Collection a reminder of nature's fragility

You go on a tour into the basement of Whanganui Regional Museum, you'll see, alongside the old carriages, colourful wedding dresses and military uniforms, pots, typewriters and ship models, a huge collection of natural history objects.

When the museum's founder, Samuel Drew, began pulling together the collection, he had a vision of putting the institution on the world stage through its collection.

In true Victorian form, he brought together animals from all around the world.

The museum's natural history cabinets and storage areas hold African parrots and North American eagles, birds of paradise from Papua New Guinea, kangaroos, thousands of seashells, birds' eggs, fish in jars, and even - strangely - a taxidermy dolphin.

Why conserve all these objects? After all, the museum's focus is now much more on Whanganui and the history of its communities, rather than retaining its original global focus.

Especially with space becoming increasingly limited, it might seem obvious to make way for other things.

One reason is that the information collected with the specimens places them geographically and chronologically, as useful for research today it was were when they were brought to the museum.

However, the collection has today a practical value that goes beyond its intention when collected.

For instance, a number of the species have gone extinct since they were collected by Mr Drew. Prime examples include the American passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), which was once the most numerous bird in the world. An 1866 sighting in southern Ontario of a single flock contained 3.5 billion birds, was one mile wide, 300 miles long, and took 14 hours to pass a single point. Intense and reckless hunting of the bird, combined with habitat destruction, caused the population to collapse to extinction, and the last bird (named Martha) died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Our museum has two of these birds, collected at a time when the species was in catastrophic decline.

The museum also has a the thylacine, or Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus cynocephalus), extinct in Australia since the first half of the 20th century.

Some species in our collection, such as the snow leopard (Uncia uncia), are alive today but in serious decline, begging the question of whether we may one day have more examples of extinct species.

Although today the idea of killing a species in decline for a museum collection is unthinkable, having these specimens in the collection now sends an important message about the importance of conserving the biological diversity we have left on Earth, which is sadly dwindling every day.

Along with extinct species from New Zealand, such as the huia, piopio, laughing owl (whekau) and New Zealand quail (koreke), they allow us to demonstrate that, as robust as nature is, it will still succumb to lack of proper care.

However, there is one more reason to care for these items in the museum's collection. They tell the story of Whanganui's history and what were, for some, the aspirations for its future.

Dr Eric Dorfman is Director of the Whanganui Regional Museum. He has a PhD in wildlife ecology from the University of Sydney, and a Masters in Marine Biology from California State University, San Jose. He is author of books on natural history such as Inside New Zealand's National Parks and Intangible Natural Heritage.