Okay, but what can we learn from a drawer of birds?

E20. Less than 1% of what's in a museum is actually on display. So what's happening with the other 99%? Scott talks with Dr. Sushma Reddy, Breckenridge Chair of Ornithology at the Bell Museum and Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, about the extraordinary scientific afterlife of a specimen in a drawer.

In this episode:

• How birds collected 150 years ago are answering questions their collectors never imagined, from air pollution to insect decline
• Why falcons turned out to be closer to parrots than hawks, and what other surprises fell out of the bird family tree
• The case for making museum collections more open, especially to scientists from the places these specimens originally came from

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All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Bird media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:

• Bald eagle sound contributed by Gerrit Vyn, ML 200943
• Red-tailed hawk sound contributed by David McCartt, ML 229578
• Gyrfalcon sound contributed by Lucas DeCicco, ML 516973
• Kea sound contributed by William V. Ward, ML 8523
• Small ground finch sound contributed by Robert I. Bowman, ML 86711
• Iiwi sound contributed by Doug Pratt, ML 5888
• Sickle-billed vanga sound contributed by Anonymous, ML 100013