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 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.