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.