Helen FieldsScience Writer

“The dinosaurs!” That’s what my boyfriend, who is British, told me I had to see at the Natural History Museum in London. So the museum and I sort of got off on the wrong foot when I discovered that the dinosaurs were all involved in some special exhibit that required payment. And I was feeling cheap. I was also feeling like a person who did not want to wait in a long line with a lot of excited children.

This may be unreasonable of me, since standing in a long line with a lot of excited children seems like it might be central to the NHM Experience. Now, to be fair, I was at the Natural History Museum during the August school holidays. And I also must point out that this museum, like all the museums I wanted to see in London, has free admission to most of the exhibits. That is pretty great. But I’d already had the line experience once, with about a 20-minute wait to get into the museum in the first place, so I decided to stick to the free parts of the museum.

The Natural History Museum has an astounding, late-19th-century building. It looks like this on the outside:

and like this on the inside:

That is the one and only dinosaur that was free to view. It’s a Diplodocus. Actually a cast of a Diplodocus, donated by Andrew Carnegie, who owned the original. (Read about it here.) The original is at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

My favorite object in the museum was this. Take a look. What do you think it is?

Looks kind of tree-like? Kind of pretty? Colorful? And a little bit spiky? And…like a Victorian chamber of horrors?

Yes, the case contains hundreds of hummingbirds mounted on branches among bits of lichen and nests. The label says they don’t know exactly where it came from, but this was the sort of thing Victorians went in for. It’s a way of thinking about nature where you appreciate it as things of beauty to be brought indoors and admired, not something you leave in its place for other people to enjoy. That’s a modern way of thinking, I suppose, and it’s probably a modern thing to feel sorry for the hummingbirds. I don’t really feel sorry for the hummingbirds as individuals. They would have died a long time ago anyway. But it’s a shame that they died just to be pretty in someone’s house.

I also enjoyed this intersection of earth and human life, from the earth sciences hall:

That’s a chunk of flint on the left and a paleolithic flint hand-axe on the right. This seems so delightfully English to me. Flint forms in chalk – and you know southern England has chalk, right? The white cliffs of Dover? Right. That’s chalk. The Cretaceous period gets its name from that layer of chalk. (The Latin word is “creta.”) And I like that they pair the chunk of flint with a real-life axe made more than 100,000 years ago. I know it’s the stereotype, that Americans go to Europe and are amazed at how old everything is, but, look. Everything there is OLD. It is really different. And totally cool.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

The other day, my boyfriend and I were very amused by the billboards we saw along the road into Pittsburgh. “RAPTORS!” proclaimed one. “PENGUINS!” said another. These billboards were advertising the National Aviary, which happened to be near our hotel, so we dropped by the next morning.

An aviary, if you’re not familiar with the term, is like a zoo for birds. The National Aviary has about 150 species of birds. There was also the occasional mammal – I spotted a mouse in one cage (ok, that was not part of the display) and a sloth in another (pretty sure that was intentional), but otherwise, it’s all birds. A few are in individual cages. The bald eagle and Steller’s sea eagle each gets its own spot, open to the sky. Most are grouped together in larger habitats, like a tropical rainforest and a grassland.

One of our first stops was feeding time at the lorikeet cage. Lorikeets are noisy little parrots that like nectar. At feeding time, you can buy a little cup for $3. Or you can let someone else do it and take pictures of them:

One of my favorite birds was this one, which wanders around the rainforest room. Shortly before I took this picture, it flew up to a branch where a bunch of ibises were making an awful racket, sidled up to them, and made this pose:

It worked – they shut up and flew away. But the most remarkable thing about this bird is that it’s a Victoria crowned pigeon, native to New Guinea. The pigeons most of us know the best are filthy-looking birds that walk around in cities, but really the pigeons and doves make up quite a lovely and diverse group. There are hundreds of species. Many have beautiful colors. This one has crazy head-feathers and is the size of a chicken. It’s not the pigeons’ fault someone domesticated them and let them take over the world’s cities. And I must admit, I like the city ones, too. They’re funny.

The wetlands display included quite a few flamingos:

Fun fact: Flamingos get their color from their diet. In the wild, they eat pink food and extract it that way, but in captivity, they’re normally fed some kind of color supplement.

