Daily News | Each dead bird in this collection of 250,000 still has a tale to tell
David Peer, retired physician and volunteer, was removing the innards of a dead Sharp-shinned Hawk that had been brought recently to thein Philadelphia, where one-quarter million perished birds are stored.
“The stomachs go to our biogeochemistry lab,” Rice said. “They will screen for PFAS and use the tissues and stomachs to track those chemicals in wild populations. They’re already finding microplastics in all kinds of birds now.”PFAS are environmentally persistent manmade chemicals that have posed a growing concern about their possible impact on human health. Their impact on animals has not been widely studied.
“We have thousands of species of birds in this collection,” Weckstein said. “This is a library of biodiversity. People think, oh it’s a museum with a bunch of dead stuff. But dead stuff tells us about life.”Tens of million of birds pass through the city during spring and fall migrations, and many are killed when they fly into buildings, attracted by lights and reflective glass. Thein recent city history took place Oct.
The sex, eye color, age, weight, amount of fat, stomach contents, and other vitals of each bird are recorded, along with the date it was found. Researchers comb through data held by the Department of Ornithology for trends in diseases, weights, food sources, parasites — even plumage. Still slightly fattened, the adult warbler was using stars and the earth’s magnetic field to navigate as it passed over Philadelphia on May 3, 2000, and crashed into a building at Temple University. Its epic migration in search of abundant food ended the same as tens of thousands that die in the city each spring.
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