Kansas City’s Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology is among the largest science analysis libraries on the earth. The library’s assortment numbers within the thousands and thousands and contains unique works from Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.
For the following a number of months, the library hosts “Chained to the Sky: The Science of Birds, Past & Future,” a free, three-part exhibition that follows the research of birds all through historical past and poses new questions on the way forward for hen populations.
Eric Dorfman, the library’s president and CEO, is comparatively new on the job. Before taking on as president on July 10, Dorfman lived in North Carolina, the place he directed the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and served as a analysis professor at North Carolina State University.
“I do have a I’ve a love of all issues dwelling, however I do have a particular place for cormorants and different giant waterbirds, egrets, ibis, herons and pelicans,” he says. “So once we thought of what exhibition to begin with, birds actually felt like one thing that we may hit the bottom working with.”
Julie Denesha
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KCUR 89.3
Besides that includes objects on mortgage from Chicago’s Field Museum, the library has introduced out many uncommon books from its assortment. Dorfman labored intently with Eric Ward, vice chairman for public applications, to assist select scientific volumes for show.
“One of the highlights of the exhibition is the display of the breadth and depth of the library’s ornithology collection,” Ward says. “Books from the 16th through the 19th century will be on display, including two great works in the 19th century.”
One of those books is a highlight of Victorian natural history. “A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains” was printed in London in 1831. It opens to a hand-colored, lithographic plate of an imperial pheasant by ornithologist John Gould and his spouse, Elizabeth, who was a really proficient artist.
Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology
Another e-book is from 1599, by Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, a prolific collector of pure historical past specimens from birds, mammals, bugs and fish. The first three volumes of his pure historical past encyclopedia had been on birds. In the exhibit, Aldrovandi’s book is opened to a lovely woodcut of a fierce-looking Osprey with a flying fish in its talons.
But the exhibit comes at a time of disaster for birds.
“Those who study birds actively are warning about the dire state of North American birds,” Dorfman says within the press launch in regards to the exhibit, noting that “bird populations on our continent have declined by more than 3 billion in the last 50 years, causing dramatic changes in our natural animal and plant ecosystems.”
Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology
The exhibit additionally exhibits that the affect of people on hen populations has been ongoing. Bird research skins on mortgage from the Field Museum embrace two birds misplaced to extinction: the Carolina parakeet, the ivory-billed woodpeckerand the passenger pigeon. A glass case serves as a kind of mausoleum for the birds.
Dorfman says the parakeet serves a type of image of the exhibition. It was the one parrot native to North America.
“The Carolina parakeet had a behavior of consuming farm crops and so it was not well-loved,” he says. “The different unhappy factor about it’s that they had been fairly tame, and so a farmer would come and shoot a tree filled with parrots. They would fly out after which instantly fly again to the identical tree and look to their fallen comrades and attempt to work out what was fallacious with them. And then the entire flock could be, in that manner, decimated.”
Julie Denesha/Julie Denesha
Dorfman says the museum’s sturdy message of conservation is supposed to assist guests recognize the birds we are able to see in our backyards and do what they’ll to assist.
In addition to the exhibit, the Library’s 14-acre arboretum offers an instance of hen conservation methods in an city setting. More than 20 distinctive hen species could be noticed utilizing the arboretum for feeding and nesting. The library invitations guests to spend time within the arboretum observing native species utilizing the identical strategies pioneered by naturalists like Darwin and Audubon.
“Chained to the Sky: The Science of Birds, Past & Future” opens Nov. 10 and continues via April 26, 2024. The exhibition is free and open Monday–Friday 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and 10 a.m.-2 p.m. the second Saturday of every month on the Linda Hall Library, 5109 Cherry Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64110.
Disclosure: The Linda Hall Library is a monetary supporter of KCUR.
