Bird Skinning.

Either I've been behind in the educational part of this blog, or I've just gotten a lot of education in the past couple weeks. Maybe a combination.

A couple weeks ago,  Dr. Nancy McIntyre was kind enough to open her lab to us to watch her teach her students how to skin and stuff birds.  As the bird curator for the Ranching Heritage Center, Dr. McIntyre skins birds to put on collection at the museum for educational purposes.

All of the birds, of course, have died of natural or unjust causes and are given to Dr. McIntyre to use for the bird collections.  So, one Friday after my organic evolution class, a fellow biology student and I headed up to her lab to check it out. When we showed up to her lab, she was directing a group of students in skinning all different owls from the area (barn, great-horned, burrowing, etc).  

The lab was pretty neat--- like nothing I've seen before in my 4 years of biology at Tech.  Everyone had their own bird, and Dr. M would just walk around the room teaching and guiding her students. It was fun to watch them learn --- especially since most of them were first time skinners. To give you a glimpse of the procedure: she takes out all of the soft organs*, leaves the muscles in the wings, and fills them with what looked like corn meal.  Compared to other dissections I've seen, the whole process looked relatively not-messy.  

I like the idea of her involving students in helping fix up the birds to be put on collection.  While I sadly can't say that I've ever gotten to take one of Dr. McIntyre's classes, I recognize her teaching style-- and it's one that I like.  She uses hands on projects to teach the students, and her projects involve students with something bigger than the class: the project is not only useful to the course, but to the community as well.  You see, if done right, the birds can last for more than a hundred years. If you think about it, that's 100 years of education using the very bird that one of the students in her classroom preserved. I enjoy the idea that Dr. McIntyre's lesson I got to witness that Friday in lab will continue for many years to come.