The Club is delighted to organise a series of monthly (September-April) Club-wide online talks for members, in addition to local branch events. Not an SOC member? Find out more about membership and the many perks it offers, including access to the winter talks programme and the Club's quarterly journal Scottish Birds.
Douglas G. D. Russell - Interesting Birds Eggs and Nests: writing a popular book on 250 years of avian architecture
We look forward to what promises to be a fascinating talk by Douglas G. D. Russell, Senior Curator of birds' eggs and nests at the Natural History Museum in London. Douglas's book Interesting Bird Nests and Eggs (published 2024) pulls together examples from the collection and forms the basis of our talk.
About the talk:
Since 1754, the Natural History Museum, UK has been gradually assembling one of the largest and most comprehensive series of ornithology specimens in the world. There are over a million bird specimens in its research collections, including several hundred thousand sets of eggs and nearly 5000 nests. For the last 23 years, Douglas G. D. Russell has been the curator responsible for the museum’s irreplaceable, historical archive of avian architecture. Over two years of work has resulted in a new book featuring 120 species accounts and incredible photography by Jonathon Jackson. Each account showcases a remarkable example of a nest and / or egg selected from 113 different bird families, collected between 1768 and 2020. Using outstanding examples featured in the book, Douglas will discuss how ornithology, ecology, conservation, and history are interwoven into each specimen.
About our speaker:
Douglas G. D. Russell is the Senior Curator responsible for the internationally renowned birds' egg and nest collections at the Natural History Museum (NHM). After studying Biological Sciences at Edinburgh Napier University, he began his curatorial career at the Royal Museum of Scotland (now National Museum of Scotland) preparing bird specimens from the 1996 Sea Empress oil spill - an environmental catastrophe which resulted in the death of thousands of birds including Common and Velvet scoters, Guillemots, Red-breasted mergansers, and Razorbills amongst many others. Curatorial work at both the Natural History Museum and Scarborough Museum followed before taking on a new role leading public engagement in taxonomy and systematics at the NHM. In 2002 he became the curator of the egg and nest collection as part of a team at the Natural History Museum, Tring.
Image: Bokmakierie Telophorus zeylonus nest collected on 13 January 1903 nr. Johannesburg, South Africa © Trustees of the Natural History Museum
