Nature ænigmatic: May 2011

My workspace for the day.

At the nursery we would laugh, feeling like a major part of our job was moving a pile from one place to another then back again. This trait seems inherently human as I watch the goings-on of those around me. A demolition crew tears down a building in the neighborhood, and it seems the machinery simply shifts the pile of rubble from one corner of the lot to the other. Park maintenance workers collect piles of trash and landscape trimmings into larger piles. More people come load those piles into trucks. My week has involved stacks upon stacks and organizing piles into new piles.

The first iteration involved sorting piles of specimens, all the same species and ranging in collection dates from 1775 to present day. Hundreds of specimens in all, we would organize them into this pile then that, pulling out the specimens that are pure rubbish, sorting them chronologically to find duplicates, then restoring some in poor condition to be sent upstairs and remounted.
Restored specimens are then registered into the computer database. I am happy to be working on the relatively easy program of Microsoft Access rather than the complicated museum database called EMu.

A specimen to be restored. This specimen had never been mounted. It was collected in June of 1887, donated to the museum in 1930, and packed in a newspaper from 1851.

To relieve us from this task of sorting, we would move to another task of sorting and put specimens away in the herbarium: sort by family, sort phylogenetically (into order of evolutionary relationships. It’s not as hard as it sounds, there’s a handy list), then lay these into the herbarium by species, sorted yet one more time by vice-county (region. I should have a firm grasp soon on UK geography if I pay close attention).

All of this sorting and database entry involves reading scribbled handwriting of botanists. I am wishing that when Linnaeus created a standard for naming specimens, he had also created a standard for handwriting. Slowly, I am becoming familiar with individual collectors from the 1800s and their specific styles of label and writing. It is an odd thing to have filling one's brain.