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Published: November 5, 2012

10 Reasons to Visit the Renovated Ronald and Christina Gidwitz Hall of Birds

John Bates, Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences, Negaunee Integrative Research Center

Many talented people contributed to update the Hall of Birds.  Below are 10 reasons why you should come see the exhibit more than just once.

Many talented people contributed to update the Hall of Birds.  Below are 10 reasons why you should come see the exhibit more than just once.

  1. Doing projects like this remind you of all the work that goes into an exhibit.  In this case, the exhibits staff has been busy on all aspects of getting the walls repainted, the cases refinished, the glass cleaned, the mounts spruced up, the graphics redone, the text corrected, and new digital and visual aspects created.  The result is beautiful and just for that; it is worth a visit.
  2. This collection is truly one of the best such displays of avian diversity in the world.  There are over 1000 mounted specimens on display of over 900 species.  That means that each specimen was collected and then prepared as a taxidermy mount.
  3. Marvel at the great taxidermy. Most of these mounts date to the 1920’s and 1930’s although a number were collected and prepared for the 1893 World’s Fair and a few are new.  The primary taxidermists included Leon Walters, John Mayer, Ashley Hine, Leon Walters, and Leon Pray.  Pray and Walters were teachers and innovators, coming up with new and creative ways (like using cellulose acetate to recreate legs and other bare parts of larger specimens).  Following in the footsteps of Carl Akeley, they worked not only with birds, but also were responsible for many of the mammals, reptiles, and fish mounts that are still on display throughout the museum.
  4. Marvel at what it took to assemble this exhibit. A look at those specimens listed as mounts in the Bird Collection database reveals some impressive statistics about the birds mounts we have, not all of which are on display because there is not room in the current hall, or they are no longer in the kind of shape that warrants display, but they remain valuable scientific specimens. Avian diversity is spread throughout the world, so in order to represent over 900 species with specimens; collectors spanned the globe.  Our mounts come from 68 different countries and these are just the ones we know about for sure.  For a percentage of our early mounts, locality data was not recorded (In the late 1800’s, specimens sometimes were purchased from biological supply companies that did not encourage locality data be collected by their collectors).  For North American birds, we have mounts from 33 states and 7 Canadian provinces.  Think about the amount of time and effort it took for different people to reach all these places and then skillfully collect specimens so that they could be displayed in this exhibit.
  5. Enjoy the atmospheric projections.  As I watched the development of this project all I could do was smile.  As a kid, I can remember quizzing myself on the silhouettes of common birds that were featured on the inside covers of Peterson Field Guides.  How far we have come? these projections help bring movement to the exhibit in a wonderful way. Thanks to the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology for vocal recordings and imagery that used to create the projections.
  6. Play with and learn from the new iPad interactives.  The creation of these interactives was the result of a great collaboration between the bird division and the exhibit department. This is an experiment for the museum and we expect it will have its fits and starts.  But we are excited about what is accessible now, the creative “build a bird” interactives, the maps and the videos. And we are excited about the freedom it should provide us to update and augment information more easily in the future.  The digital age opens doors for this traditional exhibition.
  7. Experience the Passion for Birds video.  This video was created by the Liz Sung and Matrin Baumgaertner of Angle Park and they did an outstanding job.  The video shows a broad diversity of people discussing what they love about birding.  From young to old, professional to recreational, this video illustrates why birding is such a great entry point into the wonders of biological diversity.  I am grateful to all of the great folks who were willing to be interviewed for the project.
  8. Check out the new science on the railings.  Graphics designer David Quednau and his colleagues in Exhibits have done a wondrous job of making the railing throughout the exhibit as inspirational as the mounts.  There is also new information about birds through out.  Learn about how Shannon Hackett’s Avian Tree of Life study has altered how we think many groups of birds are related to one another.  See what geolocators are and how they are providing new insight into the movements of smaller species of birds.
  9. See the Artists’ Corner, which presents a spectacular selection of works by past masters from the collections housed in our library as well as modern work by the talented artists that are associated with the museum today.  Different techniques and different points of view will inspire anyone about the interaction between birds and art.
  10. People frequently ask what my favorite bird(s) in the exhibit are.  I will usually try to get away saying I have a lot of favorites, which is true, but the Fawn-breasted Bowerbirds with a male’s amazing assembly of green objects laid out in front of his bower are on the top of the list.  I have never been to northern Australia or New Guinea where these birds live.  I don’t know for sure that I ever will, but seeing these birds and the bower always remind me of how great it would be to walk through a dry Eucalyptus forest and stumble across such an incredible sight.

