepypodius bruijnit
Megapodius pritchardii
Penelope albipennis
Pipile pipile

Mitu mitu

Crax blumenbachii
Francolinus ochropectus
Arborophila rufipectus
Arborophila davidi
Arborophila cambodiana
Ophrysia superciliosa
Lophura edwardsi
Odontophorus strophium
Turnix olivii

Grus americana
Sarothrura ayrest
Sarothrura watersi

348
White-winged Duck

Laysan Duck
Madagascar Teal
Auckland Island Teal
Campbell Island Teal
Pink-headed Duck
Madagascar Pochard
Brazilian Merganser
California Condor
White-collared Kite
Cuban Kite
Sanford’s Fish Eagle

Madagascar Fish Eagle
Madagascar Serpent Eagle
Réunion Harrier

Black Harrier

Imitator Sparrowhawk

Gundlach’s Hawk

Red Goshawk
Grey-backed Hawk
Ridgway’s Hawk
Galapagos Hawk
Philippine Eagle
Spanish Imperial Eagle
Javan Hawk Eagle
Mauritius Kestrel
Seychelles Kestrel
Bruijn’s Brush Turkey
Polynesian Megapode
White-winged Guan
Trinidad Piping Guan
Alagoas Curassow
Red-billed Curassow
Djibouti Francolin
Sichuan Partridge
Orange-necked Partridge
Chestnut-headed Partridge
Himalayan Quail
Edwards’s Pheasant
Gorgeted Wood Quail
Buff-breasted Buttonquail
Whooping Crane
White-winged Flufftail
Slender-billed Flufftail

EN

EN

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

NE India to Indochina,
Indonesia

Hawaiian Islands
Madagascar

Auckland Islands
Campbell Islands
North-east India, Bangladesh
Madagascar

Brazil, Argentina

USA

Brazil

Cuba

Papua New Guinea, Solomon
Islands

Madagascar

Madagascar

Mascarenes

Southern Africa

Papua New Guinea, Solomon
Islands

Cuba

Australia

Ecuador, Peru

Haiti, Dominican Republic
Galapagos Islands
Philippines

Spain

Indonesia

Mascarenes

Seychelles

Indonesia

Tonga

Peru

Trinidad & Tobago
Brazil

Brazil

Djibouti

China

Vietnam

Thailand, Cambodia
India

Vietnam

Colombia

Australia

Canada, USA

Ethiopia, southern Africa
Madagascar

M. P Adams et al.

Rhynochetidae
Otididae

Haematopodidae
Charadriidae

Scolopacidae

Recurvirostridae
Glareolidae
Laridae

Columbidae

Laterallus levraudi
Gallirallus lafresnayanus
Gallirallus sylvestris
Gallirallus owstoni
Rallus wetmorei
Amaurornis olivieri
Cyanolimnas cerverai
Porphyrio hochstetteri
Gallinula pacifica
Gallinula silvestris
Rhynochetos jubatus
Ardeotis nigriceps

' Houbaropsis bengalensis

Haematopus chathamensis
Charadrius sanctaehelenae
Thinornis novaeseelandiae
Vanellus macropterus
Numenius borealis

Numenius tenuirostris

Tringa guttifer
Prosobonia cancellata

Himantopus novaezelandiae

Rhinoptilus bitorquatus
Larus fuliginosus
Sterna bernsteini
Columba thomensis
Columba argentina
Columba pallidiceps

Columba mayeri

Zenaida graysoni
Columbina cyanopis
Leptotila wellsi
Gallicolumba platenae
Gallicolumba keayi
Gallicolumba menagei
Gallicolumba kubaryi
Gallicolumba erythroptera

Gallicolumba salamonis
Gallicolumba rubescens
Phapitreron cinereiceps
Ptilinopus rarotongensis
Ptilinopus huttoni

349

Rusty-flanked Crake
New Caledonian Rail
Lord Howe Woodhen
Guam Rail
Plain-flanked Rail
Sakalava Rail

Zapata Rail

South Island Takahe
Samoan Moorhen
Makira Moorhen
Kagu

Great Indian Bustard
Bengal Florican

Chatham Island Oystercatcher
St Helena Plover

Shore Plover

Javanese Lapwing

Eskimo Curlew

Slender-billed Curlew

Spotted Greenshank
Tuamotu Sandpiper
Black Stilt

Jerdon’s Courser
Lava Gull

Chinese Crested Tern
Maroon Pigeon
Silvery Woodpigeon
Yellow-legged Pigeon

Pink Pigeon

Socorro Dove

Blue-eyed Ground Dove
Grenada Dove

Mindoro Bleeding-heart
Negros Bleeding-heart

Sulu Bleeding-heart

Caroline Islands Ground Dove
Polynesian Ground Dove

Thick-billed Ground Dove
Marquesan Ground Dove
Tawitawi Brown Dove
Cook Islands Fruit Dove
Rapa Fruit Dove

