This time the venue is The Black Heart pub (next to Camden Town station). Doors open at 7pm, show starts at 7.30. I should hopefully be on in the first half. It should be a good night!

*Ahem. That is, we finished the food-related items in one room of the store. As we are moving through the collections thematically, rather than starting in one place and just doing everything, I think it will be a long time before we actually finish finish any one area. However, this still represents significant progress, as we have done the objects relating to food processing (cutlery, strainers, graters, corers, chopsticks, teapots, frying pans, ovens (yes, we have a couple!))… It was very satisfying to be able to put the last ‘Bay Completed’ label up, having started the room working on spoons several months ago!

Next the Food & Feasting team will move on to objects relating to hunting, trapping, and fishing, which should be interesting. We have a LOT of beautiful fish hooks. And arrows. Many arrows. Meanwhile, the team exploring Magic & Religion (which I moved back down to yesterday) is working on objects to do with religious and seasonal festivals – easter eggs, christmas decorations, corn dollies and the like. Yesterday I found an adorable Christmas tree decoration made of silver cardboard in the shape of a mouse wearing a dress! And a Polish dough figure of a farmer surrounded by geese, representing the new summer (which you can see on our Tumblr page). I even had a go at making some salt dough figures a little while ago, inspired by the amazing dough animals we found in the collections. Mine weren’t quite as good as these, but it was fun to try out an old craft. It’s amazing the things you learn working in a museum!

Why female ducks, specifically? Because they are much duller than the showy males, and are often overlooked. They are also sometimes harder to identify due to their drabness, especially from a distance.

The first ducks we saw were pochard. The males have grey bodies and very distinctive bright red heads, while the females are a much more muted grey-brown mottled colour. We also had the privilege to spot teal, goldeneye, goosander, gadwall (at a great distance!), tufted duck, and of course the ubiquitous mallards.

Except that there was something different about some of the mallards at Walthamstow…one of the first birds we saw was very dark brown, with white on its head and breast. This sparked a debate about whether it was a hybrid, or just an odd colour mutation. Later on we also saw another duck with this colouring, as well as one with the normal green head but an unusally dark brown body. I did a little Googling on the subject when I got home (as you do) and it turns out that, while mallards can and do hybridise with a whole range of other duck species, the birds we saw are actually examples of what are often referred to as ‘manky mallards’: the colourful result of wild mallards interbreeding with domestic ducks (which are the same species). This sort of thing seems to go on a lot, and it’s possible to see mallards with all sorts of interesting colouration due to genes introduced from the different breeds of domestics. We speculated that the dark brown ducks with the white bib that we saw were probably females, while the green-headed, brown-bodied bird was clearly a male.

The hybird/colour morph debate continued as we carried on walking and began observing geese. Both greylag and Canada geese can be seen at Walthamstow reservoirs, and there is clearly some interbreeding going on between these two species:

The bird on the left is a standard Canada goose. His friend on the right, however, is brown, with orange legs and an orange-black bill. He has the dark neck of a Canada goose, but clearly owes much of his colouration to a greylag parent.

For comparison, these two chaps are greylags:

But, again, there’s something slightly odd here. The one on the right has some white on the face and a white ring around the eye, which is absent on the normal goose to the left. It’s possible that this is a hybrid greylag x greater white-fronted goose, but then again it could just be an interesting colour morph! Without DNA from the birds it is very hard to tell which is the case.

We also saw other interestingly-coloured geese that were leucistic (reduced pigmentation caused by a recessive allele), including a Canada goose with speckles of white on its head and neck, and another with an entirely white head (but we only saw it from a distance, so it could also have been a hybrid!).

The walk may have begun as a guide to identifying much-ignored female ducks, but the reservoirs’ more unusual feathery residents added some extra interest to the day!

And I’ve been surprised at how interesting it has been…some of the spoons aren’t much to look at, but some of them look like this! We took so many photos of this spoon, and still they don’t quite capture the intricacy of the carving or the glory of the whole object. These two little beauties from India are also some of my favourites. They are made of brass, with scorpion-shaped handles! They are both different as well – one has his legs bent under him so that he stands up, and the other has his tail raised to strike!