I found the whole aviary experience delightful. We were there on a weekday, which meant it was overrun with tiny children, which was part of the fun. Near the penguin exhibit, my walking was temporarily impeded by a girl, about three, who was having, really, the only appropriate reaction to this stuff: pulling on her father’s hand, pointing, and screaming, “DADDY! DUCK! DUCK! DUCK!” (You can see the ducks and the penguins on the aviary’s Penguin Cam.)

We particularly enjoyed the bird show “Wings!” It cost $5 extra, and it was so worth it. For about 20 minutes, we learned about birds and habitat conservation and – ok, mostly, birds flew around and it was so cool. The macaws showed off their climbing skills. A whole bunch of vultures flew right over my head, raising quite a wind. There were live people talking, but also a video that introduced the show and each bird’s habitat. Birds flew in either from over a wall or from cages up near the ceiling that were wired to open at certain times.

The show was fun, partly because birds are awesome and it’s impressive to see them up close, and partly because it had a toe firmly over the line that divides tasteful from cheesy. The last bird, a bald eagle, came out to “God Bless the U.S.A.” I think it actually struck a dramatic pose on the line “I’m proud to be an American.” At the end of its segment, it showed off its wings in front of a fireworks display on the screen.

Actually, even better than that was what happened after the show. They brought out a very disheveled-looking parrot with a special skill. This picture is terrible, but I have to share:

Her special skill is accepting dollar bills and putting them in the donation box. Don’t worry, I think the dishevelment is from molting, not disease. (I hope so, anyway.) She looked so pleased with herself. I was able to resist on this visit, but the next time I go, I’m taking a stack of one-dollar bills.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

My former National Geographic colleague Jennifer Holland has a new book. It’s the #9 book on Amazon right now.

The book, Unlikely Friendships: 47 Remarkable Stories from the Animal Kingdom, is about animals that are buddies. There’s a monkey that befriends a kitten, a hippo that follows a tortoise around, a snake that hangs out with a hamster – all sorts of good stuff. Sure, it’s not investigative journalism, but who doesn’t want to read about a monkey that adopts a kitten?

Jenny’s a beautiful writer, and I can’t wait to read the book myself – I just added one more sale to those Amazon stats.

Here’s a nice item about the book in today’s issue of Parade.

The excellent David Grimm at ScienceNOW wins again…by assigning me yet another cool story. This time, it’s about a little kerfuffle in the journal Naturwissenschaften about the body size of the dodo. The dodo, you may recall, was a flightless bird – a relative of the pigeon, I learned last week – that lived on the uninhabited island of Mauritius. One assumes the dodos lived a fulfilling, pigeon-oriented, flightless life on Mauritius for many centuries, until the Dutch came along, discovered their Indian Ocean home, and messed it up. By the end of the 17th century, dodos were gone. I think it was the first time humans were like, “hey, wait, we just made something go extinct.”

I’d always heard that dodos went extinct because they were tasty and were a nice change from Dutch ship food; in other words, that sailors ate them all. Actually, one of my sources told me, it was probably the introduced mammals that did them in. They would’ve competed with pigs for food, and both rats and pigs probably ate their eggs.

Anyway, read the story. I discovered in the course of doing it that someone had already worked out almost two decades ago that the fat pictures of dodos were probably wrong, and I thoroughly enjoyed talking with that guy about his study and the new work. Next time I’m in Edinburgh, his museum is definitely on the list.

art: Dutch School, 17th century

You’ll be glad to know that Wisdom the albatross and her chick survived the tsunami. Whew. Here’s the Fish & Wildlife Service press release. Here she is her feeding her chick two days ago:

Another 110,000 chicks and 2,000 adults died when the tsunami hit the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, but it’s nice that these two survived.

Of course, tsunamis are a thoroughly natural threat for the Laysan albatross. If you’re going to insist on nesting on low-lying Pacific islands, this kind of thing is just going to happen every now and then. The Save the Albatross campaign describes some of the less natural threats, like longlining – a fishing technique where a boat puts out a line of hooks, from one to 50 miles long; the birds try to grab the bait and are hooked and drowned. (You can solve this by weighting the lines.) They’re also prone to eating floating bits of plastic, which isn’t particularly healthy.