EN
CR
EN
EW
EN
CR
EN
EN
CR
CR
EN
EN
EN

EN
EN
EN
CR
CR

CR

EN
EN
CR
CR
VU
CR
VU
CR
EN

EN
EW
CR
CR
CR
CR
CR
VU
CR

CR
EN
CR
VU
VU

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Venezuela

New Caledonia

Lord Howe Island
Guam

Venezuela

Madagascar

Cuba

New Zealand

Samoa

Solomon Islands

New Caledonia

India

India, Nepal, Cambodia,
Vietnam

Chatham Islands

St Helena

New Zealand

Indonesia

Canada, USA, Argentina,
Brazil, Chile

Russia, S Europe, North
Africa

E Russia, South-East Asia
Tuamotu Archipelago
New Zealand

India

Galapagos Islands
China, South-East Asia
Sao Tomé

Indonesia, Malaysia
Papua New Guinea, Solomon
Islands

Mascarenes
Revillagigedo Islands
Brazil

Grenada

Philippines

Philippines

Philippines

Caroline Islands
Society Islands, Tuamotu
Archipelago

Solomon Islands
Marquesas Islands
Philippines

Cook Islands

Tubuai Islands

M. P Adams et al. 350 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Ptilinopus chalcurus Makatea Fruit Dove VU Tuamotu Archipelago
Negros Fruit Dove CR Philippines
Polynesian Imperial Pigeon EN Tahiti

Marquesan Imperial Pigeon CR
Christmas Island Imperial Pigeon CR

Ptilinopus arcanus
Ducula aurorae
Ducula galeata Marquesas Islands

Ducula whartoni Christmas Island (Australia)

Psittacidae Charmosyna toxopei Blue-fronted Lorikeet CR Indonesia
Charmosyna diadema New Caledonian Lorikeet CR New Caledonia
Prioniturus verticalis Blue-winged Racquet-tail EN Philippines
Cyanoramphus cookii Norfolk Island Green Parrot EN Norfolk Island
Cyanoramphus forbesi Forbes’s Parakeet EN Chatham Islands
Cyanoramphus malherbi Orange-fronted Parakeet EN New Zealand
Eunymphicus uvaeensis Uvea Parakeet EN New Caledonia
Neophema chrysogaster Orange-bellied Parrot CR Australia
Geopsittacus occidentalis Night Parrot CR Australia
Strigops habroptilus Kakapo CR New Zealand
Psittacula eques Mauritius Parakeet CR Mascarenes
Anodorhynchus leari Lear’s Macaw CR Brazil
Anodorhynchus glaucus Glaucous Macaw CR Argentina, Paraguay,

Uruguay, Brazil
Cyanopsitta spixit Spix’s Macaw CR Brazil
Ara glaucogularis Blue-throated Macaw CR Bolivia
Aratinga brevipes Socorro Parakeet EN _ Revillagigedo Islands
Ognorhynchus icterotis Yellow-eared Parrot CR Colombia, Ecuador
Forpus xanthops Yellow-faced Parrotlet VU Peru
Hapalopsittaca amazonina __ Rusty-faced Parrot EN Venezuela, Colombia
Hapalopsittaca fuertesi Fuertes’s Parrot CR Colombia
Amazona vittata Puerto Rican Amazon CR Puerto Rico
Amazona rhodocorytha Red-browed Amazon EN Brazil
Amazona versicolor St Lucia Amazon VU St Lucia
Amazona arausiaca Red-necked Amazon VU Dominica
Amazona guildingii St Vincent Amazon VU St Vincent
Amazona imperialis Imperial Amazon EN Dominica

Cuculidae Carpococcyx viridis Sumatran Ground Cuckoo CR Indonesia
Centropus steerii Black-hooded Coucal CR Philippines
Coccyzus ferrugineus Cocos Cuckoo VU Cocos Island (Mexico)

Tytonidae Tyto nigrobrunnea Taliabu Masked Owl EN Indonesia

Strigidae Otus siaoensis Siau Scops Owl CR Indonesia
Otus hartlaubi Sao Tomé Scops Owl VU —— Sao Tomé
Otus insularis Seychelles Scops Owl CR Seychelles
Otus capnodes Anjouan Scops Owl CR Comoro Islands
Otus moheliensis Moheli Scops Owl CR Comoro Islands
Otus pauliani Grand Comoro Scops Owl CR —_ Comoro Islands
Ketupa blakistoni Blakiston’s Fish Owl EN Russia, China, Japan
Xenoglaux loweryi Long-whiskered Owlet ENG ee Rert
Heteroglaux blewitti Forest Owlet CR India
Ninox ios Cinnabar Hawk Owl VU _Indonesia

Aegothelidae

Aegotheles savesi

New Caledonian Owlet-nightjar CR

New Caledonia

M. P Adams et al.

Caprimulgidae

Apodidae

Trochilidae

Alcedinidae

Bucerotidae

Galbulidae
Capitonidae
Picidae

Furnariidae

Formicartidae

Siphonorhis americanus
Caprimulgus noctitherus
Caprimulgus candicans
Caprimulgus solala
Collocalia sawtelli
Collocalia leucophaeus
Apus acuticauda

Glaucis dohrnii
Lophornis brachylopha
Lepidopyga lilliae
Amazilia luciae
Amazilia castaneiventris
Aglaeactis aliciae
Sephanoides fernandensis
Heliangelus zusii
Eriocnemis nigrivestis
Eriocnemis godini
Eriocnemis mirabilis
Taphrolesbia griseiventris
Loddigesia mirabilis
Selasphorus ardens
Todiramphus ruficollaris
Todiramphus godeffroyi
Todiramphus gambieri
Actenoides bougainvillei

Anthracoceros montani
Penelopides mindorensis
Aceros waldeni

Aceros narcondami
Jacamaralcyon tridactyla
*Capito wallacei
Colaptes fernandinae
Campephilus imperialis
Campephilus principalis
Sapheopipo noguchii
Cinclodes aricomae
Cinclodes palliatus
Aphrastura masafuerae
Leptasthenura xenothorax
Synallaxis courseni
Synallaxis infuscata
Synallaxis kollari
Philydor novaesi
Clytoctantes atrogularis
Myrmotherula snowi
Myrmotherula fluminensis

335)

