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An Interview with the Next Generation

Last week we covered the history of Charles Jamrach: a Victorian animal trader who, though his methods would be considered questionable today, was nevertheless the source of many museum and zoo specimens in his day.

Today I’d like to talk about the future – specifically the fresh lay-enthusiasts who could one day be museum professionals. At the RSPB Conference last week, Nick Clegg said that “Many young people now know more about playing Angry Birds on their phone than they do about spotting real birds when they’re outside”. That may well be true but there is hope for the next generation, with lots of up and coming young naturalists.

I caught up with two of them to ask them about their passion for natural history: Melanie and Sam.

Sam's mounted swallow

Sam’s mounted swallow

1. What first got you interested in natural history collection?

Melanie:

“The thing that first really got me interested in natural history collecting was seeing Ben Garrod‘s series Secrets of Bones on tv. I was still a little bit freaked out by bones and skulls before seeing this series. This made me see bones as interesting. I have always had a massive love for animals and wildlife, so this helps me to see them from a new angle.”

Sam:

“Well when ever i see an animal i wonder how i can learn more about it, sure you can look online and in books but nothings works as well as … Looking at whats behind its beauty skills and adaptation, the bones and the feathers.”

2. How big is your collection today?

Melanie:

“My collection total stands at 70, but I am continuing to find new specimens constantly. This includes: Great Bustard, buzzard, owls, polecat, mink, African striped weasel and African pygmy hedgehog.”

Sam:

“My collection at the moment consists of 45-47 skulls, 1-5 hundred feathers and all sorts. It’s still growing.”

3. What is the specimen that you are most pleased with and why?

Melanie:

“I don’t really have a single specimen to answer this question. But I have a collection of 4 owls inside (2x tawny, 1x barn, and 1x Eurasian scops) and they are by far my favourites. I also have a third tawny owl rotting at the moment. Owl skulls are especially interesting to me as I love owls when they are alive!”

Sam

“My favourite and most amazing cleaned specimen is my swallow skeleton. I’m incredibly pleased with it as i articulated it myself and the skull is very interesting in the way it is shaped.”

4. What are the top 3 on your wish list?

Melanie:

“The top three specimens on my wish list are all owls: a snowy, great grey, and an eagle owl; but any skulls are always welcome in my collection.”

Sam

“My top 3 specimens on my most wanted list would be a puffin, a green woodpecker, and a seal.”

5. What has been the best advice that you have been given so far?

Melanie:

“The best advice I have been given so far was from Jake McGowan Lowe, he has helped me loads with my collection, from a good way of documenting it, cleaning advice, identifying and even the legal side of things!”

Sam

“I think the best advice anyone has ever given me is to simply just ignore when people say that it’s morbid to collect dead animals”

Melanie's owl skulls.

Melanie’s owl skulls.

6. How do you document your specimens?

Melanie:

“I document my specimens by giving each of them a tag with their name, English specie name, date they came into my collection, ID number and who found it. Each specimen then has half of a A4 sheet of paper with all of its details on it. Occasionally if its a rare skull it has a full A4 page of information linked to it by its ID number.”

Sam

“I keep a record of all my skulls hand written in my notebook and digitally on a record list and a picture profile.”

7. Has a student or scientist wanted to study one of your specimens as part of their research?

Melanie:

“No-one has yet wanted to study one of my specimens for research. I wouldn’t mind them coming and handling my specimens at all and would find it a complement if they wanted to know more about something in my collection. I would be careful about who takes them though: they are my pride and joy after all!”

Sam

“If someone wanted to study one of my specimens i would be happy for them to study them and not only that but i would be honoured.”

8. Do you see this as a hobby or would you like to get a natural history-related job someday?

Melanie:

“I see it as a hobby but I also would love to become a zoologist or osteologist one day! So being able to have a collection of my own specimens is really useful and I really love doing it!”

Sam

“when im older i would like a natural history related job and this is not just a hobby its my way of learning more about nature.”

9. If someone were to question whether your specimens were collected ethically, what steps are you taking to demonstrate that they are?