UPDATE, later on 3/24: Here’s a super sweet picture of Wisdom and her chick taken on Monday by Jim Gilbert, who dropped by here and left it in the comments of another post.

Photo Credit: Pete Leary/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Just five days after I wrote about that very old Laysan albatross mother, this sad news from Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, where she was raising her chicks: the tsunami swept tens of thousands of chicks into the water. (I don’t know whether Wisdom’s chick was one of them.)

Here’s the story from a blog at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. I also recommend the original blog post by a Fish & Wildlife Service biologist, which includes a lot of pictures of survivors. I like the last one, with a bunch of very wet birds – they’ve just been pulled out of the water – drying their wings in the bottom of a boat.

I love this news item from the U.S. Geological Survey: The Oldest Bird in the Northern Hemisphere Raises a Chick. She’s a Laysan albatross, she’s at least 60 years old, and she’s been sighted with a chick. They know her age, or at least the lower bound for it, because she was first tagged in 1956 and she had a chick then, so she had to be at least five years old. Perhaps she’s buddies with some of the albatrosses I saw in the Bering Sea two years ago?

photo: John Klavitter, USFWS

The last time I was in New Haven, I heard that one must see the Beinecke library on campus at Yale. I didn’t get around to it. So I rectified that situation this week.

It doesn’t look like much from the outside. Well, it looks like something. It looks like a hopeless victim of the ’60s.

See? Hopeless. But the story’s different when you go inside. The entrance is on the ground level. From the outside, in the picture above, the ground level looks like a cave, but there’s actually quite a nice glass-enclosed lobby there.

From the lobby you go up a wide staircase and you’re in this:

All those white panels you saw on the outside of the building are actually 1.3-inch-thick slabs of marble. The light filters through them and gives the whole space this sort of warm, wood-panelled-library feel. On the right you can see part of the central column of stacks – six floors of rare books behind glass. It’s like a zoo for books.

I don’t think banging on the glass is a good idea – it’s also not a good idea in zoos, they say – but I did take some pictures through it. Look, old books:

The library had a temporary exhibit on the effect of psychoanalysis on American writers and thinkers. They also have a few treasures on permanent display. This is a page from John James Audubon’s Birds of America:

The book is so big it’s called the Double Elephant Folio. Something I didn’t know about Audubon: He was born in Saint Domingue – you may know it better as Haiti – and raised mostly in Nantes. He emigrated at the age of 18, hung out in Pennsylvania for a while, migrated to the frontier, and eventually set out to paint every bird in America. Read about him here.

They also have a Gutenberg bible.

Oh, you Ivy League types, you think you’re so hot, with your…Gutenberg Bibles. Ok, yeah, I can’t really dispute the coolness of owning a Gutenberg Bible.

Gratuitous arty shot of exterior:

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How cool is this? A Cooper’s Hawk is hanging around the Main Reading Room at the Library of Congress.

They first spotted it on Thursday and it was still there as of this blog post Friday. Actually, the Thursday blog post is funnier:

Will you be releasing any other wildlife into the Main Reading Room?

Staff are contemplating that, both to keep themselves alert and on their toes, and also to prevent researchers from taking long naps.

Photo: from the LoC blog

I don’t know a ton about birds, but I do know this: Bluebirds like to perch on posts. If you see something cute and feathered perching on a fencepost in an open piece of land, “bluebird” should at least cross your mind. (Blue feathers should make you a little more sure, although you won’t necessarily be able to make them out, depending on the angle you’re looking at and the bird’s sex.) A few weeks ago I stopped at Manassas National Battlefield on the way back from Richmond and was delighted to see a ton of Eastern bluebirds, many of them on fenceposts.

See that thing on the post near the bottom of the picture? That’s a bluebird. It’s on a fence around a monument commemorating the first battle of Bull Run.

Then a little bit later we were walking down a path and alarmed a bluebird that had just been sitting on a sign – and I was amused by this graphic proof that, indeed, birds hang out here a lot.

I wonder if park employees have to go around scrubbing the signs all the time?

Cool story I just learned from the USGS: In the mid-1800s, as settlers pushed westward and cut down all the trees, Eastern bluebirds proliferated. Clearing out old-growth forests and producing nice open fields and orchards suited them just fine. Also, they liked that farmers fenced their fields with wooden fenceposts.

photos: me