Monkey eating raptors and the only bird with a bill longer than the rest of its body

Above: John McCormack shows off a specimen of the sword-billed hummingbird, the only bird known to have a bill longer than the rest of its body

Seth Teicher of Atlas Obscura wrote about his visit to Occidental College's Moore Laboratory's Bird Specimen Collection on Obscura Day 2012 in May. He took a lot of photos of the visit.

On April 28th, I woke up on the west side of LA, grabbed my gear and headed due east to Occidental College where I joined about a dozen other people for a hands-on tour of beautiful, dead birds. Lots of them. I mean drawers upon drawers FULL of them.

Hands-on Birds: An Obscura Day Tour of Moore Laboratory's Bird Specimen Collection

• [Marcus Pierce]

  Very interesting. BTW, if anyone who is also interested in birds and happens to be in Philadelphia this weekend, the Birdfest is going on at the Academy of Natural Sciences http://ansp.org/Visit/Events/Details/?eid=1414&iid=4280

• [max00]

  The current episode of nature has footage of them feeding:

  http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/hummingbirds-magic-in-the-air/introduction/5424/

  A bit nicer than someone wobbling a corpse in the air.

• [Stefan Jones]

  “Monkey-eating raptors” would have been better . . . for a moment there I was picture a monkey, eating raptors.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Here you go.

• [niktemadur]

  What the hell… is that headline image a photo or one of those super-realistic paintings?

  • [Michael Sheehan]

    Looks like an HDR by somebody who doesn’t know how to do HDR on any other setting than “make this look ridiculous.”

• [marukosu]

  I thought it was to illustrate the effect of that big green fatty dude’s passing around. The Asian lady gets it.