ASM Library

Today’s blog was written by Arizona State Museum’s archivist Amy Rule. She can be found working alongside the rest of the Library and Archives staff in the beautiful second floor reading room at ASM providing preservation and access to over 1500 linear feet of archival and manuscript holdings.

Bird-lovers are heading out to Willcox, Arizona, to watch the majestic Sandhill Cranes stopping off to eat during their migration to northern lands. But a special variety of migrating birds are to be seen right here in the ASM Library.

We have three very special birds visiting us. The Northern Bobwhite, Curve-billed Thrasher, and Clapper Rail were collected by Herbert Brown around the turn of the century. Brown, the first curator at what at that time was the Arizona Territorial Museum, was a passionate amateur ornithologist. His hundreds of specimens were at first displayed in the museum, but after his death in 1913, the collection was moved to the University of Arizona Natural History Museum. Now that museum has loaned ASM three bird specimens as well as a Yellow Warbler’s nest containing five eggs and an Oriole nest with three eggs, all collected by Brown.

Brown’s birds are important for research even today because they represent varieties as they lived over one hundred years ago, before their environment was changed by human activities in the Southwest. Some are endangered today, some actually have become extinct. But Brown carefully preserved them according to the standards of his day. The bird skins were dried and stuffed with cotton wool, the legs were neatly crossed, and wings folded close to the body. Today they are beautiful, silent reminders of the perfection and elegance of the birds of our area.

In April 2013, we will display Brown’s birds in an exhibition to honor the career of Herbert Brown as part of the Museum’s 120^th anniversary celebrations. It will be a challenge to sufficiently honor the many facets of his career in one small exhibition. Truly the epitome of a larger-than-life frontiersman, Brown hauled lumber in the Santa Rita Mountains, was the warden of the Yuma Territorial Prison, editor of the Tucson newspaper, curator of the Territorial Museum, an active Mason, president of the Tucson Audubon Society, and a widely-published naturalist and archaeologist.

His writings and biography tell us a lot about Arizona from the 1880s to 1913, but the birds are not talking.