I admit it, I’m biased, but I’m convinced that there is so much to see that you will want to come back and see this great exhibit again and again.  And one more thing about the value of this renovation, most of these mounts have been on display for 80 to 100 years.  If you conservatively calculate that 500,000 people per year pass through the Bird Halls, this means that these specimens have been viewed by at least 30 million people through the years.  That is just up to the present, these mounts are so well done and have been maintained so well through the years (I challenge you to find the cracks that were recently repaired in one of the Ostrich’s legs by Dan Breems of the Exhibits team) that this number will just continue to rise with our improvements.  Now remember that a majority of these visitors may never get to Arizona and Alaska much less Africa, Asia, South America or Australia and you realize that even in the age of television these displays offer incredible insight into birds of the world.  Seeing a mounted Greater Roadrunner may spur someone to go to Arizona to see a live one when they had not considered it before.  For those who are fortunate enough to have traveled, the exhibits offer opportunities to learn more about species they may or may not have seen from around the world.  The inspiration these mounts have provided to those interested in birds in general or in ornithology is impossible to calculate, but to me, the birds of this world have and will continue to benefit from these collections which so many have worked so hard and so well through the years to bring to the public.


John Bates
Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences

Contact Information

The tropics harbor the highest species diversity on the planet.  I am most intrigued by evolution at the tips of the tree of life.  My students and I study genetic structure in tropical birds and other organisms to address how this diversity evolved and how it continues to evolve as climates change and humans continue to alter landscapes.

We study comparative genetic structure and evolution primarily in the Afrotropics, the Neotropics, and the Asian tropics.  I am an ornithologist, but students working with me and my wife Shannon Hackett and other museum curators also have studied amphibians and small mammals (bats and rodents) and more recently internal, external and blood parasites (e.g., Lutz et al. 2015, Block et al. 2015, Patitucci et al. 2016).  Research in the our lab has involved gathering and interpreting genetic data in both phylogeographic and phylogenetic frameworks. Phylogenetic work on Neotropical birds has focused on rates of diversification and comparative biogeography (Tello and Bates 2007, Pantané et al 2009, Patel et al. 2011, Lutz et al. 2013, Dantas et al. 2015).  Phylogeographic work has sought to understand comparative patterns of divergence at level of population and species across different biomes (Bates et al 2003, Bates et al. 2004, Bowie et al. 2006, I. Caballero dissertation research, Block et al. 2015, Winger and Bates 2015, Lawson et al. 2015).  We also have used genetic data to better understand evolutionary patterns in relation to climate change across landscapes (e.g., Carnaval and Bates 2007) that include the Albertine Rift (through our MacArthur Grants, e.g., Voelker et al. 2010, Engel et al. 2014), the Eastern Arc Mountains (Lawson dissertation research, Lawson et al. 2015), the Philippines (T. Roberts and S. Weyandt dissertation research) and South America, particularly the Amazon (Savit dissertation research, Savit and Bates 2015, Figueiredo et al. 2013), and we are entering into the genomic realm focusing initially on Andean (Winger et al. 2015) and Amazonian birds (through our NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant). Shane DuBay is doing his dissertation research in the Himalayas on physiological plasticity in Tarsiger Bush Robins.  Nick Crouch, who I co-advise at U. Illinois, Chicago with Roberta Mason-Gamer, is studying specialization in birds from a modern phylogenetic perspective.  We seek to create a broader understanding of diversification in the tropics from a comparative biogeographic framework (Silva and Bates 2002, Kahindo et al, 2007, Bates et al. 2008, Antonelli et al. 2009).  João Capurucho (U. Illinois, Chicago, co-advised with Mary Ashley)  is studying phlylogeography of Amazonian white sand specialist birds and Natalia Piland (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the impact of urbanization on Neotropical birds.  New graduate student Valentina Gomez Bahamon (U. Illinois, Chicago) is also working Boris Igic and me, after doing her Master Degree in her native Colombia on genomics and the evolution of migrating Fork-tailed Flycatchers (Tyrannus savana).  Jacob Cooper (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the diversification of birds in Afromonte forests

Josh Engel and I are working up multi-species phylogeographic studies of birds across the Albertine Rift, based the Bird Division's long term research throughout the region.  We are working up similar data sets for Malawian birds.  Our current NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant on the assembly of the Amazonian biota and our NSF grant to survey birds and their parasites across the southern Amazon are generating genomic data for analysis in collaboration with paleoecologists, climatologists, geologists, and remote sensing experts from the U.S. and Brazil.  These large collaborative projects are providing new perspectives on the history of Amazonia.