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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Travels with a Sketchbook: A Natural History Artist’s Observations at the Museum

Carnegie Museum of Natural History has a large and expansive collection of artifacts, oddities, and wonders. It also has its fair share of mounted animals and skeletons on display, which makes it an ideal spot for the wandering artist. Where else can an artist study both extinct and extant species up close and in great detail? If, like me, you’re an illustrator who loves to draw animals, you could, for example, grab your sketchbook and head to the museum’s Bird Hall to get a close look at the flightless dodo (Raphus cucullatus). Driven to extinction by European colonists during the 1600s, early artists’ renderings provide some of the best evidence for the dodo’s appearance in life. Perhaps surprisingly, this bird is now known to be closely related to pigeons!

Dodo (Raphus cucullatus) in Bird Hall at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Sketch by the author.

If your tastes are more prehistoric, check out the museum’s sprawling Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibition. Travel back in time to ancient seas and imagine the graceful movements of the plesiosaur Dolichorhynchops bonneri while the giant carnivorous mosasaur Tylosaurus proriger hovers ominously above you. These marine reptile groups vanished in the mass extinction that also wiped out non-avian dinosaurs roughly 66 million years ago.

Skeleton of the short-necked plesiosaur Dolichorhynchops bonneri in the Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibition at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Sketch by the author.

Or perhaps you’re more interested in observing and sketching modern day animals? If so, visit the Hall of North American Wildlife and Hall of African Wildlife on the museum’s second floor. Get up close and personal with the Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) trio and capture their anatomy in detail. It’s the safest way to do so – not to mention the only way to do so here in Western Pennsylvania! (Reports of alligators in our rivers notwithstanding.)

Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) in the Hall of African Wildlife at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Sketch by the author.

So, my fellow artists and nature lovers, as I hope this post has shown, there are scores of species to inspire you here at the museum. Grab your sketchbook and come on over!

Hannah Smith is an intern working with Scientific Illustrator Andrew McAfee in the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees, interns, and volunteers are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

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Carnegie Museum of Natural History Blog Citation Information

Blog author: Smith, Hannah
Publication date: August 12, 2019

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BirdSafe Pittsburgh Makes Museum Windows Visible

The birds flying around the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History are a lot safer now, thanks to Jon Rice, the Urban Bird Conservation Coordinator and leader of BirdSafe Pittsburgh. Over the summer, Jon and his colleagues were able make a deadly wall of windows visible to birds by installing thousands of stylish reflective dots. By breaking up the reflection of the surrounding trees on the East side of the museum, birds are more likely to see the window and avoid impact.

BirdSafe Pittsburgh is a partnership between 8 local conservation organizations working to reduce bird mortality in Pittsburgh. Learn more about how you can become involved at https://birdsafepgh.org/volunteer/.

museum windows with bird proof glass

Windows on the East side of the building have been outfitted with stylish, reflective patterns to make windows visible to birds and reduce collisions.

Chase Mendenhall is Assistant Curator of Birds, Ecology, and Conservation at 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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Why Do the King Penguins in Bird Hall Look so Different from Each Other?

king penguin chick and adult in Bird Hall

Visitor comments often offer insight into the effectiveness of museum displays. The most candid comments are overheard snatches of conversation, some as touching as they are humorous.

The setting: Bird Hall at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, 2:00 p.m. on a summer afternoon.

Three siblings, the oldest about nine, were studying a pair of king penguin taxidermy mounts while their mother, a few display cases away, looked at a different group of birds.

The mother walked toward her children as the nine-year-old explained the birds to his younger brother and sister, “This one is the girl penguin, and this one is the boy penguin. They really look different. The girls are brown and fuzzy, and the boys are black and white.”

The mother quickly surmised the misinterpretation and offered a gentle correction without any trace of ridicule: “The brown one’s a young bird. The label says ‘chick,’ but that doesn’t mean it’s a girl.”

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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Broken Egg Evidence

Challenges involving eggs aren’t limited to the Easter season. The pictures below are of songbird egg shells I came across in early July of 2018. Each fragment hints at a different outcome for the developing bird that once occupied the structure. My speculation about those outcomes is mainly informed by details about the places where the shells were found, critical information not captured in the photographs.

broken egg on the ground

This northern cardinal egg shell fragment rested on a brick sidewalk near a forsythia bush where a pair of the birds had been observed nesting. Blue jays frequented the area, as did eastern chipmunks. Either could have removed an egg from the nest, broken the shell, eaten much of the contents, and left drying yolk for ants to scavenge.

broken blue egg among rocks

It’s likely this wood thrush egg fragment was deliberately dropped by a parent bird as part of routine post-hatch nest-keeping duties. The blue shell rested on a gravel State Game Lands road inMercer County, a place that echoed with flute-like Wood Thrush song. The fragment’s spotless interior was evidence that this egg had almost certainly been opened by its occupant rather than a nest visitor.

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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New Zealand, Realm of Birds

I recently returned from three weeks’ vacation on New Zealand’s South Island. I had expected to see bazillions of sheep (I heard there were 7 sheep for every person in New Zealand), but I found that New Zealand is characterized by birds and ferns (and although we saw lots of sheep, many farmers are turning to dairy). In this post, I’ll touch on the birds of New Zealand.

