Natural History

 Last week's Adventurers was again Natural History.  We did the mammal hall, human origins, and the ocean hall.

What's not to like about glowing jars of weird stuff in a dimly lit corner?




And here is Choclo doing his best penguin impression!




And here is everyone's second favorite giant squid (the really big one is in a very long horizontal case).

But the real surprise was the birds!  I've been to this museum probably a dozen times in the last 5 years, but I hadn't seen the birds.

Oob loves birds, and was disappointed in the lack of feathers in Mammal Hall, so I told him we would find the birds. I had a vague idea they were on the bottom floor.

We discovered two things.

 One, the birds are tucked away in two dead end hallways in the basement.

Two, they are not "birds of the world" the way Mammal Hall is "mammals of the world."

They were something much better!  They were samples of every single bird found in this area in the last 150 years!

As a novice bird watcher, it was fantastic!  I have a fancy searchable bird app with pictures and songs, but there is truly nothing like seeing all the sparrows in the area next to each other, holding still.  Seeing them together, it's quite obvious that the song sparrow is the one with the gray cap and the house sparrow has just a gray stripe.

There were glass cases for song birds, another for owls, another for ducks, for eagles and vultures, for heron like birds... all with tags explaining where and when they might be seen.  It was a beginning birders paradise!