Jamaican Pauraque

Puerto Rican Nightjar
White-winged Nightjar
Nechisar Nightjar

Atiu Swiftlet

Tahiti Swiftlet

Dark-rumped Swift
Hook-billed Hermit
Short-crested Coquette
Sapphire-bellied Hummingbird
Honduran Emerald
Chestnut-bellied Hummingbird
Purple-backed Sunbeam
Juan Fernandez Firecrown
Bogota Sunangel
Black-breasted Puffleg
Turquoise-throated Puffleg
Colourful Puffleg
Grey-bellied Comet
Marvellous Spatuletail
Glow-throated Hummingbird
Mangaia Kingfisher
Marquesan Kingfisher
Tuamotu Kingfisher
Moustached Kingfisher

Sulu Hornbill

Mindoro Tarictic
Visayan Wrinkled Hornbill
Narcondam Hornbill
Three-toed Jacamar
Scarlet-banded Barbet
Fernandina’s Flicker
Imperial Woodpecker
Ivory-billed Woodpecker
Okinawa Woodpecker
Royal Cinclodes
White-bellied Cinclodes
Masafuera Rayadito
White-browed Tit Spinetail
Apurimac Spinetail
Plain Spinetail
Hoary-throated Spinetail
Alagoas Foliage-gleaner
Rond6énia Bushbird
Alagoas Antwren

Rio de Janeiro Antwren

CR

CR

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Jamaica

Puerto Rico

Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia
Ethiopia

Cook Islands

Tahiti

Bhutan, India

Brazil

Mexico

Colombia

Honduras

Colombia

Peru

Juan Fernandez Island
Colombia

Ecuador

Ecuador

Colombia

Peru

Peru

Panama

Cook Islands
Marquesas Islands
Tuamotu Archipelago
Papua New Guinea, Solomon
Islands

Philippines
Philippines
Philippines

Andaman Islands
Brazil

Peru

Cuba

Mexico

Cuba, USA

Japan

Peru, Bolivia

Peru

Juan Fernandez Island
Peru

Peru

Brazil

Brazil

Brazil

Brazil

Brazil

Brazil

M. P Adams et al.

Rhinocryptidae

Cotingidae

Pipridae
Tyrannidae

Phytotomidae
Pittidae

Alaudidae
Hirundinidae
Campephagidae
Pycnonotidae

Laniidae

Vangidae
Troglodytidae

Mimidae

Turdinae

Herpsilochmus parkeri
Formicivora littoralis
Pyriglena atra
Grallaria chthonia
Grallaria ridgelyi
Grallaria milleri
Grallaricula ochraceifrons
Merulaxis stresemanni
Scytalopus iraiensis
Scytalopus psychopompus
Calyptura cristata
Cotinga maculata
Antilophia bokermanni
Elaenia ridleyana
Anairetes alpinus
Phylloscartes roquettei
Phylloscartes ceciliae
Tyrannus cubensis
Phytotoma raimondii
Pitta gurneyi

Pitta superba

Pitta anerythra

Mirafra degodiensis
Heteromirafra archeri
Alauda razae
Eurochelidon sirintarae
Coracina typica
Coracina newtoni
Phyllastrephus leucolepis
Hypsipetes olivaceus
Lanius newtoni
Laniarius brauni
Laniarius amboimensis
Laniarius liberatus
Telophorus kupeensis
Malaconotus alius
Calicalicus rufocarpalis
Thryothorus nicefori
Troglodytes tanneri
Nesomimus trifasciatus
Mimodes graysoni
Toxostoma guttatum
Ramphocinclus brachyurus
Zoothera major
Zoothera turipavae
Myadestes myadestinus

352

Ash-throated Antwren
Restinga Antwren
Fringe-backed Fire-eye
Tachira Antpitta
Jocotoco Antpitta
Brown-banded Antpitta
Ochre-fronted Antpitta
Stresemann’s Bristlefront
Tall-grass Wetland Tapaculo
Bahia Tapaculo

Kinglet Calyptura
Banded Cotinga

Araripe Manakin
Noronha Elaenia
Ash-breasted Tit Tyrant
Minas Gerais Tyrannulet
Alagoas Tyrannulet
Giant Kingbird
Peruvian Plantcutter
Gurney’s Pitta

Superb Pitta
Black-faced Pitta

Degodi Lark

Archer’s Lark

Raso Lark

White-eyed River Martin
Mauritius Cuckoo Shrike
Réunion Cuckoo Shrike
Liberian Greenbul
Mauritius Bulbul

Sao Tomé Fiscal
Orange-breasted Bush Shrike
Gabela Bush Shrike
Bulo Burti Boubou
Mount Kupe Bush Shrike
Uluguru Bush-shrike
Red-shouldered Vanga
Niceforo’s Wren

Clari6n Wren

Floreana Mockingbird
Socorro Mockingbird
Cozumel Thrasher
White-breasted Thrasher
Amami Thrush
Guadalcanal Thrush
Kama’o

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Bolivia

Brazil

Brazil

Venezuela

Ecuador

Colombia

Peru

Brazil

Brazil

Brazil

Brazil

Brazil

Brazil

Fernando de Noronha
Peru, Bolivia

Brazil

Brazil

Cuba

Peru

Thailand

Manus (Papua New Guinea)
Papua New Guinea, Solomon
Islands

Ethiopia

Somalia

Cape Verde Islands
Thailand

Mascarenes
Mascarenes

Liberia

Mascarenes

Sao Tomé

Angola

Angola

Somalia

Cameroon

Tanzania
Madagascar
Colombia
Revillagigedo Islands
Galapagos Islands
Revillagigedo Islands
Cozumel (Mexico)
Martinique, St Lucia
Japan

