Ornithology

Dr Jacqueline Nguyen: Museum collections are a place of biological discovery. They record what, when, where, and how a bird species has lived. Museum collections provide the fundamental information about bird species' names, classifications, and how different species are related to each other. But they also allow us to ask all sorts of questions about the biology of birds, and every specimen in our collection tells its own story.

We're here in one of the collection rooms in Ornithology at the Australian Museum. My name is Dr Jacqueline Nguyen. I'm a Scientific Officer in Ornithology at the Australian Museum.
Birds are one of the largest groups of vertebrates, so animals with backbones. There are over 10,000 species of living birds today. The most important specimens in the bird collection are type specimens. Type specimens are the official name bearers and physical definitions of a species. They are a permanent representative of a species that scientists will use to clarify the identity of an unknown or potentially new species, or to better understand species definitions.

One of the ways in which the Australian Museum bird collection is used is for scientific research. For example, I use the bird collection to understand how bird diversity has changed over time and across Australia. I use a combination of fossils, anatomy, and DNA to understand how birds have evolved, how fossil and modern birds are related to each other, to better understand the bird tree of life and the timing of the evolution of birds, as well as to identify new species of fossil birds, and more broadly, to understand how birds and their environments have changed over time.

Birds come in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and colours, but they all have the same basic body plan. A beak with no teeth, a long neck, two wings, two strong legs, a short tail, and feathers. Because of all these features, we know a bird when we see one today.

Birds have evolved their form to adapt to a wide range of habitats and diets. For example, birds have a diversity of beak shapes and sizes to suit different types of food. Some birds, like penguins, have adapted their wings into flippers so they can swim underwater. Other birds, like emus and cassowaries, have become flightless, so their wings are very reduced relative to their body size. Birds are found on every continent, including Antarctica, in almost every habitat on land, as well as in the sky and in water. Because birds are so excellent at adapting, they've become one of the most successful animals on Earth today.

Birds have been around for a very, very long time, going as far back as about 150 million years ago, which is the age of one of the oldest birds, Archaeopteryx. Archaeopteryx appears in the fossil record nearly 70 million years before Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops.

Emily Cave: My name's Emily Cave, and I've been working here at the Australian Museum in Ornithology since 2020. The Ornithology collection here at the Australian Museum, we have over 100,000 registered specimens. We've got a variety of different types of specimens. So we have mounts, we've got about 50,000 study skins, and that's easier to store them that way, and they're most commonly used for research. About 3,500 skeletons, nests, a massive egg collection of about 20,000 or so eggs. We also keep wet specimens in jars, and we also have feet and wing specimens. We also have a large tissue collection. So we've got about 17,000 or so tissue samples, which are kept in special freezers.

Dr Jacqueline Nguyen: Some of the unusual specimens we have in the bird collection include bird nests built in unusual places; for example, we have a Grey Shrike-thrush nest built in an old boot, a bird nest that was built in part of a horse bridle, and even magpie nests made out of wires.

Specimens of some species have feathers that fluoresce or glow under UV light. When we shine a UV light on it, we can see what birds see and see that their feathers are even more spectacular.

Emily Cave: The Australian Museum collection's really important for conservation because our bird collection is a big library. We need to understand the different species before we can conserve anything. Habitat loss is one of the biggest threats to birds, and a really big example is the Regent Honeyeater, which is now critically endangered because 90% of its habitat has been lost because of clearing of land by humans. And this species used to occur throughout all of Eastern Australia in flocks of hundreds of birds, but sadly now there's just so few remaining that you're lucky to see them. And the museum's got quite a collection of Regent Honeyeaters, and it's a really important example of historical distributions and the impact that humans can have on habitat clearing and loss of species diversity. So a lot of our specimens in the museum are quite old, from late 1800s to early 1900s, and so sometimes if people are studying genetics and you don't have fresh material like frozen tissue or blood samples, you can take genetic material from the historical specimens.

Dr Jacqueline Nguyen: With new techniques like CT scanning and DNA analysis, specimens that have been collected decades ago can still provide new information that is scientifically important, and this is one of the many reasons why our museum collections are really important.
One of the purposes of our collection is for exhibitions, and we've also got another reason to make mounts for education to be used in school programs. One of the more unexpected uses of our collection is artists will come in, so photographers, painters, sculptors, and even animation studios wanting to look at specimens for reference material.
Even though birds are found everywhere, we see them every day, we feel like we know a lot about birds, there's still a lot to learn about them. And the bird collection is an important resource for expanding our knowledge about all different aspects of birds.