Days of Yore

You can’t beat birding outside, but an afternoon in the museum is the second-best thing. Today, Tom, an ornithologist and the Collections Manager at the University of Arizona’s bird range, showed us 100-year-old nests of Willow Flycatchers collected along the lower Colorado River, an area from which the species has essentially been extirpated for decades as a result of habitat destruction. There before us was all that was left of the population, messy clumps of ancient vegetation wedged into twigs sawn off early in the last century. It was almost sad, but Tom reminded us that the information preserved in those drawers is absolutely priceless, ranging from distributional data to long-dead nest parasites. And had the nests not been collected in that earlier day, we would know precious little about a bird that is in the process of slipping away.