Solomon Islands
Hawaiian Islands

M. P Adams et al.

Timalinae
Sylviinae

Muscicapinae

Monarchinae

Rhipidurinae

Dicaeidae
Nectariniidae

Zosteropidae

Meliphagidae

Emberizinae

Myadestes lanaiensis
Myadestes palmeri

Turdus helleri

Copsychus sechellarum
Malacocincla perspicillata
Apalis fuscigularis
Bradypterus grandis

Acrocephalus familiaris
Acrocephalus caffer
Acrocephalus rodericanus
Orthotomus moreaut

- Macrosphenus pulitzeri

Amaurocichla bocagii
Phylloscopus amoenus
Petroica traversi
Cyornis ruckii
Eutrichomyias rowleyi
Terpsiphone smithii
Terpsiphone corvina
Pomarea dimidiata
Pomarea nigra
Pomarea mendozae
Pomarea whitney
Monarcha boanensis
Rhipidura malaitae
Colluricincla sanghirensis
Dicaeum quadricolor
Nectarinia thomensis
Nectarinia rockefelleri
Zosterops ficedulinus
Zosterops chloronothos
Zosterops modestus
Zosterops rotensis
Zosterops nehrkorni
Zosterops albogularis
Rukia ruki

Notiomystis cincta
Manorina melanotis
Junco insularis
Spizella wortheni
Torreornis inexpectata
Atlapetes flaviceps
Atlapetes pallidiceps
Nesospiza wilkinsi
Poospiza garleppi

353

Oloma’o

Puaiohi

Taita Thrush

Seychelles Magpie Robin
Black-browed Babbler
Taita Apalis

Dja River Warbler

Millerbird

Tahiti Reed Warbler
Rodrigues Warbler
Long-billed Tailorbird
Pulitzer’s Longbill

Sao Tomé Short-tail

Sombre Leaf Warbler

Black Robin

Rueck’s Blue Flycatcher
Caerulean Paradise Flycatcher
Annobon Paradise Flycatcher
Seychelles Paradise Flycatcher
Rarotonga Monarch

Tahiti Monarch

Marquesan Monarch
Fatuhiva Monarch
Black-chinned Monarch
Malaita Fantail

Sangihe Shrike-thrush

Cebu Flowerpecker

Giant Sunbird

Rockefeller’s Sunbird

Sao Tomé White-eye
Mauritius Olive White-eye
Seychelles White-eye

Rota Bridled White-eye
Sangihe White-eye
White-chested White-eye
Faichuk White-eye

Stitchbird

Black-eared Miner
Guadalupe Junco

Worthen’s Sparrow

Cuban Sparrow
Yellow-headed Brush Finch
Pale-headed Brush Finch
Grosbeak Bunting
Cochabamba Mountain Finch

CR
CR
CR
CR
VU
CR
VU

CR
VU
EN
CR
EN
VU
VU
EN
CR
CR
VU
CR
EN
CR
EN
CR
CR
VU
CR
CR
VU
VU
VU
EN
CR
CR
CR
CR
CR

VU
EN
CR
EN
EN
EN
CR
VU
EN

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Kenya

Seychelles
Indonesia

Kenya

Cameroon, Gabon, Central
African Rep.
Hawaiian Islands
Society Islands
Mascarenes
Tanzania, Mozambique
Angola

S40 Tomé

Solomon Islands
Chatham Islands
Indonesia

Indonesia

Annobon
Seychelles

Cook Islands
Society Islands
Marquesas Islands
Marquesas Islands
Indonesia

Solomon Islands
Indonesia
Philippines

Sao Tomé
Democratic Rep. of Congo
Sao Tomé
Mascarenes
Seychelles

North Marianas
Indonesia

Norfolk Island
Faichuk group (Chuuk) in
F.S.Micronesia

New Zealand
Australia
Guadalupe (Mexico)
Mexico

Cuba

Colombia

Ecuador
Tristan da Cunha
Bolivia

M. P Adams et al.

Thraupinae

Parulidae

Drepanididae

Vireonidae
Icteridae

Fringillidae

Estrilidae

Ploceinae

Sturnidae

Oriolidae

Dicruridae

Callaeidae
Corvidae

Sporophila melanops
Sporophila nigrorufa
Sporophila zelichi
Sporophila insulata
Melanospiza richardsoni
Camarhynchus heliobates
Conothraupis mesoleuca
Nemosia rourei
Vermivora bachmanii
Dendroica angelae
Geothlypis beldingi
Leucopeza semperi
Telespiza ultima
Psittirostra psittacea
Pseudonestor xanthophrys
Hemignathus lucidus
Oreomystis bairdi
Paroreomyza maculata
Melamprosops phaeosoma
Vireo caribaeus

Icterus oberi

Curaeus forbesi
Macroagelaius subalaris
Serinus flavigula
Neospiza concolor
Carduelis cucullata
Carduelis johannis
Loxia megaplaga
Pyrrhula murina
Estrilda poliopareia
Erythrura kleinschmidti
Ploceus aureonucha
Malimbus ibadanensis
Foudia rubra

Foudia flavicans
Aplonis santovestris
Aplonis pelzelni

Aplonis cinerascens
Leucopsar rothschildi
Oriolus crassirostris
Dicrurus fuscipennis
Dicrurus waldenii
Callaeas cinerea

