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Once There Were Billions Opens
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OEC installs the great auk.
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Our new exhibition, Once There Were Billions: Vanished Birds of North America, successfully opened on June 24! Staff from the Smithsonian's Office of Exhibits Central (OEC) installed the exhibition, located in the Smithsonian Libraries Gallery of the National Museum of Natural History, on June 16-17. The installation included mounting specimens of each of the four extinct birds (passenger pigeon, heath hen, Carolina parakeet, and great auk), displaying the books (such as The Birds of America: From Drawings Made in the United States and Their Territories by John James Audubon (1840-44) and Mrs. Rorer's Philadelphia Cook Book by Sarah Tyson Heston Rorer (1886)), and posting the exhibition signage.
A lecture by Joel Greenberg, author of A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction, accompanied the opening. Joel spoke
about the passenger pigeons' propensity to nest, roost, and fly together in
vast numbers, which made them vulnerable to an unremitting market
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Joel Greenberg
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and recreational hunting. Over 150 guests joined us for the lecture and book signing.
Additionally, Once There Were Billions generated several press opportunities, including features on NPR, the Washington Post/Express, and newspapers around the country via the Associated Press.
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Great Auk: Flightless, Social, and Doomed...
The story of the last passenger pigeon and the disappearance of the great auk, Carolina parakeet, and heath hen reveal the fragile connections between species and their environment. In the next few e-newsletters, we'll be highlighting each of the four birds from Once There Were Billions with content from the exhibition and illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
The great auk (Pinguinus impennis) once lived in large, dense colonies along North Atlantic shores. Clumsy and flightless on land, they were perfectly adapted to "fly" underwater, with their small wings and streamlined bodies.
Unfortunately, they could not flee human predators. Hunters slaughtered auks by the thousands for meat, eggs, feathers, and oil. Once the bird's numbers dwindled precipitously, naturalists hurried to add them as specimens to their collections before they disappeared forever. By the mid-1800s the species went extinct-the final result of centuries of intense human exploitation.
The Smithsonian's great auk is one of about 80 museum specimens that remain in existence, along with a similar amount of eggs. The displayed auk is thought to have been collected off Iceland in 1834, only 10 years before the species became extinct.
What can be done to prevent future extinctions? One way is to support researchers who seek a better understanding of the biodiversity of this planet.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a global project that is changing the way research is done, by digitizing and sharing biodiversity literature online.
BHL makes more than 43 million pages and nearly 100,000 scientific illustrations-of animals and plants, living and extinct-freely available to scientists and other users around the world.
The great auk is documented in over 3,000 pages of the literature found in of the BHL corpus. BHL relies on donations from individuals to support scanning of the biodiversity literature held in some of the world's most renowned natural history and botanical libraries. To learn more about how a donation supports the continued growth of BHL, please visit this page.
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Adopt Garden scene with dancers
 Garden scene with dancers (to be used as the set for a miniature theater) is a peep show (or tunnel book), designed by engraver and print-seller Martin Engelbrecht of Augsburg, Germany (1684-1756). The set includes six 6" x 8" hand-colored etched prints on light gray laid paper, with sections carefully cut out to create a perspective view when the prints are arranged in a viewing box.This early and rare example of a peep-show is a significant addition to the Cooper-Hewitt Library collection of over 1700 movable and pop-up books. It is important because Engelbrecht was the first to popularize these highly crafted peep-shows books in the 18th century, and whose appeal continues on into the 21st century.
 Very few are held in American libraries and there no others in our collection. Garden scene with dancers was featured in the Libraries' exhibition Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop, and Turn in 2010-11. The images of the six prints show aristocratic men and women holding flowers or gardening tools dancing together in a scene set in a formal garden reminiscent of Versailles. To adopt Garden scene with dancers, visit our website or call 202.633.2241.
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