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Some thoughts on scientific collecting

10,000 Birds

I worked with an enormous collection of bird skins in the collection of Te Papa (The National Museum of New Zealand) during my (unfinished) PhD. I remember looking at a single skin of a Long-legged warbler from Fiji, the only known specimen or record of its particular subspecies, the sum total of all knowledge about its kind.

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Grey-headed Robins

10,000 Birds

It is, instead, a member of the Petroicidae, the Australasian robins, a family mostly found in New Guinea and Australia but also reaching here in New Zealand and as far across the Pacific as Fiji. Until I started researching this post I didn’t know an interesting fact about the range of this species.

Guinea 154