Melanie:

“The measures I take to prove that my specimens were ethically acquired are: take photos if I can of any injures to prove that it was not shot; write down where it was found/who I bought it from, and where it came from. I keep documents linked to all my specimens with all of this info on it, and also try to acquire only car killed or naturally found specimens. I have one grey squirrel that was shot, and have kept the bullet with it and taken notes about it. Its really important to keep all of this written down and have it to hand so that if I needed to I could prove how it died. I also do lots of research into whether or not I need any licences to be able to keep that particular skull.”

Sam:

“Well I take photos of where they are found and keep them a folder that shows where it was found sometimes who was there and proof of the death from the bones.”

So you can see there’s a lot of enthusiasm for the subject material, which should always be encouraged. The idea As long as amateur collectors are informed and guided by the subject specialists towards conscientious and ethical collecting this can only be a positive thing. If you would like to learn more about these young collectors and their collections, they are very active on Twitter and Sam’s collection has it’s own blog at Nature Based.

Charles Jamrach: Exotic Animal Collector

Charles-Jamrach-Shop

The week before last saw historian Elle Larsson speaking at PubSci. The talk centred around the exotic animal trade and, in particular, the life of Charles Jamrach: a trader of animal specimens – both living and dead.

Charles’ father was an entrepreneur from Hamburg who noticed that sailors were bringing back exotic animals in the hull of their ships and selling them. There was such huge interest in these peculiar beasts that sailors were able to retire from the profits. Jamrach Senior wanted a cut of the action. It soon became apparent that London was the hub of the exotic animal trade and Charles moved to London in 1840 to set up his business after the death of his father.

Charles began forming a network of contacts and runners between Liverpool, Marseilles, and Bordeaux. He was soon able to boast that he could get ‘any animal except a Koala’. The relationship between Koalas and gum trees had not been fully realised at this point and three unsuccessful attempts to secure one had resulted in failure. Jamrach was forced to concede this one shortcoming. Jamrach was buying between a shilling and five pounds, depending on the specimen. With the middle men involved it was no longer possible for a sailor to make his fortune selling exotic animals as the profit was split among too many people. Even Jamrach sometimes had to take a lower asking price for one of his animals than he had originally paid for it: He was certainly not guaranteed a better price later and the cost of keeping the animal in sellable condition was not cheap.

He sold living specimens to zoos and private collectors, dead specimens to museums. Whatever these groups turned down, the taxidermists picked up. In late Victorian London there was a fashion for furniture made from animal parts. People would choose an animal (often still alive) that they wanted turned into cutlery, a chair, or piano and the poor beast would be sent to the taxidermist for production. It is hard to imagine such a situation today, though the culinary world still has a “choose live product” remnant of these bygone days.

There’s one area in which Charles Jamrach reminds me of Archcancellor Ridcully, from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld – in the sense that they both did their bit for endangered species… by keeping them that way: in 1851 Jamrach acquired a quagga for the Zoological gardens. In 1883 the quagga was declared extinct in the wild.

The interest in unusual wildlife had a political motive in many cases: a zoo of the British Empire showcasing species from elsewhere was not just introducing the public to animals they had never heard of, it was showing the dominion that man had over the animal and the empire had over the animals’ home land. On one occasion a bengal tiger managed to back out of a poorly made transport crate and run off down the road – grabbing hold of a young boy. Jamrach managed to subdue the tiger with his truncheon but the boy’s parents still, understandably, sued. Jamrach was now famous: not only was he bringing back animals that represented empiric might, he now personally symbolised Britain beating down the tiger, symbol of rebellion against it.

Not everyone was a fan of Jamrach: awareness of animal welfare was in its infancy but this was the generation that saw it develop – the RSPCA was formed during the late Victorian era during Jamrach’s lifetime and he received a good deal of complaints abou the way his animals were treated. Complaints about Jamrach centred around the cramped transport conditions, stressed overcrowding of predators near their prey, and the malnourished states they reached London in. This was a time when the accepted wisdom for “reforming” a vicious and malnourished crocodile was to tie it down and force feed it. It is unclear whether Jamrach participated in this but he escaped criticism by dying in 1891 – the year that the practice was challenged. He left a vast sum of £7108 inheritance to his son: the equivalent of half a million pounds in today’s money.

