ete Olson gets the inside species' geographic range, wh ich in turn may What does the Museum

y What does the Museum mean to you?

ry from Senior Curator in
rge of Birds at the Natura l
tory Museum at Tring,
Alex Bond.
Natural History Museum at Tring, in
fordshire, is home to the Museum's vast
collections and is the former home of the
ntric collector, Lord Walter Rothschild.
x, a conservation biologist by training,
ks to us about his new position at Tring and
work on plastics ingested by seabirds.
hat do you do at the Museum?
in charge of a team of five curators, helping
em to look after the bird collections. Th ere's a for reseorch7' I reply, 'I haul bottle caps out of
Jot of activity associated with scientists co ming dead birds.' We find dead bird s and pump th eir
to Tring to use the col lection s. Although we loan stomachs to see if we can find contaminants,
fewer specimens than in the past, this has been inevitably find in g giant chunks of pla sti c.
replaced by requ ests for DNA samp les.
Unlike at the Mu seum's main site in South
Kensington - where there ore larger numbers of
people dedicoted solely to exh ibition s - at Tring
my role also involves working closely with the
people looking after the public programme and
exhibitions, as well as brooder site mana gement. who you ask, or what time of day it is.
There are six permanent ga ll eri es showi ng the
Rothschild's co llection, with Gal lery 1 includ in g
every breeding bird in the UK - that's more
than 900 specimens. We also look after the
bird specimens used in exhibitions in South
Kensington, such as the recent Life in the Dari<.
What do you think are the most critical areas
in conservation right now?
All of our conservation issues really come down
to how we interact with the natural world.
Habitat loss is the crux of the problem. Europe
has effectively no native habitat left and in the
tropics there's ongoing conversion of land for
agriculture, which ha s a devastating impact
on biodiversity.
Conservation is all about people and the
decisions they make. So it's trying to find a way
to balance·the welfare of communities with the
conservation of their ecosystems.
What connection is there between collections
and conservation research?
There's a big conn ection, thanks to the historicol Zealand, Chino and the US - we also traced
nature of the collections. We can ask questions
about changes thro ugh tim e, for examp le, to a
point to habitat loss or climate cha nge.
We've loo ked at contam inants in fea thers,
which once grown, ore in ert and ca n give
an in dication of contam inant levels in the
environment. In thi s way, we found that mercury
levels in ivo ry gulls - a high-orcti c seabird -
have gone up 45 times since the 1870s. More
fundamentally , the 'units' of conse rvation ore
species, and what the limits of a species ore, as
defined by its anatomy or genetics, is something
th at requires specimens for comparison - hen ce
mu seu m and university col lectio ns.
Do you t hink conservationists are optimists,
pessimists or realists?
· Conservation scie nce con be very emotio nally
tiring . When I go to Australia each year to
sample birds, peop le ask, 'What do you do
We've been sampling on Lo rd Howe Island,
between Australia and New Zealand, for 16
years and this happens year after year. You can't
he lp but have on emotional reactio n - it's heart-
breaking. But I think conservotionists·include all
of those types, it ju st depends on what subject,
What specific research are you most proud of?
In 2015, I was involved in supervisi ng on
exped iti on to Henderson Island in the Pitcairn
Islands, a UK Overseas Territory in the Sou th
Pacific. It turns out that, in term s of pl astic
pollution, it's the most contaminated remote
island in the wo rl d.
It was estimated that there were 38 mi ll ion
pieces - 18 tonnes - of plastic on this
uninhibited is land , which is 5,000 kilometres
from anywhere else. That work was publish ed
about a year ago and it hos since played a
port in the increa sed awareness of pla stic
po llution. It's been picked up in peer-reviewed
literature, in government documents, and in
world heritage management plan s, so it's
having on impact.
Th e is lands sit in the midd le of the South
Pacific where the gyratory currents
concentrate the plastics. Whi le much of the
rubbish came from places you'd expect given
the position of th e islands -Aus tralia , New
pieces to Spain and the UI(, as well as othe r
ports of Europe.
It's effe ctively on archive of th e natural world.
The colle ctions at Tring also hove on hi storical
va lue. We hove specimens coll ected by Darwin
(the Galapagos finches), Wallace and Fitzroy
(captain of the Beagle), and during Cook's
voyages in the Pacific. The bird coll ections
represent more than 95 per ce nt of the world's
bird diversity
What do you see as the Museum's role
in the future?
To safeguard the collections we hove, while
maintaining the biologica l record. One of the
cha llenges we hove in birds is that most of
our collections ore from the late ninetee nth
and early twentieth centuries. While we hove
great coverage of species diversity , if someone
wonted a time series, we wou ld hove very
little from the lo st 60 years, as we've received
comparatively few specimen s.
On the other hand, there are not many
institutions in the world that in clu de spec imens
from the early 1800s. The re ore also the
associated collections that contrib ute to the arts,
culture and humanities - the history of natural
history - including archives of correspondence,
letters and catalogues that accompany the
specimens. You can learn a heck of a lot about
the people who did the col le.ting just from the
labels on the specimens, including who, where
and how - and there's increasing interest in
that side of things. For example, there's a PhD
student at Tring whose dissertation concerns
Rothschild's collecting methods and not the
specim ens he collected. ·
Fact file
► I started here in 2017.
► Before I joined the Museum I worked for the
RSPB as a conservation scientist.
► I enjoy cycling, tea and maple syrup - from my
native Canada. ·
► My first memory of the Museum was visiting
the collections os a researcher. I come for a
visit to Tring in 2014 to use the collections - to
measure penguin eggs. Fortunately, they have
loads of them .
► My fovourite specimen (so far) is a helmeted
hornbill, Rhinoplax vigil, skull that has been
carved. It's more valuable than ivory and has
the most amazing, intricate carving. It's a
fantastic combination of science and art, as
well as an important cultural object.

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