Kiwi bird. Photo courtesy of Kiwi Birdlife Park.

Before humans arrived, the only land mammals on New Zealand were two species of bats and a now-extinct mouse. That left birds to radiate into numerous niches, and without ground-based predators, many birds became flightless and fearless. (The fearsome Haast eagle, with a wingspan up to 3 m or 10 ft, hunted from the air, but is now extinct.)

42% of the bird species have become extinct since year 1300. New Zealand was colonized by humans comparatively recently: Polynesians, who became the Maori people, arrived about year 1300 AD and brought the Polynesian rat, or kiore, which started to harm ground-nesting birds, and the Maori wiped out the large, herbivorous moa birds (evidently, they were tasty). Europeans colonized in the 1800s and brought mammals that further devastated the bird fauna: Norway rats, cats, and stoats (relatives of weasels).

The New Zealand Department of Conservation traps and poisons the mammals, which helps some birds recover. Mammal lovers who oppose the control efforts don’t offer an alternate plan, but without control, even more birds would now be extinct. There is a move toward complete eradication of the introduced mammalian predators by 2050.

One of the widespread and friendly flightless birds is the weka. It is a member of the rail family and is roughly the size of a chicken. I tried to show one weka how to read a map, but I think it had trouble understanding my U.S. accent (see photo).

weka bird and man with a map
Weka, one of the flightless birds of New Zealand. Photo by Alice W. Doolittle.

Thanks to conservation efforts, five species of kiwi birds still live in New Zealand. They are primarily nocturnal, and we were fortunate to see some at Kiwi Birdlife Park (see photo). The mother kiwi lays an unusually large egg that is about a quarter of her mass (I imagine her saying ouch at egg laying). Recent DNA evidence suggests the kiwi is more closely related to the (extinct) elephant bird of Madagascar than to the (extinct) moa of New Zealand. I believe the large size of the kiwi’s egg relative to its body size could be from evolution shrinking the adult size faster than it shrank the egg size. Kiwis have a very long proboscis, and the Maori name for one of the kiwi species translates to weka with a walking stick. Kiwis are the only bird with nostrils at the end of its proboscis. Given that bill length is measured from the nostrils to the tip, despite its prodigious nasal protuberance, technically the kiwi has the shortest bill of any bird!

Timothy A. Pearce is Curator of Collections, Section of Mollusks at 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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A Match Made by Coevolution

Darwin once predicted the existence of a pollinator after examining the star-shaped flower of the orchid Angraecum sesquipedale, a flower whose nectar is at the end of a 30 cm tube. Darwin wrote that “in Madagascar there must be moths with probosces capable of extension to a length of between ten and eleven inches [25.4–27.9cm].” Twenty years after Darwin’s death, his prediction was proven correct with the discovery of a moth, Xanthopan morganii praedicta, which boasted a proboscis 20 cm in length. In 1992, natural history observations of the moth feeding on the extreme flower and transferring pollen provided even more evidence that this plant and insect were tangled in a coevolution that resulted in their extreme morphology.

Coevolution is now a cornerstone of biology and has been well developed through examples of flowering plants and insects, parasites and hosts, predators and prey, and even gut microbiomes and human health. In fact, the influence of closely associated species on each other in their evolution is so ubiquitous one could argue that evolution is coevolution—as the boundary between what is an individual versus a consortia of different species blends as we dive deeper into the units that natural selection is acting upon. The microbiome and human health example helps illustrate the problem of defining an individual, specifically because scientists now think that microbial cells outnumber human cells in your body. Moreover, there is growing evidence this diversity of symbionts on our bodies complete metabolic pathways and serve other physiological functions. Coevolution crisscrosses the natural histories of organisms, creating nuances that sometimes complicate things.

With so much excitement and work surrounding coevolution, it is romantic to stumble across an example of coevolution fit for a kindergarten class. In the collection of birds at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, we recently finished an analysis of 24 Costa Rican hummingbirds and the pollen types found on their bodies and were reminded of Darwin’s predictions of coevolution over 100 years ago with orchids and moths. The White-tipped Sicklebill (Eutoxeres aquila) is a hummingbird with an extreme bill curve, with an appearance that would remind kindergarteners of Jim Henson’s Gonzo Muppet. Putting this bird next to its favorite food, Centropogon granulosus, illustrates coevolution in an exciting way that doesn’t tangle you up in learning about microbes or imagining other complex ecological relationships. Like Darwin’s orchid and moth, this hummingbird and its preferred flower allow us to see coevolution is all around us.

sicklebill hummingbird and its preferred flower

In an ongoing study at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Section of Birds, we were reminded of the natural history observations and predictions that led to an explosion in the field of coevolution. By studying pollen types collected from hummingbirds in Costa Rica we confirmed that the White-tipped Sicklebill (Eutoxeres aquila) feeds mostly on Centropogon granulosus, a match made by coevolution.

Chase Mendenhall is Assistant Curator of Birds, Ecology, and Conservation at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.