When we have time, we’ve been trying to put some of our favourite things on the museum’s new(ish) Tumblr page for all the world to see. It’s been quite popular so far, and it’s been fun to see the reaction to our objects. We’ve seen some wonderful spoons made of animal materials (the ones involving animals are always my favourites!) including antler, horn and bone this week, which are quite stunning. I will try to get some images of them up on Tumblr soon.

I feel like I’ve used the word ‘spoon’ too many times in this post. But I’ve lost the ability to talk about anything else now – I am immersed in a world of spoons (at least until we finish the next couple of shelves and get on to knives…)

I wandered across Peckham Rye Common, amused by all the giant snowmen that were in the process of being erected – and demolished – and into the park, to see how the birds were faring in this chilly weather. Quite well, as it turns out. The usual contingent of mallards, coots, moorhens, tufted ducks and Canada geese were well fed, and had been joined by a large number of black-headed gulls, a stately grey heron, and an opportunistic robin.

While the birds on the pond are being taken care of by kindly locals with bags of grain and bread (although bread is actually not good for most birds), some other birds are clearly struggling…most sources will tell you that you would be very lucky to ever catch sight of a woodcock on the ground, but yesterday morning there was one in my tiny urban scrap of garden! I’m asuming that it came from Peckham Rye Park, as there is a wooded area there, but it must have been hungry to start foraging in a space as open and dangerous as a garden. Luckily for the woodcock, the cat didn’t even notice it was there, and it soon flew off again (EDIT: I’ve been informed by a bird expert that the woodcock may in fact have flown all the way from Russia before landing in my garden!).

I took lots of photos in the park. Here are just a few of them:

At the end of the day I managed to prep the jar and glass backplate for the harbour crabs, so that I had everything ready this morning to crack on with mounting them. Tying them to the backplate was a fairly quick job, but then came the harder task of reattaching the stray claws and legs with glass needles. I first had to decide which crab which limb belonged to, and then exactly where each limb should go. It took quite a long time, but I got there in the end!

There are still a few more limbs missing, but they weren’t in the jar with the specimens so must have been lost long ago. Once in their nice new jar, though, the crabs looked much happier.

Sadly, by the time I’d finished mounting the crabs, and had sealed the jars of my finished specimens, I didn’t have time to finish the lizard. I had the jar prepped, and all ten holes drilled in the backplate, but I didn’t have time to mount it. One of our conservators has offered to finish it for me tomorrow, and I left her with the worst diagram of a lizard ever drawn to show her how I had planned to pose the lizard, which I hope will help her to sew him to the backplate in the right position. He’ll probably end up looking much better than if I’d done it!

Poor little Varanus waits patiently for a new jar

There has been a huge amount to take in this week, as there are so many different processes involved in restoring dried-out specimens, and I’m now quite exchausted. But I am really pleased with the results of my specimens, and I’ve learned a whole host of new skills that I feel confident I could put to good use in the future if someone put a shrivelled specimen in front of me.

If you have wet-preserved specimens in your collection that you don’t know what to do with, or don’t think you can rescue, I’d highly recommend going on Simon’s fluid preservation course – I was amazed at how well all of the specimens we worked on this week came out. They all started as dry, sad-looking husks, and by the end of the week most of them looked ready to go on display!

 Before:

After:
Chameleon, octopus (named Little Chulhu) and sea slug, prepared by Gina

‘Fixing’ specimens involves bathing them in a fixative, in this case formalin (a dilute solution of formaldehyde dissolved in water), which stabilises tissues by binding to amines in protein, making them less soluble and mobile. Most specimens also need to be injected with formalin, to ensure that it penetrates the whole body and the internal organs don’t start to degrade. My crabs did not need injecting, as the formalin could get inside the carapace fairly easily to reach the tissues.

Here you can just about see the glass microscope slides being used to force my still floaty crabs beneath the surface of the formalin to make sure that it penetrates evenly.