Corvus unicolor

Corvus kubaryi

Corvus hawaiiensis

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

354

Hooded Seedeater
Black-and-tawny Seedeater
Entre Rios Seedeater
Tumaco Seedeater

St Lucia Black Finch
Mangrove Finch
Cone-billed Tanager
Cherry-throated Tanager
Bachman’s Warbler
Elfin-woods Warbler
Belding’s Yellowthroat
Semper’s Warbler
Nihoa Finch

‘O'u

Maui Parrotbill
Nukupu’u

‘Akikiki

O’ahu ‘Alauahio
Po’o-uli

San Andrés Vireo
Montserrat Oriole
Forbes’s Blackbird
Mountain Grackle
Yellow-throated Serin
Sao Tomé Grosbeak
Red Siskin

Warsangli Linnet
Hispaniolan Crossbill
Azores Bullfinch
Anambra Waxbill
Pink-billed Parrotfinch
Golden-naped Weaver
Tbadan Malimbe
Mauritius Fody
Rodrigues Fody

Santo Mountain Starling
Pohnpei Mountain Starling
Rarotonga Starling
Bali Starling

Sao Tomé Oriole
Grand Comoro Drongo
Mayotte Drongo
Kokako

Banggai Crow
Mariana Crow
Hawaiian Crow

<OoOww
Py (Gl 24 FL

mm
Zz

Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Brazil

Bolivia, Brazil
Argentina, Paraguay
Colombia

St Lucia

Galapagos Islands
Brazil

Brazil

USA, Cuba

Puerto Rico

Mexico

St Lucia

Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian Islands
San Andrés (Colombia)
Montserrat

Brazil

Colombia

Ethiopia

Sao Tomé

Venezuela, Colombia
Somalia

Haiti, Dominican Republic
Azores

Nigeria

Fiji

Democratic Rep. of Congo
Nigeria

Mascarenes
Mascarenes

Vanuatu

Pohnpei

Cook Islands
Indonesia

Sao Tomé

Comoro Islands
Comoro Islands

New Zealand
Indonesia

North Mariana Islands
Hawaiian Islands

Foanne H. Cooper & Frank D. Steinheimer 855 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Why museums matter: report from the
workshops 14-15 November 1999
‘Increased cooperation between bird collections’

by Foanne H. Cooper & Frank D. Steinheimer

The post-conference workshops were primarily aimed at museum workers directly
involved in curation and collections management, and were attended by about 85
delegates from more than 50 institutions in 22 countries. As originally intended, the
main theme of the workshops was increased cooperation between bird collections,
particularly within Europe, but as with the main meeting this was often overlain
with a far more global perspective. Four sessions were spread over two days, with a
largely free-form structure allowing wide-ranging and flexible discussions of issues
raised in the foregoing conference or during the workshops themselves. Rather than
consider each session individually, this report aims to provide an overview of the
workshops as a whole, and is based around the key subjects that emerged.

Increasing cooperation

The value of cooperation and collaboration was emphasised throughout the
conference and a definite eagerness for developing greater cooperative links both at
European and global levels was clearly demonstrated during the workshops.
Fundamental to achieving this aim is communication, and the basic currency of
communication is information. At its core, this information begins simply as
resources, places and people: what, where, who? An important step in compiling
and disseminating such basic information is the directory presented by Kees Roselaar
in this volume (Roselaar 2003), unveiled at the workshops. This directory is based
mainly on the responses of curators to a questionnaire about their collections,
combined with previously published data. Initially, Roselaar intended to contact
only collections with over 20,000 bird specimens, but as many smaller collections
hold valuable material in the form of types or extinct species, they too made it into
the list. However, as a printed publication, the scope of the directory was inevitably
constrained, but there was some enthusiasm for developing a version of it on the
internet. Potentially, institutions would be able to update their entries directly, and
size limits would be effectively removed, allowing any institution with a bird
collection to add to it—even school collections, which might contain country or
county records (see Hudecek et al. 1999). Recognising this, a new project group,
‘Museums Ornithology’, has been established with the German Ornithologists’
Society with the aim of compiling the data of even the tiniest bird collections in
Germany.

Means of making and maintaining contact were also considered. Apart from the
diversity of the conference and workshop delegates, and the resulting opportunities
for networking (Cooper 2000), another valuable quality was the meeting’s largely

Foanne H. Cooper & Frank D. Steinheimer 356 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

informal nature, which positively encouraged contact. As such meetings have until
this event been relatively infrequent occurrences, there is both a niche and a need
for alternative, ongoing means of contact. To this end, e-mail forums were discussed
and met with considerable interest. A US-based bird collections forum exists in the
form of AVECOL, used primarily by curators. However, it was felt that a new
European-based forum would be appropriate and useful, and the task of creating
one was undertaken by Jérn Scharlemann with the assistance of Chris Sleep and
James Van Remsen. Hosted by The Natural History Museum, London (BMNH), the
electronic Bulletin for European Avian Curators (eBEAC) is now fully functioning
(see below, under ‘eBEAC’, for further information).

The basic foundations for increasing cooperation seem to have been successfully
laid. However, as of August 2002, relatively few messages had been sent on eBEAC
and there is little ongoing discussion using this new forum. The trick now must be to
maintain the momentum gathered during the workshops and build upon it.

Inventories

Discussions surrounding Roselaar’s list and its presentation of broad collections
statistics developed to encompass the possibilities of more detailed international
collections inventories, catalogues or databases and their cooperative compilation,
aiming ultimately at publication on the internet. It was generally agreed that an
inventory project of some kind would be an excellent practical expression of the
cooperation that the conference and workshops were hoping to foster.

Specifically, discussion concentrated on two forms of catalogue/database, (1)
types and (2) extinct and endangered (E&E), both of which were considered to have
their advantages and disadvantages as potential projects.

