The University of British Columbia

Beaty Honorary Assistant Curator Ildiko Szabo shares some of the fascinating work that goes into preparing bird specimens in the museum.

I lose my sense of time when I am between these tall rows of cabinets opening drawer after drawer. I am passionate about feathers. I never tire of looking at these bird study skins carefully stuffed, wings folded, designed to take up minimum space, and packed in like sardines. Instead of finding the birds in chronological order or according to global regions, they are stored using the bird taxonomist’s alphabet. Side by side I could find a bird skin prepared a couple of centuries ago that travelled to North America on a sailing ship next to one that I prepared last month in the bird lab of the museum. I had forgotten that the extinct Passenger Pigeon would be in this drawer. Compared to many other species it is a plain bird, but with such wonderful iridescent plumage on the neck. Since each properly prepared bird skin is expected to last 500 years or longer, each bird is a store house of information. What kind of information? I can’t give a complete answer. Darwin never dreamed of DNA analysis which can even be done on extinct birds using the pulp found in breast feathers. Currently researchers use feathers to answer all sorts of questions. What were the mercury levels in the world’s oceans 120 years ago. You can’t go and get a water sample, but you can compare mercury levels found in feathers from different decades. Like Darwin, we can’t fathom the methods that will be developed in the next hundred years. The Scientific Co-Director of the Beaty Museum, Dr. Wayne Maddison, thinks of natural history museum collections as a time traveller’s paradise. Today we must preserve the existing collection and keep adding to it to increase the length and breadth of information available to our children’s children so that they can travel back in time... back to today... or the days of sailing ships.

Preparing Bird Skins

In recognition the importance of bird skin collections for current and future generations, this webpage has been created to provide basic tools on how to prepare bird study skins. The target audience is graduate students working in the field as well as volunteers and staff at parks, colleges, universities, and museums that have the appropriate permits.

Please note: The birds shown in these presentations were salvaged. As these presentations deal with preparing skins from whole animals, some of the imagery may be considered graphic.

• Intro: The look of the bird (includes a bird quiz)
• Part 1 Spread wings, a good place to start
• Part 2 Skinning your first bird
• Part 3 Problems with bird heads, partial skeletons and other methods
• Part 4 Stuffing your first bird
• Part 5 Other ways to stuff and pin study skins and bird parts
• Part 6 Sexing birds using gonads (includes quiz with answer sheet)
• Part 11 Flat skins, shmoos, and other types of study skins
• Part 12 Labelling: The most important step

Resources

Although there are only a few basic methods on how to prepare bird skins, almost every large museum has a unique signature on how they prepare specimens. Collected here are various videos, websites, and PDFs showing alternate ways to prepare birds.

Videos

Field Museum: A Way to Call Home: David Willard
Field Museum: Skeleton Preparation - Fallen birds get a second life
Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science: Specimen Preparation
Smithsonian Museum Bird Skin and Partial Skeleton Prep: Roadrunner - part 1
Smithsonian Museum Bird Skin and Partial Skeleton Prep: Roadrunner - part 2
Smithsonian Museum Bird Skin and Partial Skeleton Prep: Roadrunner - part 3

Websites

Michel Klemann - Feathers: Flight Feathers of European Birds
University of Michigan Museum of Zoology: Dermestarium
University of Puget Sound: Wing Image Collection
U.S. National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Lab: The Feather Atlas: Flight Feathers of North American Birds >

Documents

University of Alaska-Anchorage: Field Catalog
University of Alaska-Anchorage: Prep Manual
University of Alaska-Fairbanks: Winker, K. 2000. J of Field Ornithology paper on specimen preparation PDF
Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science: Label Guidelines DOC
University of Puget Sound: Bird Skinning