"There's a tendency in museums to not be interested in the really common things. They're generally more interested in the rare things," says Calum Ewing, a registrar at the NSMNH. "And with the conservation ethic in the past, the desire on the part of museums was to collect significant records through any means available."

It is that very conservation ethic that led to the shooting of even those birds whose populations were in the throes of decline. "As things became more rare, the tendency was to rush out and get specimens before they were all gone," says Ewing.

Passenger Pigeon

The lamentable story of the now extinct Passenger Pigeon is a case in point. "When Passenger Pigeons were darkening the skies with their numbers, there were very few museums collecting them," he says. "But when it became apparent that they were becoming very rare...there was a great desire on the part of museums to collect specimens to document that this rapidly disappearing species had existed."

In the earlier part of the century, the NSMNH kept a shotgun as part of its field equipment. And as Ewing puts it, it used to be that if you were in the field, and saw something unusual, you shot it. But the birth of environmental consciousness in the 1960s brought with it changes in the way museums collected animals.

"There was a general change in attitude in society, as well as within the museum community, of being more concerned about the protection and conservation of species," says Ewing. "Nowadays the tendency is to go out and shoot it with a camera rather than a shotgun."

This change in attitudes was certainly put to the test recently in Halifax, when a Brown Shrike appeared near a container pier in the Bedford Basin. It was the first record of this Asian species in Canada, and word of its arrival quickly spread. Birders came from all over North America to catch a glimpse of it.

"Nowadays the tendency is to go out and shoot with a camera rather than a shotgun."

"It's actually a good case in point for the way museum attitudes have changed over time. In the 1930s that particular specimen would have been shot and incorporated into a museum collection by now," says Ewing. "But we have records from several experienced birders...and there are probably many photographs of that specimen and as far as we're concerned that's all we really need to be able to say, yes, in 1997 a Brown Shrike turned up in Nova Scotia and here's the proof."

The dramatic change in conservation ethic is largely, sometimes singlehandedly, the reason many species are still around today, having bounced back from dangerously low numbers in the past. And this is undeniably something to celebrate. But sometimes it becomes apparent that the pendulum may have swung a little too far the other way. In the early 1980s, the museum became an infamous media favourite over an unusual frog. Because of its peculiar blue colour, it was bound for the pickling jar for further study. When the media, and consequently the public, caught wind of this, the museum became the unenviable centre of a particular brand of attention.

"We were getting death threats—‘if the frog dies, you die'," says Ewing. "We had people picketing in front of the museum with signs saying ‘save the frog'. It just goes to show how far that conservation ethic has gone."

Mention "blue frog" to anyone who was at the museum during that time, and they will shudder, or at the very least, grow solemn. It was a tough time for an institution whose mandate was to document the natural history of the province through collections of minerals, plants and animals—from the common to the rare, and indeed, the unusual.

"Our collections serve many purposes—in the scientific community there are a wide range of applications, from studying the accumulation of pesticides to using plant collections to determine the presence of mineral deposits as a form of prospecting," says Alex Wilson, Manager of Collections at the NSMNH. "They are also used by the art community, the craft community, for interpretive displays, media presentations, lectures..."

Although it is thus important for museums to maintain collections which are current in their reflection of the natural world, most modern museums have begun to shy away from "active" collection, and now rely a great deal more on what Ewing describes as "passive" methods.

"We tend to collect car kills and window kills and other accidental deaths, and that's a way of still keeping track of what birds are migrating through," he says. "Very often the birds that turn up here are strays after storms, and are often found dead on beaches. Birds occasionally get caught in fishing nets and we'll get these specimens brought in by fishermen because they don't recognize them."

Two deep-freezers in the lab are filled to capacity with birds waiting to be incorporated into the collections—birds of all sizes from hummingbirds to hawks—birds that died completely by accident. And though museums maintain that there is still a need to represent rare and endangered species in the collections, a great deal more emphasis is put on photographs and the observations of skilled birders. Ultimately this means that the museum can no longer custom-tailor its collections, obtaining what it wants, when it wants it. But as some will say, this is but a small price to pay in the name of conservation.

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