While our specimens were busy fixing, we went for our morning’s lectures, which included information on the various jar sealants that have historically been used and which one is likely to come across in a museum collection, mounting pelagic specimens using monofilament wire and glass backing plates, and also information on dealing with fluid-preserved botanical specimens.

Next it was back to the lab, where my frog was finally supple enough to be fixed in formalin, and my crabs were ready for the next stage. Once fixed, specimens are usually then transferred into alcohol, which acts as a preservative and prevents them decaying over time. A solution of 70 – 80% Industrial Methylated Spirits (IMS) is used for this. But with specimens that have dried out completely in their jars (as mine had), they can’t be put straight into 80% IMS, as this would damage them. Instead, they need to be stepped up in gradual stages to 80%, starting with a low alcohol concentration.

But before my critters could go into their alcohol, they had to be treated for the air inside them that was causing them to float. This was done in a dessication chamber attached to a vacuum pump, which pulls the air out of the chamber, and removes air bubbles from the body cavity of the specimen.

Unfortunately, while quite a lot of air did come out of my specimens, they failed to sink totally, even after several treatments in the vacuum. As the frog will be mounted on a glass backing plate anyway, this isn’t too important.

While waiting for my specimens to work their way up the alcohol ladder, I also attempted to make a lid for the frog’s jar by cutting a circular piece of glass from a sheet…after three failed attempts, I resorted to a ready-cut lid! Which is cheating, but I did at least get the principle of how it should work, and why mine went wrong. I also drilled a hole in my shiny new lid, which can be used to top up the alcohol in the finished jar in the future if the level gets too low, without having to go to the hassle of removing the lid (which will be well sealed).

I also started a new project, which is this little chap:

He is a small monitor lizard (of the genus Varanus), and he has clearly been squashed into a jar that was too small for him, as he is rather hunched and his tail curls around quite a lot. His main problem, however, was that the fluid level in his jar was far too low, as you can see above. He was still fairly flexible, so I didn’t need to put him into Decon-90, but instead moved him into a nice, new, (and much larger) jar and doused him in his first batch of IMS.

Tomorrow I will finish moving the frog and the lizards up the alcohols, mount the frog on his backplate, and attempt to re-attach some stray crab legs. Can’t wait!

Day one featured a morning of lectures on the various problems that face fluid preserved specimens, including drying out, lipid contamination, and incomplete fixation. There was a lot of information to take in, and a lot of chemistry involved – I haven’t studied organic chemistry since university so I’m a bit rusty, and I can’t say I took in all of the details of fixative formulae and chemical reactions! But the theory was followed by practical, which always makes things clearer.

The practical side of the course involves rehydrating some completely dried out specimens. The first step was to choose specimens – I managed to bag myself a small, rather mouldy tree frog (of the genus Rhacophorus), and a jar of three crabs (labelled as Portunus depurator, now called Liocarcinus depurator, the harbour crab).

My poor sad looking frog

A jar of dry crabs

The first step in rehydration is to bathe the specimens in a dilute solution of Decon-90 (which is usually used as a surface-active cleaning agent and radioactive decontaminant, but is also excellent for rehydrating dried tissues). I decanted the specimens from their jars into beakers, and placed them on hotplates to warm the Decon-90 solution slightly, which catalyses the reaction.

And in their baths they will stay overnight, as my specimens remain quite stiff and unreponsive so far. Tomorrow they will be treated in a mild vacuum to remove the air pockets that are causing them to float at the moment.

While waiting impatiently for our specimens to show signs of improvement, Simon showed us some techniques for glass cutting, which is important for making new lids for specimen jars, and also showed us how to drill holes in jars to top up fluids without having to remove the lid (which is often quite a chore if the jar has been well sealed).

Charlotte demonstrates how to drill holes in glass

By the end of the week I hope my little critters will look plump, healthy and lifelike again! I will keep you updated on progress…

While we were there, we also went on a free tour of the museum’s spirit collection (things preserved in alcohol (and ocassionally formalin)). The tour took us around the stores in the Zoology Spirit Building, which is part of the new (although I suppose it isn’t so new anymore!) Darwin Centre. The place is HUGE. There are whole floors filled with cabinets, stuffed with animals in glass containers of different sizes. We were allowed to see into a few cabinets, and were greeted by the watery stares of a bat, various rodents, and an upside-down tamandua.

