Greetings All

Assuming any of you actually care....

I just want to make my opinion clear on this.

Museum collections, especially ones like the Field Museum of Natural History, the UW Burke Museum, and even the smaller but excellent UPS Slater Museum are fabulous resources.

They are great for studying ID.
They are great for studying molt.
Every once in a while, one will find a specimen of a vagrant that was previously unknown to the world at large.
They are good for discerning the range of races not often looked at by birders.

They are not perfect. But what is?
Most of the erroneously labelled specimens I've found were quite old. As the manager of one collection said after I'd found a Laz Bunt labelled as a Varied Bunt in their collection -- "It has been a long time since someone critically has gone through that tray." The bird had been collected in the 1920s in Mexico, if I remember correctly. Anyway, though I've found several such erroneously labelled, most were collected a long time ago, and they represent a tiny fraction of total birds looked at.

Cheers
Steven Mlodinow
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