Milwaukee Public Museum

by Nathan Kraukunas

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is reprinted without illustrations from LORE magazine (vol. 43, no. 1, (March, 1993), p. 7-9), a benefit of museum membership. ©1996 Milwaukee Public Museum, Inc.

In 1983, the museum's former director Dr. Kenneth Starr called me into his office and asked me to locate a specimen of an American Robin, which may be in the Bird Collection of the Vertebrate Zoology Section. He had just returned from a Muses luncheon and had a conversation with one of the ladies at the luncheon, Miss Emma Pagel. Miss Pagel told Dr. Starr that as a young girl of 11, she had found a dead robin on her way home from school. She carried the bird home cradled in her arms to show her mother, who instructed Emma to bury the 'poor' bird under the chestnut tree in their backyard. After Emma had dug the hole, she refused cover the beautiful bird with the dirt and ran up to her father's dresser and got one of his big white linen handkerchiefs and wrapped the bird in it. Without telling her mother, she walked the five or six blocks from her home to the Milwaukee Public Museum. At the Museum, Emma was taken into the office of Henry L. Ward the Museum's current director, she presented the robin to Mr. Ward and said that she had just found him. He took the bird and very kindly thanked Emma for bringing it to the Museum. That was in 1905 and the robin's destiny was set. It's carcass was made into a study skin and a label was attached to its legs indicating when the robin had died, where it was found and from whom it was received. Over the next 78 years, many events took place in the world and in Milwaukee - two World Wars, the Great Depression, the U.S. had 15 different Presidents, Milwaukee became an industrial center and the Milwaukee Public Museum out grew its 1898 building and moved across Wells Street to its present building in 1962. Throughout this time Emma's robin stayed in a draw with other robin skins in the Museum's Bird Collection.

Now on a May afternoon in 1983, 89 year old Emma returned to the Museum to find out what Mr. Ward did with her 'poor' robin. A half hour after Dr. Starr's request, I had a computer printout of the Bird Collections holdings of A.O.U. number 700 - American Robins, and it included Emma's bird. I found the study skin in our collection, still with its original 1905 leg tag and an updated 1981 tag. At the next Muses luncheon, Dr. Starr presented Emma with her robin and was able to demonstrated to her and the others at the luncheon one of the most important jobs of the Museum. This important job is to curate (or care for) and preserve the objects of the present in this case 1905, for the future (1983). This 1905 specimen with its data has immense value to the scientific community, it has survived many years and has taken on a great new significance.

The thousands of people who visit the Milwaukee Public Museum know it to be one of the best, if not the best, exhibit museum in the United States. It is also considered one of the greatest educational facilities available to children in Wisconsin. But, beyond the popular exhibits of the 'Crow Indian Bison Hunt', the 'Torosaurs' , the 'Streets of Old Milwaukee', or the 'Rain Forest', lie collection upon collection of objects and specimens from Anthropology to Zoology. The Museum is bursting at it's seams with collections and similar to an iceberg, less than 10% of the objects and specimens from the collections are exhibited. All of the unseen objects and specimens are stored in the upper three floors, the ground floor and the basement of the building.

The Zoology Section consists of many collections, with the subsection of Vertebrate Zoology composed of the separate collections of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes. The collection which I curate is the Bird Collection, which holds approximately 25,000 specimens kept as study skins (like Emma's robin), mounts, skeletons, eggs, nests and whole carcasses in alcohol. The majority of specimens are study skins which are housed in light proof and insect proof steel cabinets on the sixth floor, in an area shared with Taxidermy. In this collection there are examples of species which no longer exist in the world from Passenger Pigeons to Carolina Parakeets, these species have been extinct in the wild for many years never to be seen again, except in museums. The genes of these birds have been removed from the biodiversity of the world, lost forever do to man's short sightedness. The oldest specimen in the collection is among these lost species, it is the articulated skeleton of a Great Auk, this penguin-like flightless bird once lived along the northeast coast of Canada and was forced into extinction by man in the 1840's. The Museum obtained its specimen of the Great Auk in the 1880s.

The Bird Collection has been shaped and formed over the last 110 years through many sources. It started with the specimens received among the 20,000 objects of the Wisconsin Natural History Society in 1882, which included the personal specimens of Increase Lapham, who was one of Wisconsin's earliest naturalists of the 1800s. Lapham a geologist and botanist is also credited with starting the U.S. Signal Corps which eventually became the U.S. Weather Bureau. In the late 1800s, the Victorian Period, it was a very common hobby of gentlemen/naturalists to have collections of birds either as skins and mounts or of eggs and nests. Collectors/naturalists traveled all over Wisconsin and North America to obtain bird specimens for their private collections. They also traded and sold specimens with other collectors in the U.S., Europe and especially in Great Britain. The most popular of bird specimens which were traded and sold where eggs. When many of these collectors became bored with their hobby or ran out of space for their collections or they passed away their collections eventually found a home at the growing Natural History Museum. And after the International Bird Treaty was signed between Canada, Mexico and the U.S. in 1912 - the private collecting of migratory birds became illegal and many collectors gave their specimens to Museums. Besides the private collectors, bird specimens were added to the collection by Museum curators and taxidermists. Today we still receive birds from the public as in Emmas case of 1905, other specimens are also obtained from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Fish Wildlife Service, the Milwaukee County Zoo and the Wisconsin Humane Society's Wildlife Animal Rehabilitation Center.

What happens when a bird is received at MPM?

The following data are written on a 3x5 card:

1. Field Collection Number - (00-NK-93, if I collected the specimen)
2. Log Number - (MPM-VZ 93-00, all birds and mammals receive one)
3. Date it was found
4. Where it was found- street address, city, county and state
5. Name and address of the donor

This card is enclosed with the bird in a plastic bag which is put into one of several freezers. Eventually, this bird could become a catalogued specimen, either by being processed into a study skin; or a mount for an exhibit; or it could be skinned and the body put into the dermisted beetle colony, which will clean the meat off of the bones leaving the skeleton to be processed and put into the collection; or it could be injected with formalin to fix its tissues, the formalin is then soaked out of it using water and the specimen is put into ethanol alcohol for long term storage. All of the types of specimens in the collection are used in many different ways. Study skins and eggs are most often used by scientists from throughout the world, who may studying a particular aspect of a species or who may be studying specific types of environmental pollution (ie. DDT or heavy metals). These specimens are also used by artists (especially painters and sculptors) who need to get exact measurements, take specific color notes, and sketch detailed feather shapes and patterns.

The data that accompanies a specimen is as valuable as the specimen. Care is taken to make sure that this data stays with the specimen throughout its life at the Museum. Specimens without data do not become part of the scientific collection and may be used by the Education Section or given on a long term loan to local nature centers. Without the data of where the specimen is from, who collected it, when it was collected and in some cases the detailed measurements taken from the fresh body - the specimen is almost useless to the scientific community. Each bird specimen is given a catalogue number, unique to the specimen, this number corresponds to the Zoology catalogue books, computer entry and leg tag with all of the pertinent data.

Since the Milwaukee Public Museum's founding in 1882, its mandate has been to collect specimens and objects for the purpose of learning what we can from them - Research and of passing that information on to society - in the way of Exhibition and Education. The full value of the specimens in the Bird Collection or of any of the other collections at the Museum or for that matter any other museum in the world will never be known. As long as the collection exist and are preserved, they will serve to help educate future generations.