Stuffed Peepers : Museum Lends Mounted Birds and Critters Like a Library

Ranger Barb Ward was borrowing a box full of stuffed birds, mammals, reptiles, mounted butterflies and insects from the museum for the summer.

She’ll use them to educate the hundreds of youngsters who visit the visitors’ center in the San Bernardino National Forest.

Ed Grodecki, 70, a bird carver from Riverside, also stopped in for a loan. He was filling out forms to borrow a rose-breasted grosbeak and a loggerhead shrike for three weeks.

“A stuffed bird is three-dimensional, 100% better than working from a photograph for carvers and artists. It’s like having a wild bird posing motionless perched on a table in front of me,” Grodecki said.

Borrowing mounted birds, mammals, reptiles and insects at the San Bernardino County Museum in Redlands is like borrowing books from a library.

“Cub Scouts do it. Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts borrow butterflies, owls, snakes and lizards to study. Just about everybody with a legitimate reason can check out mounted insects, birds or animals,” said Kathy Strobaugh, secretary to the museum director.

Most museums are very protective of their collections. Resources not on exhibit are carefully stored for future displays or for research by staff and visiting scholars.

Not so at this one.

Gene Cardiff, 61, curator of biological sciences at the museum, believes in loaning out the valued collections “to better educate the public about our biological world.”

For the past three years the museum has loaned specially prepared Environmental Study Kits to schools and other organizations. The kits are filled with mounted birds, mammals, reptiles, insects and information about them.

So far, more than 70,000 students--from preschool children to high school seniors in San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange and Los Angeles counties--have used them for classroom study.

The kits contain stuffed versions of woodpeckers, jays, juncos, cactus wrens, hummingbirds, screech owls and great horned owls, kestrels, king fishers, gophers, weasels, moles, squirrels, chipmunks, shrews, kangaroo rats, desert tortoises, fringe-toed lizards, rattlesnakes, beetles, butterflies, tarantulas, scorpions and numerous other mammals, birds, insects, reptiles and plants.

“Schools just don’t have this type of biological material,” Cardiff explained. “It’s our way of turning kids onto learning about birds, animals and insects found in the different habitats of Southern California. I don’t know of another museum with a program like this.”

All that is required is that teachers pick up and return the kits to the museum. Schools may borrow the five different habitat kits prepared by the museum for as long as a month, teachers for as long as 10 days for one class.

Many teachers and schools reserve the birds and animals a year ahead. All the Environmental Study Kits are booked already for the first three months of the next school year.

Cardiff received a $15,000 grant three years ago from the state’s personalized license plate program to prepare the kits. He received a similar grant again this year to do more of them.

Cardiff started collecting birds when he was 11 and living on a farm in Bloomington, near San Bernardino. In 1955, when the San Bernardino County Museum was established in his hometown, he donated his collection of birds and became a curator of birds and mammals.

Cardiff is concerned by what he sees as a dramatic loss of habitat for plants and animals worldwide. “We’ve lost 90% of marsh and pebble plain habitat in the San Bernardino Mountains, 95% of the Southern California riparian habitat due to the population explosion and man-made developments,” he lamented.

“If we don’t educate the public and the kids, we’re going to lose a lot more of our biological world. If I can add a little knowledge and help preserve life in the field of biological science, I feel my time on Earth will have been worthwhile.”