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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DLane" data-source="post: 3288216" data-attributes="member: 16557">Hear hear! I too am sick of seeing every thread turn into a "What a bunch of savage killers those museum collectors are! Oh, looky here, another wonderful paper on taxonomy! Ugh! That one ALSO involved collecting! Wow! Someone has discovered another news species!! Wait, you mean they collected it?!" However, I feel obliged to respond to others' comments above: being emotional and having an opinion is fine, but then to say that your emotional opinion gives you enough information to judge the collection of modern museum specimens as "useless" and "self-interested", etc., is not fine. You clearly don't use specimens and you can't seem to judge their usefulness. I respect your dislike of collecting, but that does not mean that your opinion cancels out its importance. That was my point above, and was what moved me to respond as I did. Yes, there are good bird artists and poor bird artists. I think everyone will agree that Ian Lewington is excellent, for example, but many of his illustrations in HBW of birds which he clearly had little reference material are simply inaccurate (some woodcreeper and Neotropical barbet plates immediately come to mind)! Why? Because he wasn't sitting in front of good museum specimens when he illustrated the birds! Good photos won't show everything (you can't look at the back side of the bird, or under the wings of a perched bird, for example. A specimen will show most everything one needs to see. Furthermore, a modern specimen will mention on the tags many of the characters that would be missing after the preparation such as soft part colors)... and accuracy is important to identification, no? OK, you think accurate, well illustrated field guides aren't important? Yet, we all hear folks complain bitterly about every field guide and how it could be better. In addition, ecotourism to countries seems to spike after a better guide is published, so those two things suggest that your opinions are in the minority. You think that phylogenetic studies aren't important? Clearly that can't be true, or you wouldn't bother reading this forum!But to go back to Snapdragyn's comment: if, in future threads, those who want to cry out against collecting do so in a separate "I hate collecting" thread, so it does not pollute the present thread with more such comments, I, for one, would be happy and would gladly keep my peace! Such back-and-forth really distracts from the interest of the topic at hand, and clearly gets none of us anywhere.</blockquote>

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