Mighty Oak Monday: Brittney Hahn

02/14/2022

Having spent three years cataloging the egg collections housed in the Roosevelt Wild Life Collections (RWLC), Brittney Hahn understands the importance of preserving the specimens.

When the RWLC moved from Illick Hall to its current home in the lower level of the Gateway Center, Hahn began organizing and relabeling the egg collections. "Seemingly insignificant specimens like eggs are full of hidden knowledge waiting to be discovered," Hahn said, a senior environmental biology major.

Species names and classifications change throughout the years as discoveries are made, and part of Hahn's job is to find out how the specimens are classified today. She uses numbers recorded according to the American Ornithologists' Union and does literature searches to determine what each species is. She has done this for more than 1,000 nests, with each nest having the potential to have up to 10 eggs.

Hahn spent a significant amount of time working with the Sudworth and Squires collections, some of the oldest specimens in the RWLC. These collections offer a snapshot going back over a century and help researchers understand the complexity of birds that feather and tissue specimens alone can't provide. Since egg collecting is much less common today, these specimens are even more valued.

Hahn is a firm believer in the importance of natural history collections. "They provide a wealth of knowledge for academics and a source of inspiration for the public," she said. "Having even the same species recorded among multiple museum collections is important, because these specimens span space and time, and therefore help us to understand so much about the changes in geographic range and morphology of species."