Ornithology

N A T U R A L H I S T O R Y M U S E U M S A N D R E S E A R C H C E N T E R S


	O R N I T H O L O G Y

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.	Macleay Museum Sydney, Australia .	The Macleay Collections house some 9000 catalogued and documented bird specimens.		.
.	The Provincial Museum of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta, Canada .	The Ornithology Department has a collection of some 30 000 avian artifacts and 8400 slides documenting the birds of the province. The Museum maintains the only public bird collection dealing with the birds of the province, and is the single most important collection of avian material in Alberta.		.
.	Museums of Natural History Copenhagen (Faculty of Science, University of Copenhagen) Denmark	The Ornithological Section which comprises study skins, altogether some 110,000 specimens of some 7,000 species. This collection is arranged in systematic order and with a geographical subdivision within individual species (Denmark, the North Atlantic dependencies Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland, Scandinavia and other geographical areas). The collection contains some notable rarities such as: a dodo (Didus ineptus) skull and considerable subfossil material of dodo and solitaire; two mounted specimens, an egg, soft parts (in spirit) and some skeletal material of great auk (Pinguinus impennis), the only known female of the crested shelduck (Tadorna cristata) and some 30 type specimens. The Copenhagen Bird Ringing Centre is the Bird Ringing Data Collection of the Zoological Museum which comprises data from Denmark as well as the Faroe Islands and Greenland. The Collection consists of ringing data for some 2.5 million birds as well as information on some 150,000 recoveries. The annual number of ringed birds varies between 100,000 and 120,000. While the ringing data are still manually recorded, the main part of the recoveries are stored in a computer database. .		.
.	Albany Museum Grahamstown South Africa .	The Museum houses a comprehensive collection of southern African birds dating back to the 1880's. The study skin collection comprises c. 3845 skins representing 619 different species with raptors well represented. In addition there is a growing number of wet specimens, skeletons, nests and a good audio and visual (photographic slide) collection. A small collection of exotic birds, mainly in the form of mounts, is also maintained and is used for display, education and comparitive purposes. .		.
.	The Academy of Natural Science Philadelphia, PA, USA	The Ornithology Department has a collection of over 163,000 skins, first in the USA to be housed in compactors and entirely recorded on a database. A variety of progressive programs have become integral parts of the department: Birds of North America (BNA) is a series of 720 life histories of the nesting species on this continent. With 200 accounts published by January, 1996, the entire series will be completed early in the next millennium. VIREO (Visual Resources for Ornithology) is the world's largest collection of bird photographs with some 85,000 photographs of 5,832 species of birds -it is available for science, conservation, education, advertising, and publishing purposes. The DNA studies focusing on relationships among species and the process of evolution. The Department's conservation and atlasing efforts in conjunction with the RARE Center for Tropical Conservation, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network, and others are part of the ongoing projects. .		.