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In defence of museum collections

10,000 Birds

To quote from their Facebook post: It is my sad duty to report to you that the ULM administration has decided to divest the research collections in the Museum of Natural History. This includes the 6 million fish specimens in the Neil Douglas fish collection and the nearly 500,000 plant specimens in the R. Dale Thomas plant collection.

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Some thoughts on scientific collecting

10,000 Birds

What wasn’t publicised at the time, but the scientist later both admitted and owned, is that the kingfisher was then killed and collected for scientific reasons. I’m not going to rehash the arguments for scientific collecting here. The large room the collection was held in was a profoundly weird place. Bush Wrens.

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What the Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds: A Book Review

10,000 Birds

Jennifer Ackerman points out in the introduction to What the Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds , that we don’t know much, but that very soon we may know a lot more. What the Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds is a joyous, fascinating read.

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COMMENTS ON COLLECTING BIRDS: A Reply

10,000 Birds

After my post about collecting two weeks ago I received a bit of feedback, some positive, some negative, and I’ve been mulling it over with the intention of writing about some of the issues that could be considered the root cause of the disagreement. The preferred alternative to collecting a bird is to take photos and a blood sample.

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Seeking the Bahama Nuthatch

10,000 Birds

He noted that this new bird had longer bills and “darker loral and auricular regions” than the mainland Brown-headed Nuthatch, and collected two of them for science. He gave one to his home institution, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the other to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

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Birding Technology – The New Citizen Science

10,000 Birds

But one of the most important aspects of these advances in new-age birding is the fact that they have grown hand-in-hand with the almost exponential growth in citizen science. Citizen science is a term used for the systematic collection and analysis of data and the dissemination of such data by researchers on a primarily voluntary basis.

Science 265
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Citizen Science or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love eBird

10,000 Birds

I rely on my library of cookbooks rather than Google for recipes, and prefer my cassettes, CDs, and LPs to my iTunes collection. Steve Kelling from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology gave the keynote talk, “The Birder Effect: Birding, Science, and Conservation.” Birding citizen science Conservation eBird'

Science 186