As the basic defining units of biodiversity, type specimens carry a greater
systematic importance than E&E material, and so should arguably take priority.
Additionally, it was pointed out that the world type list is considerably more static
than the world list of E&E birds, which is unfortunately steadily increasing. However,
assembling a type catalogue even for an individual collection is not an easy task,
given the taxonomic complications this can involve, for example in synonymies.
However, to an extent, a type catalogue would be self-correcting as information
accumulated and could in fact open up discussion between institutions, probably
providing fresh insights into specimens’ status.

Rémy Bruckert, Muséum National d’ Histoire Naturelle IMNHN), in cooperation
with the Natural History Museum (NHM), American Museum of Natural History
(AMNH), Edward Dickinson and Norbert Bahr, has now taken on this challenge
and is preparing a type- and taxonomical database to house the world’s digital avian
type catalogue (Bruckert in press). Obviously a great help in amassing such an amount
of data is the fact that several institutions already have published type catalogues
available, covering some of the largest type collections in the world, amalgamation
of which has proved to be an excellent foundation for this project.

Foanne H. Cooper & Frank D. Steinheimer Say Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Fewer institutions have an E&E catalogue available, although it emerged that a
limited attempt at a European E&E online database has been made, based on data
from eight collections around Europe. This is the Extinct and Vanishing Animals
Project (EVAP), coordinated by Professor Marco Vannini of the Zoological Museum
of the University of Florence using EU funding (see ‘Websites’ for address). Whilst
a separate project 1s probably appropriate, EVAP does give ideas upon which to
build.

A fundamental starting point for devising any E&E catalogue is a species list.
The Bird Group at NHM, in consultation with BirdLife International, have drawn
up such a list, based on the recently published landmark volume Threatened birds of
the world (BirdLife International 2000) (Adams ef al. 2003, this volume). It is hoped
that initially this list will be of assistance to institutions wishing to collate their own
E&E catalogues, with the compilation of worldwide databases a longer-term prospect.

The talks surrounding the assembly and publication of inventories raised a number
of issues that any similar project will be likely to face. After the complexities
associated with compilation, a particular concern is maintenance: how should such
inventories be kept updated? Enthusiasm for the principle of global inventories was
considerable but at times guarded as the scale of the logistics involved became
apparent. It must be said that there is considerable responsibility in taking on such a
task, and concerns such as the availability of personnel and their time and, inevitably,
funding must be acknowledged and addressed. Each institution that becomes involved
will have to face these issues, but especially those contemplating the initial steps of
creating their individual E&E or type catalogues, possibly from scratch.

Collections and curation

These workshops were not a forum for questioning whether or not to collect birds
(for which see Remsen 1995, Collar 2000); rather they were used to examine how
collecting, particularly within Europe, could or should be carried out in the future.
Active collecting is now pursued mainly by North American institutions; only a
very few European museums are able to carry out some collecting, and little of that
is of their own national avifauna. Arguably, the most important impact this decline
has on collections is the significant gaps that are opening up in specimen time-
series, which not only has implications for long-term studies (e.g. Green &
Scharlemann 2003, this issue), but also affects interpretation of other data, such as
distribution patterns.

Whilst it would be possible for curators in non-collecting institutions to gain
experience of collecting through participating in expeditions run by collecting
institutions, this does not address the key problem of time gaps in European avifaunas
or the obstacles of public opposition. There appeared to be a groundswell of opinion
at the workshops that it is perhaps time to broach these issues with government and
conservation bodies.

For institutions wishing to add objectively to their collections, in addition to
more opportunistic sources such as donation, specimen exchanges with other

Foanne H. Cooper & Frank D. Steinheimer 358 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

collections can be extremely valuable. Exchanges are commonly based on unprepared
frozen material, and can be especially useful for acquiring anatomical specimens,
which are regaining recognition as key material for taxonomic research (Livezey
2003 and Olson 2003, this issue). Institutions that may not maintain anatomical
collections should be aware that specimens they might normally discard could be of
considerable interest to somewhere else. Another part of the appeal and strength of
exchanges is that almost any specimen may be of value to the right collection. One
institution’s common birds are often another’s rarities, so if facilities allow it can be
worth retaining material specifically with exchanges in mind. Freezer inventories
are generally a fundamental starting point in setting up exchanges; after that it is a
question of communication, and it has been found that email forums can be effective
for this.

There is a perceived decline in preparation skills and expertise, possibly linked
to the decline in collecting but probably also owing to staffing reductions and perhaps
to the fact that workers may not be well-placed to gain experience of new or unfamiliar
methods. Increasingly, there is more emphasis on multi-preparations, where parts of
a single specimen are preserved in several different ways, which can be as simple as
preserving a spread wing on a skin specimen. Additionally, the value of incidental
material associated with specimens, such as stomach contents, frozen tissue samples,
avian parasites or even sound recordings (see Alstro6m & Ranft 2003, this issue), is
gaining recognition and can build into an impressive research resource. It was felt
that technical manuals, including videos, would be very welcome, and that some
form of preparation workshop might be appropriate at subsequent meetings.

