Index cards from the bird collection of the AfricaMuseum (06)

The first bird specimens in our ornithology collection date from 1897, but only from the 1910s-1920s, when the Belgian zoologist Henri Schouteden started working in the scientific services at the Royal Museum for Central Africa, that every new acquisition had to be registered in the book, so called  bird register.

In the 1970s, at the time of Dirk Thys Van den Audenaerde, collection managers switched to a new numbering of the bird specimens and a new cataloguing system, shown here.

Every new arrival had to be registered in the files (cardboards) per bird species, instead of in the bird registers.

Our bird collection, almost entirely obtained in Africa, contains more than 150,000 bird specimens, including flat-skins, specimens preserved in alcohol, mounted specimen and skeletons, but also eggs, bird nests etc. Approximately 250 species and sub-species of bird are represented by type specimens. These files have been digitalized since they contain valuable information regarding our bird collection (localities, collectors, special observations, …), which can be added to our digital databases, which can be used for scientific research.