Carnegie Museum of Natural History

One of the Four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh

Blogs about Birds

Birds are incredibly important to Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The museum's Section of Birds contains nearly 190,000 specimens of birds. The most important of these are the 555 holotypes and syntypes. The Section of Birds staff also cares for approximately 196 specimens of extinct birds as well as specimens of many rare species collected decades—if not more than a century—ago.

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Front Door Owls

Owl engraved on a metal door

by Patrick McShea

You have to know where to look to spot the owls on the front door of Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Carriage Drive entrance.

Amid the bronze relief art work on each of two massive doors, a tiny owl perches atop a flaming oil lamp, symbolically marking the building as a place of wisdom and illumination.

The association of owls with wisdom dates at least to ancient Greece, where Athena, goddess of wisdom, favored the owl among all feathered creatures. Physical features might well have influenced Athena’s judgment, for an owl’s large round head and huge forward-facing eyes endow the creature with a human-like face.

Owl engraving on a metal door

These physical features, which are adaptations for nocturnal hunting, are available for close inspection at Discovery Basecamp, where an array of owl taxidermy mounts greets visitors.

Although the eyes of the taxidermy mounts are made of glass, their size, color, and placement accurately mimics the remarkable light-gathering structures of the living birds. The feathers of each mount are real, and those creating the flat facial disc of each owl are visually different than the surrounding plumage. The shape, stiffness, and placement of these feathers makes each owls face a satellite dish for gathering sound and transmitting it to the creature’s ears.

Display of taxidermy owls in Discovery Basecamp

Patrick McShea works in the Education and Visitor Experience department of Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

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What’s up with the dead birds?

A study skin displayed below a taxidermy mount in Bird Hall.

by Patrick McShea

Museum visitors sometimes offer spontaneous testimony to the deceptive power of taxidermy.

“There’s a dead bird!” is a comment frequently voiced by people encountering a bird specimen lying on its back in Bird Hall, such as the Wilson’s phalarope pictured below. These specimens, so often called “dead birds”, are actually called study skins.

study skin of a Wilson's Palarope bird

Study skins are a traditional form of specimen preparation for birds in scientific collections. Unlike taxidermy mounts, which attain a pretense of life through concealed body forms, strategically positioned wires,
and glass eyes of the appropriate size and color, the cotton-stuffed study skins appear lifeless.

The more than 154,000 bird study skins in the museum’s research collection have all undergone similar preparation. For each specimen the full skin of the bird was carefully removed from the underlying muscle,
skeleton core, and internal organs, preserving every feather of the creature. Such Uniform preparation creates a standard for comparisons of features between both similar and strikingly different specimens. In addition, the low profile of study skins allows for their storage in shallow cabinet drawers in the manner of the passenger pigeon study skins pictured below.

bird study skins in a drawer

Although taxidermy mounts far outnumber study skins in Bird Hall display cases, the “skins” play an important role by representing the most numerous form of preserved specimens in the museum’s vast bird collection. Whether or not adjacent taxidermy mounts seem more alive because they share display space with the skins is something you may judge for yourself during your next museum visit.

Patrick McShea works in the Education and Visitor Experience department of Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences of working at the museum.

Carnegie Museum of Natural History Blog Citation Information

Blog author: Patrick McShea
Publication date: June 22, 2016

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Superb Lyrebird

Superb LyrebirdIf you thought you were having a great hair day, check out the  in Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Bird Hall.

Males Superb Lyrebird attract females with their ornate tails, which can take up to seven years to fully develop.

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Powdermill Nature Reserve

Ruby-crowned Kinglet bird
“Our nets are like a box of chocolate, you never know what you’re going to get.
Our January morsel: a Ruby-crowned Kinglet.
The only other time we’ve ever caught a Ruby-crowned Kinglet in January was in 1993 when 2 were banded, one which was re-caught 2 more times. Our lovely lady was first banded in late October and re-caught twice in November, last on November 21st.
We’re looking forward to finding more goodies in our nets this year, but we’ll pass on the cordials please.”