Another point of discussion was the increasing numbers of DNA sampling
requests for museum specimens. It seems that relatively few institutions have a set
policy governing destructive sampling but, as techniques develop not only for DNA
but also for chemical sampling or anatomical analyses, such protocols will be essential
to protect collections. As an example, the destructive sampling protocol of the
Division of Birds, National Museum of Natural History (USNM), Smithsonian, is
available online (for addresses, see below). :

Going global

A subject frequently returned to throughout the conference and workshops was
information technology and its huge potential as a means of disseminating and
analysing collections data. This summary is not the place to attempt a detailed review
of the complex, and occasionally controversial, discussions that developed, but it is
abundantly clear that the opportunities presented by the internet and other information
technology are impressive to say the least, culminating in the concept of a virtual
world museum (see, e.g., Peterson et al. 2003). However, tools this powerful must
be handled with extreme care and it must be said that the opportunities are not
necessarily all positive. Basic issues surrounding the mass release of data, particularly
in catalogues or inventories, that emerged in the course of the workshops included:

Foanne H. Cooper & Frank D. Steinheimer B59 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

funding of data capture/publication and subsequent charging; intellectual rights of
institutions to their collections data and continued control of them; rights of the
Specimen’s nation of origin to the data; implications of an increasing perception
(rightly or wrongly) of specimens as economic property (see Graves 2000 for more).
Once data have been released, the consensus is that it may be difficult to backtrack
and reclaim them in the future. If this is so, then decisions taken now must be made
very carefully and projects such as the type and E&E catalogues may well prove to
be important testing grounds.

The future?

As the first meeting of their kind the workshops were rated a success, achieving
their aim of opening up new lines of communication between workers in bird
collections and encouraging new levels of cooperation. Suggestions for increasing
cooperation, such as the creation of eBEAC, were met with enthusiasm, with the
overall verdict that yes, we want more interaction, and future workshops of a similar
nature should take place. The Second European Symposium ‘Bird Collections in
Europe: The Challenges of Mutual Cooperation’ has now been held, from 9 to 12
November 2001 in Bonn, Germany, and was also well attended. The Alexander
Koenig Research Institute and Zoological Museum (ZFMK), Bonn, invited speakers
for lectures covering bird collections and biodiversity, the promotion of ornithological
science, sharing databases, the history and development of individual collections
and other topics. Detailed proceedings of this second conference will be published
in due course (Rheinwald in press).

However, these meetings will come but once a year at most, and nurturing our
new cooperative opportunities will need more attention than that. Continuing the
process begun at these workshops needs input from individual workers, whether
sitting on steering committees, initiating specimen exchanges or simply posting a
message on eBEAC. We have started something at these conferences and
workshops—now let us see how far we can take it.

References:

Adams, M. P., Collar, N. J. & Cooper, J. H. 2003. Extinct and endangered (‘E&E’) birds: a proposed list
for collection catalogues. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 123A: 338-354.

Alstrom, P. & Ranft, R. 2003. The use of sounds in avian systematics, and the importance of bird sound
archives. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 123A: 114-135.

BirdLife International. 2000. Threatened birds of the world. Barcelona & Cambridge: Lynx Edicions &
BirdLife International.

Bruckert, R. (in press) A relational database as a tool in ornithological taxonomy and comparative
systematics. Conference Proceedings of the Second European Symposium ‘Bird Collections in
Europe: The Challenges of Mutual Cooperation’. Bonner zoologische Beitrdge 51(3/4).

Collar, N. J. 2000. Collecting and conservation: cause and effect. Bird Conserv. Internatn. 10: 1-15.

Cooper, J. 2000. Report on Why Museums Matter: Avian Archives in an Age of Extinction. /bis 142:
347-348.

Graves, G. R. 2000. Costs and benefits of Web access to museum data. Trends Ecol. Evol. 15: 374.

Joanne H. Cooper & Frank D. Steinheimer 360 Bull. B.O.C. 2003 123A

Green, R. E. & Scharlemann, J. P. W. 2003. Egg and skin collections as a resource for long-term ecological
studies. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 123A: 165-176.

Hudecek, J., Hanak F. & Jakubec M. 1999. Sbery dermoplastickych prepardtu ptaku ze Skol na
Novojiccinsku v Okresnim vlastivedném muzeu v Novém Jicince a ve Slezském zemském muzeu v
Opave. Zpravy MOS 57: 157-172.

Livezey, B. C. 2003. Avian spirit collections: attitudes, importance and prospects. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl.
123A: 35-41.

Olson, S. L. 2003. Development and uses of avian skeleton collections. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 123A:
26-34.

Peterson, A. T. Vieglais, D. A., Navarro Sigiienza, A. G. & Silva, M. 2003. A global distributed biodiversity
information network: building the world museum. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 123A: 186-196.

Rheinwald, G, ed. (in press) Conference Proceedings of the Second European Symposium ‘Bird
Collections in Europe: The Challenges of Mutual Cooperation’. Bonner zoologische Beitrage 51
(3/4).

Roselaar, K. 2003. An inventory of major European bird collections. Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 123A: 253-337.

Remsen, J. V. 1995. The importance of continued collecting of bird specimens to ornithology and bird
conservation. Bird Conserv. Internatn. 5: 145-180.

Websites

Extinct and Vanishing Animals—A European Natural History Museums Databank: http://
www.specola.unifi.it/eva.htm

Division of Birds, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution—for types catalogue,
loans and destructive sampling protocols: http://www.nmnh.si.edu/vert/birds

eBEAC: the Electronic Bulletin for European Avian Curators
eBEAC is primarily intended for curators and collection managers of European museums, but those
working elsewhere in curation or management of bird collections are not excluded.
Messages to eBEAC can only be sent by subscribed members. In order to subscribe, send an e-mail to
<majordomo @nhm.ac.uk> with the following message:
subscribe eBEAC
end
If you have any technical problem or question relating to eBEAC, please contact the administrator at
<owner-eBEAC @nhm.ac.uk>.

