Princeton is home to a remarkable collection of over 6,000 avian specimens. For its relatively small size, the Princeton Bird Collection is impressive in terms of taxonomic breadth and historic significance. The Princeton Bird Collection includes representatives from most of the nearly 250 bird families, and it boasts several extinct species. In recent years, the Princeton Bird Collection has been integrated into several university courses and numerous undergraduate senior thesis projects. In terms of research, the Princeton Bird Collection is actively used by the Stoddard Lab (see, for example, our recent efforts to create digital 3D bird specimens) and others.

The Princeton Bird Collection also includes archival documents, including personal bird journals and photo albums that belonged to Charles Rogers, who was a professor of ornithology at Princeton from 1920 until 1977. His handwritten journals cover the period of 1899 (when Rogers was eleven years old) to 1972 (when he was eighty-four) and contain records of the bird species observed on frequent walks in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. The bird biodiversity of Princeton is particularly well documented because Rogers was a Princeton undergraduate (1905-1909) and then faculty member for more than fifty years. Long-term datasets on bird biodiversity—particularly one spanning seven decades, by the same observer in the same general location—are extremely rare, making the Rogers dataset of great value to researchers interested in the effects of climate change and/or land use change on patterns of biodiversity. To preserve and digitize Rogers’ handwritten journals, some now over a century old, the Stoddard Lab—including PhD student Audrey Miller and undergraduate Annika Kruse (’20)—worked with Betty Horn (who for many years has managed the Bird Collection) and a team at the Princeton University Library. To learn more about this project, explore the “Capturing Feathers” exhibition website.