To learn more about Elle Larsson’s research, visit the animal history museum – an online exhibition about the trade.

Should museums charge for enquiries?

janfreedman's avatarFromShanklin

As a museum curator I get a huge variety of enquiries from members of the public. My most popular is the ‘meteorite’ enquiry; in 7 years, I have only ever seen one real meteorite. (99% of the time the‘meteorite’ is unquestionably waste from smelt works, wonderfully called ‘slag’.) The most interesting enquiry I’ve had so far was a leopard tooth, subsequently donated to the museum and is currently undergoing some pretty awesome research. I have had plenty of funny enquiries, including a person who saw faces in her ‘crystals’ (there were no faces, nor were there crystals, just pebbles picked up from the road). The funniest has to be an email sent into me for a bird identification: no photo, just a wonderful description of the bird; “It had black feathers. As it flew, it made a ka ka karr kar noise. It never flew higher than 4 metres above the…

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Uses of Natural History Collections – NatSCA2014 Meeting

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Day three of SPNHC2014 kicked off with the NatSCA conference! Clare Brown introduced the session with a brief account of the importance of NatSCA. Many non-specialist museums do not have access to staff with an understanding of science, and so NatSCA can provide support to these institutions as well as demonstrate the importance of advocating collections and the many different uses that can be made of them.

The NatSCA conference continued with a series of (strictly!) five minute presentations.

Henry McGhie, of the Manchester Museum, discussed how natural history collections are under-appreciated and underused, and how an informal partnership of museums in the North West has formed in order to aid advocacy.

Rob Huxley, Natural History Museum, London, showed that museums could be used much more by a range people, such as molecular biochemists, vets, geneticists or medical practitioners. We need to think of strategies for reaching out to many more people that could make use of the collections.

David Schnidel from the NMNH Smithsonian Institution suggested we focus on what others might want from the collections, and the new uses that could be discovered for data. Scientific collections could hold answers for research in a range of fields such as the food shortage crisis, disease research and climate change. In addition to scientific research, collections could be used for inspiration for artists, fashion designers, or even architects. With millions of objects across the UK, the opportunities for expanding the usage of our collections could be endless!

Glenn Roadley, Natural Science Curatorial Trainee

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An Audience with Lyuba – the Mammoths come to London

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What better way to spend a gloriously sunny day than to wander around a museum exhibition indoors? Doesn’t sound ideal? How about if I rephrase it: what better way to spend any day, regardless of the fickle favours of weather, than to stand in the presence of a 40 000 year-old baby mammoth! Considering she died at the tender age of one month, Lyuba has had a very eventful ‘life’: discovered by a reindeer herder; sold to a nearby shop; worried by local dogs; and now she’s travelled thousands of miles to be the centrepiece of the Natural History Museum‘s latest temporary exhibition: Mammoths – Ice Age Giants.

Taking photographs of Lyuba was prohibited, so you will have to see her. Fortunately the rest of the exhibition was a photography free-for-all. There were some lovely members of the elephant’s ancestry present, including my favourite: the shovel-faced gomphothere Platybelodon. Flora and fauna that shared their world with the mammoth also made an appearance, including a staggering reconstruction of a rearing cave bear. It is easy to see why Neandertal culture was so obsessed with them.

The whole exhibition is well worth seeing. You can tell people how big mammoths are but, until you stand under their tusks it is hard to conceptualise. The real reason to go is of course to see Lyuba. Lyuba has told us so much already: the gestation period of mammoths (22 months, similar to a modern elephant); that mammoth mothers probably fed faeces to their young, just as modern elephants do, to aid in the cultivation of digestion-assisting bacteria in the gut; that mammoths have brown fat at the back of the neck…

The Americans were not so lucky and had to make do with a model of her. The guys on the door speculated that she came here because the museum sent a specimen on loan to Russia in return – the moon rock perhaps. Whatever the circumstance, we are lucky to have her. For some of us this may be the only chance we get to see her: to gaze upon the underside of her trunk and observe just how… Elephant-like her trunk wrinkles are; to see the little tufts of hair surviving in her inner ear.

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