Free The Owl That Fell from the Sky by Brian Gill

thinks to ring the museum, or visit it in hope of seeing an expert in person. Queries about animals flow in from all quarters, from academics and tertiary students, school pupils, people with a burning interest in nature, and specialists in the commercial sector, from book publishers in Australia to documentary researchers in Britain. I once received a telephone call from a family in Ohio whose daughter was doing a school project on New Zealand birds.
    The enquiries vary greatly. In my department, we receive questions about birds and their life history, about the museum’s birds on display or in storage, and about ornithology and ornithological organisations. One day someone rang me urgently from Wellington to ask if kiwi mate for life; he was a speechwriter for a company boss who was delivering a speech in eight minutes’ time. I was able to tell him it seems they probably do. A city council arborist asked about the breeding season of herons in order to schedule the felling of tall trees at a safe time, and people cutting suburban hedges ring with the same issue with regard to the nesting of small garden birds.
    One caller had seen fast-moving flies in the plumage of his pet parrot, and I was able to tell him about louse, or hippoboscid, flies. These quite large flat parasitic insects are sometimes seen when you handle wild birds, and the speed of their movements is amazing. I thought I was seeing things the first time a hippoboscid landed on my hand and then returned in a flash to conceal itself in the plumage of the bird I was holding for banding.
    Most curators are highly accessible and may in effect be on standby all day to deal with public enquiries. When I started at Auckland Museum in 1982 there was an archaic but delightfully simple paging system. The offices in the administrative section of the museum looked out across a large internal courtyard to a high blank wall, which was the back of the public galleries. High on the wall was a large flat circular light that flashed a short morse code repeatedly in dull crimson when activated by the receptionist. (My own call-sign was short–long–short–short–short.) If you were away from your telephone, you looked periodically through any convenient window to see if the light was flashing. In some corridors there was also a warning sound to indicate that paging was in progress. Today there are many more landlines in the building, not to mention mobile phones.
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    Perhaps the most common question I receive is along the lines of “What bird have I just seen (or heard)?” This is often easily sorted from the person’s description of the bird’s size, shape and colour. Bird calls are much less easily resolved from phone descriptions—even when the enquirer, in desperation, says such inventive things as that the sound reminds him or her of a phrase in the third movement of the Bruch violin concerto. Callers have sometimes played me barely audible recordings of a mystery songster, or taken a cordless telephone into the garden to be closer to a bird calling in the background.
    Over the decades many enquiries have concerned welcome swallows ( Hirundo neoxena ), spur-winged plovers ( Vanellus miles ) and spotted doves ( Streptopelia chinensis ). The swallow and plover arrived of their own accord from Australia and in the last fifty years have spread throughout New Zealand. The enquiries have come from people who, for the first time, have seen these birds closely, found them breeding, or heard them calling. The welcome swallow, which flits about at great speed with its pointed wings and deeply forked tail, is easily identified by most people, but less so the first sight of its mud nest plastered to the side of a garage or shed. When these birds first arrived they tended to nest in the most inaccessible places—under tall bridges, for example—but as their numbers built up they were forced to nest closer to human habitation.