London Museums

A jar of moles

 
Last weekend R and I went on an action packed weekend to London. On our last visit we were unable to visit the Grant Museum of Zoology and I completely forgot about the Natural History Museum at Tring, so that's where we spent some of our time on this trip!

The Grant Museum of Zoology was founded in 1828 by Robert Edmond Grant, the first professor of zoology and comparative anatomy in England. He was from Edinburgh and is credited with establishing that sponges were animals and giving them the name Porifera. The collection contains around 67,000 specimens of taxidermy, wet preservations and skeletons packed into glorious wood and glass cabinets upon cabinets. It was once, and still is, used as a teaching collection - a haven of education and inspiration for the likes of me!

Beautiful glass nudibranch (sea slug) models made by the Blaschka family in the late 1800s

How often do you see fin whale foetuses?

Surrounded by slides!

Relatives and ancestors looking down

There are also a few examples of extinct species in the museum such as the Quagga skeleton (member of the zebra family), Dodo bones, Thylacine (Tasmanian wolf) and a giant deer skull with huge antlers.

We also spent a couple of hours at NHM Tring, the collection by Lionel Walter Rothschild (who has lent his name to hundreds of species!) opened to the public in 1892. The galleries are impressive large glass case displays providing corridors around a central atrium. Some have old wooden entomology cabinets, opening the wooden doors carefully to find out what beautiful inverts are lurking underneath!

Giant ground sloth skeleton

A variety of longhorn beetles

Saiga - a type of antelope

Mexican hairy dwarf porcupine

There is a an impressive taxidermy collection of domestic dogs

Including this tiny dude

I ran

Lady Isle from the boat

Today I joined Nina (who is doing her PhD on sea bird ecology) as a volunteer on a trip to Lady Isle, a small island with breeding colonies of herring gull and shag in the Firth of Clyde. Up and ready at 7.30am a glorious day awaited us via a smooth boat trip and quick outboard to the shore. I was posted on 3-hour Nest-Watch with Maureen (a masters student studying tagging related to stress). I had a comfy camping chair with self-contained hide that pulled over the top, and set to work trying to identify nests on the rocky shore. It's harder than it seems as the grey speckled chicks blend into the rocks and often disappear behind them! During the watch I logged the number of adults at chicks at each nest at the beginning and then at 5 minute intervals how many adults were present and any provisioning (feeding) or disturbance events. It's very tricky trying to work out which chicks belong to what parents but I used my best judgement so hopefully the data will be useful.

Spot the chick!

 I did see a few provisioning events but working out what kind of food was being offered is another matter altogether - orange stuff could have been crab. Mmm crab :P

Making our way the relatively short distance between the lighthouse and the shore was complicated by there being hidden gulls nests in the long grass, forcing us to pick our way slowly through. On the way there were a fair few dead chicks, the coastal survival rate is less than that of urban gulls, generally about 0.82 (data from Skomer in South Wales).

The view from the hide

:(

 

Shag Pile

There are also Shags breeding on Lady Isle but this time we didn't collect any data for them, only listen to their throaty calls. After a quick lunch we spent some time searching for gulls that were ringed last year. I had photographed a couple on my watch but we found about 3 more in the afternoon. Some of them have GPS loggers attached to them to track where they are foraging for food. I think there have been some problems with with the antennae picking up the data and possible with the scapular feathers covering the solar panel that is used to charge the device. Lessons learned!

Ringed Herring Gull

Taking measurements

While I was watching the nests Dave and Nina were catching, measuring, weighing and ringing 25 chicks! I got to get my grabby hands on one as well :)

Gull chick freshly tagged!

Ullo!

There's not much love for gulls generally but when you spend some time observing them they can be quite charismatic.

 The noise and the smell of the gulls is literally intoxicating, but you do get used to it fairly quickly. I was surprised I wasn't covered in shit by the end of the day with the amount that was getting sprayed around, guess I'm lucky this time. I did have shower when I got home though :)

Tripping over nests!

Oor wee boat

The lightouse and warden's hut

I'm keeping my ears open for the next seabird opportunity, maybe I'll get to catch some chicks!

