Week 10: Goodbye Again

I have had another wonderful summer. This week I finished the final edits on my online training website and handed it into my boss. It will hopefully be the first online training used by the education and outreach department at the museum. I also attended a seminar for interns about getting paid internships and jobs within the Smithsonian. I am hoping to be able to come back to the museum for a paid internship next summer.

On my last day I said goodbye to the people, the bugs, and the bones. I also had to turn in badge. I hate giving back my badge. Without the badge I can no longer get into the back hallways or use the staff entrance. More importantly I lose my discount in the museum stores. :-)

I have determined that my ideal career would be in the education and outreach department of the museum and I think that I am on my way to getting there. I am extremely grateful for the opportunities and experiences I have had at Smithsonian this summer.

Week 9: When I’m Not on a Tour

I have written a lot about the tours I take, since I often learn some very interesting things about the museum. But I do actually work here, and thought I might talk about that this week. My day at the museum generally consists of helping with any extra lab or animal prep that needs to be done in the morning, working on my independent project, occasionally helping to pin the chrysalides that come in during the week, and helping with whatever miscellaneous project needs help. On Wednesdays, the lab work includes coming in early and helping change out all of the plants in the Butterfly Pavilion.

I may have mentioned this earlier, but the Smithsonian is not licensed to breed any of the butterflies on display. This means that every plant that leaves the pavilion, and any dead butterflies, must be frozen for 72 hours before being thrown away. So all of the plants that are changed out every week are double bagged and brought on metal carts through a maze of three different freight elevators and down several back hallways to a large walk-in freezer that is stored in an old men’s bathroom (clearly no longer functioning, but the baby blue tile and mirrors remain.) This freezer is in the farthest back and most hidden corner of the museum I have ever found (and I have spent a lot of time exploring this building.)

The fact that the museum is not allowed to breed the butterflies also means that they must receive constant shipments of chrysalides from breeders around the world. Butterflies have an average life span of about two weeks; in order to keep the population in the pavilion going, there are usually at least two boxes of new chrysalides that come in each week. They come wrapped in paper towels with a label. We lay them out and pin each chrysalis to a foam board, which is then displayed so that visitors can watch the butterflies emerge (I am not as good at pinning as one of the other interns, so she tends to get this duty.)

I also spend a fair amount of time at the back of the butterfly pavilion. Because there are many exotic species kept in the pavilion it is very important that no butterflies escape into DC. So everyone who works in the butterfly pavilion takes an hour or two of back door duty, which involves letting visitors out into a vestibule with a mirrored wall and helping them check themselves over for any hitchhiking butterflies. There are a few caught every day that get placed into a box in the vestibule for reintroduction to the pavilion at the end of the day. I had quite a few children look over and very excitedly cry, “Look mommy! That butterfly is in time out!” Occasionally, someone from the education department helps by taking a shift at the back door to free up the Butterfly Pavilion staff (and once even the Director of the museum came down for a shift.) One side effect of this job is that those of us who do it regularly find ourselves obsessively scanning people’s backpacks on the Metro platform, checking for butterflies.

Week 8: Petting a Passenger Pigeon

This week I learned a bit about what the ornithologists at the museum do. On the intern tour, we saw specimens that have been collected by the scientists; specimens that were collected and stuffed by Teddy Roosevelt; and the extinct bird box. This is a small box of extinct North American species that they keep out to show visitors and interns (at the end of the tour I was even allowed to pet the passenger pigeon.) The collection of birds (and really, everything in the museum, for that matter) is used regularly by both museum and visiting researchers. The constant continuing collection of these specimens is crucial. As time goes on, populations of animals in different geographical areas change; museum collections allow researchers to clearly see and document those changes.

But that’s not all that ornithologists at the museum do. They also handle quite a few cases from airports. Museum specialists often receive mangled and virtually unidentifiable bird remains from airports across the country for identification. If there are feathers, researchers start there, using the collection as a reference once they have identified the basic group of birds the remains probably came from. If there are no clear feathers left, they may obtain a DNA profile of the bird and then move into the collection. Once researchers have identified the bird, they can help airports develop strategies to deter specific problem species from the runways.

In one case that the tour guide told us about, the Smithsonian had received a sample from the military without being told anything about where the plane was going or where it had come from, so they had no idea where to even start looking. DNA led them to a species found only in a foreign country.

There was also a remarkable case in mid-December, in which the lab tech in charge of running the DNA kept coming back to ask if they had given her the correct DNA. She was new and very eager to do a good job and had run it several times before she finally came back to the museum researchers and told them that the DNA results showed that the remains were from a deer, bringing up several questions-- quite a few reindeer jokes. The pilot was very clear that he had hit a bird and that there were no deer on the runway when he took off. The case was finally resolved when they ran a different section of the remains for DNA and realized that they belonged to a vulture whose last meal had been deer.