The Owl That Fell from the Sky Read Online Free

mammalogist at the British Museum (Natural History), was described by contemporaries as having the innate habits of a squirrel. He smoked an ounce of tobacco a day from the age of seventeen and never threw away a tobacco tin. After he died, more than 10,000 tobacco tins were removed from his rooms, as was more than a tonne of paper, including receipts, chequebook stubs, used envelopes and notices, all mixed up and some going back over sixty years.
    Squirrel-like habits in a mammalogist show the danger curators run of becoming like the things they study. Dave Simmons, former ethnologist at Auckland Museum, once told me that as he grew older and his face more lined, his wife accused him of looking more and more like a Māori carving. Could it be that I myself sometimes chatter too quickly and move too jerkily, like a bird? If so, I hope a friend will tell me.
    Improving and developing collections for the long haul requires tenacity, but determination was perhaps a little misdirected in George Albert Boulenger (1858–1937), an expert on reptiles and amphibians at the British Museum (Natural History). Boulenger was so angered and saddened by the German invasion of his native Belgium that he refused to read any German publications issued after 1914.
    This famed herpetologist published a nine-volume catalogue of the amphibians and reptiles in the museum’s collection of nearly 8,500 species. He holds the record for having described more currently recognised species of reptiles than anyone else—some 570. He described and named at least three New Zealand skinks that still bear his original names; among them is the endangered chevron skink Oligosoma homalonotum .
    Peter Whitehead (1930–1992), an ichthyologist at the British Museum (Natural History), had interests beyond his immediate collection of fishes. His career coincided with an era when administrative tasks previously done by senior scientists were increasingly taken over by a new breed of museum managers. For many years Whitehead worked on the draft of a satirical novel about events behind the scenes in the running of the museum. He is said to have abandoned the novel when actual events at the museum became more ludicrous than those he had invented.
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    Chronic underfunding has been an enduring problem for many natural history collections. In recent decades financial crises have seen closures of some collecting institutions, particularly small ones such as university museums. Bigger museums have also suffered. In the early 1990s about a sixth of the scientific staff at the Natural History Museum in London was axed. Such disruptions, combined with the ageing workforce of taxonomists and the failure of universities and museums to train and employ enough new ones, mean we may never accomplish the fundamental cataloguing needed for a proper understanding of the world’s biodiversity.
    Yet natural history museums, and natural history galleries within general museums, remain enormously alluring to the public. Sharks, dinosaurs, giant squids, spiders and other venomous creatures, fossils and mounted birds and mammals seem of perennial interest. No large general museum in New Zealand would be complete without displays of moa and kiwi. Similarly, most other countries have popular and emblematic animals that their museums must display.
    Today there are about 500,000 bird specimens (study-skins and all other categories) in Australian and New Zealand museums, and at least four million bird study-skins in the museums of Europe. Linked together—in principle, if not physically—collections of different museums form a major collective asset for biological research. Rapid progress is being made in digitising the collecting details and images of natural history specimens around the world, with the ultimate aim of making all this material accessible on the worldwide web.
    Already hundreds of research projects have used the bird specimens in New Zealand