Danish bird collection comes to °®ÎÛ´«Ã½
The University of Alaska Museum of the North is delighted to announce the arrival of an invaluable gift—the Erritzoe collection from the House of Bird Research in Denmark. Dr. Johannes Erritzoe has been a research affiliate of the University of Alaska Museum (Ornithology) for over 20 years, and his bird collection is an amazing scientific resource. Developed over decades of careful work, this research collection has already been very productive scientifically. Its importance and use will grow considerably now that it is in Fairbanks, because it has not historically been online or in a public lending institution. The scientific gains for the museum, for °®ÎÛ´«Ã½, for this collection, and for ornithology are considerable.
The Erritzoe collection comprises over 8,800 meticulously prepared bird specimens and is highly complementary to the current UA museum bird collection. A large proportion of Alaska birds are Holarctic in distribution. Many more are the easternmost representatives of Eurasian populations and their close relatives.
As such, the Erritzoe collection, most of which is from the northwestern Palearctic, is an important scientific addition to our current holdings. In short, we cannot understand the similarities and uniquenesses of Alaska birds without using complementary material like this — much of which we’ve had to borrow in the past to work in the appropriate comparative framework. This collection is also a fantastic research resource for the study of northern birds and the ways in which climate change affects them.
The permitting and moving of such a large collection was especially challenging, and we thank the many people both in Denmark and the U.S. who helped us accomplish this task. Our next steps are to get the collection catalogued, integrated, and online so that it is widely available to researchers.