© British Ornithologists’ Club 2003

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS

Authors are invited to submit papers on topics relating to the broad themes of taxonomy and distribution of
birds. Descriptions of new species of birds are especially welcome and will be given priority to ensure rapid
publication; they may be accompanied by colour photographs or paintings.

Submission may be made electronically to the Editor (feare_wildwings@msn.com): if large (>I mb) files
are involved, e.g. to include illustrations, please contact editor first. Submission may also be made by post
(to Prof. Chris Feare, 2 North View Cottages, Grayswood Common, Haslemere, Surrey GU27 2DN, UK);
in this case send one hard copy and also a copy on a 3.5” disk. as Word or Wordperfect files for PC. Where
possible, reviews, and returns of papers and reviewers’ comments to authors, will be undertaken electronically.

Where appropriate half-tone photographs may be included and, where essential to illustrate important points,
the Editor will consider the inclusion of colour illustrations (if possible, authors should obtain funding to
support this inclusion of such colour plates).

Papers should follow the general style:

Title — lower case, centred, bold
Author(s) — lower case, centred, italics
Introductory section without a heading
Primary headings — lower case, centred, bold

Secondary headings — left justified, lower case, italics, bold
English names of animals should begin with capitals; give English name at first mention of every species.
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Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club Supplement
ISSN 0007-1595 |
Edited by Nigel J Collar, Clemency T Fisher & Chris J Feare
Volume 123A
Why Museums Matter: Avian Archives in an Age of Extinction

NIAN INSTITUTION WET

CONTENTS Ml

HAFFER, J. Avian zoogeography, speciation and the MUSEUM LradiLION ............seeceseessecseseseseeeneeee
OLSON, S. Development and uses of avian skeleton collections .:...:........-..g:.-.:--cs--sreoce-eeeeeeeeae
LIVEZEY, B.C. Avian spirit collections: attitudes, importance and prospects ..............::scceseeeee
CHRISTIDIS, L. & NORMAN, J.A. DNA and the museum tradition .................eececeeeeeeenneeeeeeees

RAJKOWSKI, K.M. DNA and protein sequence databanks: SOME CAaVEALS .........cceeeseeceeseeceneenseees
RASMUSSEN, P.C. & PRYS-JONES, R.P. History vs mystery: the reliability of museum
SPECHMEN Gala q..0...nccncedecesnssenesannsnuatiebeabastennonme: Weue issashlentinnsl ant noua cielo ee
COLLAR, N.J. & RUDYANTO The archive and the ark: bird specimen data in conservation
SlALUS ASSESSMIEHL, .......6.2-ceo.cessuscoennsnswsaneuersnsauesnnthenenslen dasonesieeaiea sunalnasecOdeaceseucel eel yee eee
ALSTROM, P. & RANFFT, R. The use of sounds in avian Sysiemnalies and the importance of
bird SOUNMG ARCHIVES 52..,..:00-sceeneascataannenssvucssenbonsetansevoensasenatiuedecas ease teneicccee sneer
FISHER, C.T. & WARR, F.E. Museums on paper: library & icnueerale FESOUICES. ..;:-.1.seeee
GREEN, R.E. & SCHARLEMANN, J.P.W. Egg and skin collections as a resource for long-
term ecological: StUGIES. «...205...sccosccsccsuneseosenoroamoeeSoonnegh sce pans anoien aiaitleenneaanren ee <5 eee ee ane ea
KITCHENER, A.C. & MCGOWAN, R.Y. Sudden large samples: opportunities and problems .....
PETERSON, A.T., VIEGLAIS, D.A., NAVARRO, A.G, S., & SILVA, M. A global distributed
biodiversity information network: building the World MUSEUM ...............::cesseccesecrceteeneerenseerenne
CHEKE, A.S. Treasure Island—the rise and decline of a small tropical muscum, the
Miaaritivs Tnstitute «.....ccosesssesssadsanseesceochsanvernaenoousesndhionehtpwanntnancouenas cots Jeieapese eee areata eae
NAVARRO, A.G., S., PETERSON, A.T. & GORDILLO-MARTINEZ, A. Muscums
working together: the atlas of the birds of MEXICO ..........2..0s<scoa-esaesoanonvarscoesessesteresee eee

HROMADA, M., KUCZYNSKI, L., SKORACKI, M., ANTCZAK, M. &
TRYJANOWSKI, P. The value of the bird collections and associated data in regional
museums: Lanius excubitor specimens in Sarisské Museum, Bardejov, Slovakia .ss.c2ee

BOEV, Z. Specimens of extinct and threatened birds in the collections of the National
Museum of Natural History in-Sofia, Bulgaria...............c.cc0c0t.scenasesesentence-eocmetns-nccoaieee eae

RICHFORD, A.S. Museums, books and costs: public service vs private enterprise .............0esee
WOODCOCK, M. Some reflections on the use of skins in bird illustration .................c0ceeseeseeserreeee
ROSELAAR, K. An inventory of major European bird Collections ..0...........ccccseeseereeeeeseereenenneeseeeee

ADAMS, M.P., COOPER, J.H. & COLLAR, N.J. Extinct and endangered (‘E&E’) birds:
a proposed list for collection catalag@es ...2.c..<ccscssaccedancsnsescocceuecyncwosteneescecnoeeenetaoe a eee ee

COOPER, J.H. & STEINHEIMER, F.D. Why museums matter: report from the
workshops 14-15 November 1999‘Increased cooperation between bird collections’ ..............

Printed on acid-free paper.

Published by the BRITISH ORNITHOLOGISTS’ CLUB
Typeset by Alcedo Publishing of Colorado Springs, USA, and printed by Crowes of Norwich, UK

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