We then moved into the tank room, which is the highlight of the tour. Here they keep all the really big specimens, including large fish, shetland ponies…and a giant squid (Architeuthis dux, nicknamed ‘Archie’ by The Sun newspaper apparently, despite the fact that the specimen is female!). The squid was really the main reason for our visit…having both read Kraken by China Mieville (a seriously weird, but very good, urban fantasy novel which features Archie herself and a cult of giant squid worshippers) we were really excited to see her. And she didn’t disappoint. Dominating the room in a giant glass tank, she is the length of a London bus. And she wasn’t alone – Architeuthis shares her tank with part of a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, an incomplete specimen of which mostly tentacles survive). While not much of the colossal squid was present, the sharply hooked tentacles gave a very good impression of the predatory prowess of this little-known deep-sea cephalopod. There is debate about which squid is actually larger, as both are known from very few complete (and mostly immature) specimens.

The giant squid may be the main attraction of the tour for most people, but I was just as excited to see some of the tank room’s other residents, especially some very old specimens of Monotremes from 1880 with original hand-written on their jars proclaiming that these specimens were sent to Dr Owen for examination…Dr Owen of course being Richard Owen, famed anatomist and founder of the NHM. And then I got about as near to a religious experience as an athiest evolutionary biologist really can, when we were shown a small locked glass cabinet sitting nonchalantly in the corner of the room, containing specimens collected on the Beagle by Charles Darwin. Many of them had their lids painted yellow, which indicates that they are the type specimens for their species (the specimen used in the original description of a species, which holds the name, and against which all other specimens are compared). In the lab next door we also got to see a jar containing a small octopus which Darwin kept as a pet.

The spirit collection isn’t just there to look pretty (although it could be argued that some specimens are somewhat less than pretty!). It is an important research resource, and is regularly used by academics from all over the world who are interested in anatomy, taxonomy, evolution, and a whole host of other topics.

The tours on the weekend are only half an hour long, and give a brief introduction to the collections, taking in only a very few highlights. During the week they run longer tours – I might have to do one of those sometime, as I just love poking around in museum stores, and they don’t get much more exciting than the stores at the NHM.

Photos weren’t allowed on the tour, but there are also specimens on display in the public lobby of the Spirit Building. Here are a few tasters of this wonderful collection:

I’ve also been using a break from my Museum Studies course to gain new skills, some museum-related, others not so much. In the ‘not so much’ category falls archery, which I start tomorrow – I’m doing a beginner’s course with a club in London Bridge, and should be able to give Robin Hood a run for his money by Christmas! Or maybe not. More work-related are the field excursions I’ve been on with the London Natural History Society, which I joined in the summer to learn new field skills, and improve my ID skills for a variety of wildlife. And just to have fun – I’ve always been something of a theoretical naturalist, and it’s nice to be out in the field actually observing species in the wild.

Last weekend I went on a fungus forage at Bookham Common. I confess I know next to nothing about mycology, having studied a very small amount in my second year at undergrad, and I was very out of my depth. But the experts on our walk were all very kind about my total lack of knowledge, and very helpful in getting me up to speed. It was a lovely day, for the most part, and only rained a little in the afternoon. We were extremely lucky all round – it’s been a terrbile summer for fungus, having been mostly wet but then turning dry at the end of the summer, and there were fears that we wouldn’t find anything at all. But by the end of the day our list contained well over 100 fungus species, and everyone seemed pleased with the results.

I took a lot of photos (many of which are rather out of focus because the macro on my compact digicam is a bit poor). I’ve tried to identify most of them from the notes I made on the walk, and my shiny new Collins Complete Guide to British Mushrooms and Toadstools. Apologies to any mycologists out there if I’ve got any of them wrong! Corrections are gratefully received.