Glasgow Museum Resource Centre

Today was a pretty exciting day. R and I went on a tour of the Glasgow Museum Resource Centre in Nitshill.

  

Because Glasgow City Council has around 1.4 million objects, they can't all be displayed all the time, in fact only 2% of the collection is on show so this is where the rest live! There are 17 purpose built 'pods' split into categories such as Archaeology, Art and Painting, Arms and Armour, Natural History, Transport and Technology and World Cultures.

It's open to public viewing as long as you book a tour in advance, you can also specify what you are interested in seeing and they'll accommodate you as best they can. Of course when I booked the tour I might have mentioned my love of taxidermy...

The first pod was Art & Painting, and let me tell you, it was almost akin to walking into the storage room at the end of Indiana Jones Raider of the Lost Ark:

Hundreds of original paintings and prints are contained within the racks, and we were party to a Lowry, Warhol, Degas and Cezanne as well as some others I forget before being led through a maze of grey corridors and an seemingly unnecessary amount of doors to the next pod. On the way we could see into rooms where the conservation of art works was taking place. We also visited the World Cultures pod which was crammed full of curious and beautiful objects from far flung places, including a huge intricately carved elephant tusk with gilt silver end.

When we stepped through the next door I could barely contain my squee...

So much taxidermy! I mean wall-to-wall stuffage, I was like a kid in a sweet shop (of the skins of dead animals). As well as the mountains of whole taxidermy there was also a collection of illegal/restricted goods seized at Glasgow Airport customs such as ivory and marine turtle shells. 

It was interesting to find out that the curator uses plaster cast moulding of the carcass along with fibreglass and woodchips to sculpt the forms. Here's a half-n-half example:

Owls!

Pheasants! (and a great bustard on the bottom left)

Gulls

Baby Giraffe

Very old cheetah

Need a rabbit, hare or badger?

Wombat and cat with kitten

There's also some mighty fine crappy taxidermy examples

Tapir

Handsome Walrus

Lifelike dog

Lynx with with odd and even toed ungulates!

We're definitely going back to look more closely and see some of the pods we missed :D

If you'd like to book a tour check out the website

Trilobites and Treerats

Eep, no posts since October last year - well I've mostly been concentrating on university and also haven't really been out in the wilds a whole lot over winter. We did manage a few walks to Mugdock Country park, Killiecrankie and Callender as well as a fruitful trip to Trearne Quarry in Ayrshire where we came back with a few quality brachiopod and coral fossils!

 

Our Carboniferous haul mostly included Productids, rugose corals and tabulate corals, and we also got some photos of bryozoan mats and possible echinoderm spines.

I also finally got around to doing some taxidermy on a female grey squirrel I picked up off the side of the road last year (don't panic, its been in freezer!). I actually started it a couple of months ago, it took me most of the day just to skin it, and then I got it back out again the other day to finish. It really shouldn't be taking two days to taxidermy a squirrel >.<

 

I've only used a pre-made foam body form once in my work so far (on Douglas the stoat), I much prefer the woodwool wrapping method, that way you can hold the form up to the actual carcass and get a much better feel for the measurements and ability to change things before it's too late. It also gives you freedom over the final pose, you can muck about and tweak it several times before you leave it to dry. ...And it's a pretty traditional old school method, I've seen some commercial taxidermists slag it off and argue that it takes too long and isn't economical, but I don't think it makes any difference time wise on small mammals or birds to be honest. I was originally going to mount it on a piece of wood but we're running out of shelfspace so for a change I've left it free standing.
Some people were wondering about the pins liberally stuck into poor Nutkin, thinking it was some weird voodoo acupuncture thing - they're there to keep the eyelids, mouth, ears and toes in place while the skin dries over the course of a week or so. As the skin dries it tightens a bit and so things that aren't stuck down tend to move around!

It's not perfect, one of the eyes is more pushed in than the other but you only really notice when you look head on. The chest is a bit too far forward and there are a few small annoying bald patches which im asssuming are a result of it being it by a car rather than the fur slipping during skinning (as I didn't see any clumps come out when i was doing it!). Overall I'm quite pleased with how she's been drying.

Next on the list is a half-finished stoat (yes another one) which I'm planning to mount on a piece of wood with a vole in it's mouth :)