Student Mele Avery Helped Prepare & Map Data of Corvid Specimens

Last summer, UBC student Mele Avery helped Ildako Szabo, Assistant Curator of Birds at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, on organizing specimens at the Museum. She shares with us her experience working on this project:

Between May & August of 2012, I had the pleasure of helping prepare data on the Corvid specimens in the Beaty Biodiversity Museum collection. Crows, Magpies and their brethren are perhaps the least musically gifted members of the songbird order, but they possess other charms that endear them to admirers. Their intelligence, curiosity and playfulness make them one of my favourite kinds of birds. This is why I asked to concentrate exclusively on the Corvidae family for this project. I recently graduated from the UBC Master’s in Library & Information Studies program and wanted to work with ornithology and natural history collections.

The process was simple: go through the drawers and check if the data on the tags matched what was in the current database. Over time, I became familiar with the old-fashioned handwriting of the more productive collectors. Reading the cramped text occasionally required the use of a magnifying glass. I learned when to recognize seemingly random figures as AOU species ID numbers. In all, I catalogued 548 items.

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Going through drawer after drawer of study skins, I got to see up close the variations in the subspecies. Steller’s and Blue Jays were particularly diverse in their regional plumages, and it was a treat to compare these differences side by side. The purple cast in some Blue Jays was not something I’d noticed while birding, likewise the different brow shades worn by Steller’s Jays. I’d never encountered colour mutations in the wild, such as the albino Northwestern Crow, so seeing them in hand was very special.

I enjoyed exploring the human and geographic aspects of the collection. The oldest skins were prepared in the 1880s, and oftentimes looked better than recently acquired ones. Geo-referencing specimens to their collection sites was fun and challenging. Some were obtained in extremely remote locations, making me want to know more about those expeditions and the scientists involved. One location, “Lang’s Woods, Ottawa” proved impossible to pin down, even after contacting area historical societies and looking at old property maps (the bird was collected in 1886).

Having completed the review, I experimented with visualization tools to map out the collection. Using Google Fusion Tables, I created an interactive map of all the corvid specimens that had location data. The map can be viewed here: http://goo.gl/bFXVo

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(Top) Interactive map of collection sites. (Bottom) The filter tool can be used to isolate subspecies.

 

Corvids are a much more diverse lot than one would think, with 120 species. Here’s a list of all the species I got to work with: American Crow, Black-billed Magpie, Black-throated Magpie-Jay, Blue Jay, Brown Jay, Carrion Crow, Cayenne Jay, Chihuahuan Raven, Clark’s Nutcracker, Common Magpie, Common Raven, Eurasian Jackdaw, Eurasian Jay, Eurasian Magpie, Eurasian Nutcracker, European Jay, Fish Crow, Florida Scrub-Jay, Gray Jay, Green Jay, Hooded Crow, House Crow, Island Scrub-Jay, Northwestern Crow, Rook, Rufous Treepie, San Blas Jay, Steller’s Jay, Western Scrub-Jay, Yellow-billed Magpie, Yucatan Jay.
Users can filter the map to pinpoint data of interest to them. For example, the image above shows how the map would appear if it only showed the hesperis subspecies of the American Crow. It’s not intended as an actual research tool; I just thought it might be fun to map out.