Matt Andrews from Bedfordshire shares his fascinating volunteering story after retiring.
About fifty years ago, I spent my school summer holidays volunteering at Tring Museum of Natural History. The then curator was Dr. David Snow who was an acquaintance of my father, and he had made it possible for me to be there. As a keen, teenage bird watcher, this was a unique opportunity to meet some of the country’s most influential ornithologists and I was involved in cataloguing the then newly arrived from South Kensington, national collection of birds’ nests under their guidance.
A career in engineering and then the Metropolitan Police later, I had retired and was looking to do something I considered worthwhile, fulfilling and related to natural history but on a voluntary basis. Repaying some of the wonderful times I had spent with nature over the years was important to me and I enquired of the museum whether there were opportunities to volunteer there.
In 2022, I was introduced by Dr. Alex Bond, the museum’s curator, to the senior curator of the national collection of nests and eggs, Douglas Russell who needed someone to volunteer and start rearranging the order in which the world’s largest and most important scientific collection of birds’ eggs are held. It is essential in any large collection of this nature that researchers are able to find both reference to particular specimens and then accurately locate them within the collection of around three-quarters of a million individual eggs!
The eggs themselves are retained in large, locked, fire-proof cabinets and the card-index should be able to show where each individual clutch and egg is located within this enormous storage area. Finally, the vast card-index itself is vulnerable to physical deterioration. The conservation of this index is of paramount importance to the museum’s scientific relevance.
Some of the individual cards are a hundred and fifty years old and it will be an enormous future project to transfer these to digital databases which will make locating individual sets of eggs easier as well as more readily facilitating modification.
I try to get into Tring four times a month and I estimate it will be another two years before I have completed the current cataloguing work.
It requires concentration and attention to detail and for me, is an exceptionally rewarding task knowing I am making a difference to future specimens’ access. I am learning about the conservation of scientific specimens, the importance of retaining original collectors’ notes and how these relate to the research work of the many visitors to the collections. I have been shown along the way some of the world’s most important museum specimens including eggs and nests from now sadly extinct birds as well as eggs and nests from the nineteenth and even eighteenth centuries.
I consider my acceptance at the museum as a privilege enjoyed by few others; it represents an exceptional opportunity for me, someone without a scientific background to give something of real value back to ornithology which has given me so much over the years and ultimately, to enhance the future conservation of bird life.