Subject: [Tweeters] re: Mounted bird specimens
Date: Dec 16 21:15:40 2005
From: bboek at olympus.net - bboek at olympus.net


The discussion about the need for mounted specimens encourages me to
brag about the specimens currently on display at the Dungeness River
Audubon Center in RR Bridge Park in Sequim. The Center has about 200
full mounts on display, most of them prepared by Claude and Edna Ritze
of Sequim in the last 3 years, making a great teaching collection.

Claude, who turns 91 next May, learned taxidermy at the University of
Michigan in the 1930s and worked as a technician there during the
depression. He calls his specimens "100-year mounts," beautifully
posed and life-like. Edna graciously helps with the skinning and
painting. Claude has a little trouble with the smallest birds, but
everything else is superb. He has a few hunting buddies who provide
him with occasional ducks, but all the other birds died from window and
road kills, or washed up on beaches, or just found dead. He knows all
the tricks of the trade, able to turn what looks like hopelessly
dried-out carcasses destined for the garbage into beautiful mounts.
We're building another wall case to display some new birds that Claude
prepared in the past few months.

These are not your typical old and dusty specimens - they really are
extraordinary, so take a look when you're next in Sequim.

Bob Boekelheide
Sequim


Phil, you're absolutely right. I consider it a tragedy that so many
museums are abandoning exhibits and collections such as these to make
way for exhibits to go along with our modern fast-paced world (in other
words, those that kids can relate to, more like video games). When I
worked at the Burke Museum in the early 70s, they had a fine exhibit of
mounted local birds, and the administrative staff (which were all
cultural rather than natural historians) took down the exhibit to make
way for remodeling and then conveniently never put it back up. It was
apparently one of the more popular exhibits at the time, but one
wonders if museum personnel pay as much attention to that as they do to
the latest trends in exhibitry. Don't get me wrong, I'm entirely
pro-museum, but I've seen these changes and regret the trend toward
fancier and fancier exhibits with fewer actual specimens.

We're losing not only nature but the ability to relate to it, the
latter just because almost all of us live away from it. Those mounted
birds are real, more real in a way than a TV program about bird
behavior, and yet it's getting harder and harder for any of us to have
access to such educational resources.

Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115
206-528-1382

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