Okay, but what can we learn from a drawer of birds?

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E20. Less than 1% of what's in a museum is actually on display. So what's happening with the other 99%? Scott talks with Dr. Sushma Reddy, Breckenridge Chair of Ornithology at the Bell Museum and Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, about the extraordinary scientific afterlife of a specimen in a drawer. In this episode: How birds collected 150 years ago are answering questions their collectors never imagined, from air pollution to insect decline Why falcons turned out to be closer to parrots than hawks, and what other surprises fell out of the bird family tree The case for making museum collections more open, especially to scientists from the places these specimens originally…