The Owl That Fell from the Sky by Brian Gill

Author:Brian Gill
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781877551499
Publisher: Awa Press
Published: 2012-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

Old specimens in natural history museums, provided they have been carefully documented and faithfully numbered and labelled, tell many such stories—not just of bygone days and remote and exotic places, but of the passion of the collectors and the troubles they endured to bring or send the specimens home. Today, museums get fewer of their birds from intrepid expeditions. Many specimens are salvaged from accidental bird deaths. Members of the public play a critical role by offering museums dead birds they find crashed into windows, lying on the roadside, or washed up on beaches. Bird curators often keep in touch with field officers, post-graduate biology students, bird-rescue volunteers, and other people who show an understanding of the value of museum collections and take great trouble to collect and label any dead birds they find during their work. For every new specimen received, we record the collector’s name: even seemingly ordinary specimens may be of great interest to future generations because of the identity of their collectors.

In the early 1970s Auckland Museum received three wading birds from the Delaware Museum of Natural History. When you look at these birds they seem very drab and pedestrian—until you discover they were collected in the 1950s by John Eleuthère du Pont, a member of the American industrial family. Du Pont, an ornithologist whose interests included South Pacific birds, founded the museum in 1957 and directed it for several years. He described a new subspecies of parrot-finch from Western Samoa, and in 1976 published a guide to South Pacific birds, beautifully illustrated by George Sandström.

Du Pont was also a stamp collector and apparently paid nearly a million dollars in 1980 for the unique 1856 British Guiana one cent black-on-magenta, perhaps the world’s most famous postage stamp. In his private life he displayed increasingly bizarre behaviour. A major supporter of wrestling, with dreams of personal glory, on January 26, 1996 he shot and killed David Schultz, the 1984 Olympic wrestling champion who lived on his estate in Philadelphia. Convicted of third-degree murder, du Pont died in prison in 2010.

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