The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson

The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson

Author:Kirk Wallace Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-24T04:00:00+00:00


* * *

Dr. Robert Prys-Jones and Mark Adams arrived, not appearing excited to discuss the events of June 23, 2009, especially with a refugee advocate moonlighting as an amateur bird heist investigator.

I began by relaying some of the curious opinions about the role of natural history museums I’d heard at the Somerset show. Some fly-tiers had questioned why, with hundreds of thousands of bird skins, museums needed so many “copies” of the same bird—they’d be better off selling them, wouldn’t they? Hoping to provoke a response, I told the curators that several tiers had suggested that “what they do—heralding the beauty of these birds by tying them into flies—is better than locking them in some museum basement.”

“The United Kingdom doesn’t spend millions of pounds on the Natural History Museum so the stuff isn’t used. . . . It’s underwriting a resource that is of immense importance scientifically!” said Prys-Jones, peering at me through his glasses, his brow furrowed. “I’m not able to make an intelligent response to that nonsense.”

The world already owed a debt to the knowledge unlocked by these specimens, he and his colleague explained. Wallace and Darwin had drawn upon them to formulate their theory of evolution through natural selection. In the middle of the twentieth century, scientists compared historic specimens in the museum’s egg collection to show that shells had grown thinner—and less viable—after the introduction of the DDT pesticides, which were ultimately banned. More recently, feather samples from 150 years’ worth of seabird skins were used to document the rising mercury levels in the oceans, which contributes to declines in animal populations and creates public health implications for humans who eat mercury-laden fish. The researchers described the plumes as the “memory of the ocean.”

Many of these birds were already in museum storage cabinets before the word scientist was even coined. Over hundreds of years, each advance—the discovery of the cell nucleus, viruses, natural selection, the concept of genetic inheritance, and the DNA revolution—ushered in new ways of examining the same bird: a researcher peering at a skin through a simple microscope in the early nineteenth century couldn’t have comprehended what would be revealed by mass spectrometers in the twentieth or by nuclear magnetic resonance and high-performance liquid chromatography in the twenty-first. The Natural History Museum’s curators made the bird skins available to hundreds of scientists each year, hailing from increasingly specialized branches of inquiry: biochemists, embryologists, epidemiologists, osteologists, and population ecologists.

Scientists can now pluck a feather from one of the Tring’s eighteenth-century specimens and, based on the concentration of carbon and nitrogen isotopes, understand the bird’s diet. This in turn allows them to reconstruct entire food webs throughout history and to see how species have changed or where they migrated when food sources vanished.

Specimens in the collection are currently aiding efforts to preserve the endangered California Condor by extracting DNA from ancient bone samples. The budding field of de-extinction, also known as resurrection biology, relies in part upon extracting DNA from museum specimens in order to bring lost birds like the Passenger Pigeon back to life.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.