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Okay, so growing up, my family and I took a lot of trips to the American Museum of Natural

History.

We would stand there gawking at the dinosaur bones, at the gemstones, at that giant replica

of a big blue whale, if you know you know.

But what I didn't know as a kid is that some of the museum's most staggering stuff is

actually behind closed doors.

Keeping the archives, the museums got 40,000 bird specimens from the Pacific Islands,

collected during the Whitney South Sea expedition in the early 1900s.

And it's one of the longest ornithological expeditions in history.

Can you turn on your camera and get one of those birds that you showed me?

Oh sure, hold on.

This is Paul Sweet.

He's the collection manager in the Ornithology department in the American Museum of Natural

History, which added over Zoom.

Okay, here are a couple of birds collected on the Whitney South Sea expedition.

The Whitney collection is one of the earliest records of avian diversity in the Pacific Islands.

And these birds, by the way, are very dead, like 100 years dead.

Paul holds up an oryall whistler specimen to the camera.

They are essentially a bird that's been had all the internal parts removed and then replaced

usually with a substance like cotton.

And attached to their legs is a paper label containing the specimen data.

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