I will most likely never see the great majority of the planet’s
10,000 plus bird species, but I’m fine with that, since I’m not
a competitive birder. I am, however, not happy about missing
those species native to the East Coast that were exterminated
long before I showed up: heath hen, Carolina parakeet, passenger
pigeon. And a little further afield, the Eskimo curlew and Ivory
billed woodpecker (both have partisans who believe that they are
not, in fact, gone, so perhaps…). The best any of us can do now
is look at the stuffed ones. This week, I got to go behind the
scenes of the ornithology department at the American Museum of
Natural History. Woo-woo! As you may know, museums don’t — can’t
— display the vast majority of their holdings, and the great old
pile that is AMNH is no exception. There are shelves upon
shelves upon shelves of objects in storage there. This was my
second time being shown around in natural history’s storehouse.
Back in the mid-1990s, I got to go up into AMNH’s attic, which
was filled