I have turned over a copy of my database as well as all of my X-rays to The Canadian Museum of Nature so they are available to anyone who is interested in using them for study. To arrange access to them, see below:
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Note, April 2009.
Though my writing and illustrations are no longer in progress, a dozen of my last published drawings and photographs are included in a beautiful book newly published by the Royal Ontario Museum: Biological Notes on an Old Farm: Exploring Common Things in the Kingdoms of Life, by retired Curator Emeritus Dr. Glenn B. Wiggins. Dr. Wiggins took me on some delightful field trips on his farmland to find and photograph unusual ferns, lichens and aquatic life. We both love bugs, too, and it was over the larvae of certain caddis-flies that we met, years before; I had found them in the stomach of a Trumpeter Swan, and he identified them for me. He is an amazing teacher, and I am pleased to have contributed to his fascinating book. Kit Chubb |
The studies use the following (updated Jan 2005):
- a custom-designed avian relational database of 7456 admissions
- 2865 post-mortems, often with students, and photographing or saving findings
- de-fleshing some bodies to study their skulls and bones, and to make skeletons
- collecting, cleaning and bagging ingesta bones, teeth, elytra, exoskeletons etc.,
- our collections of X-rays-- about 2000 birds, filmed and filed
- photographs, about 4000 or so-slides, black-and-white, digital, scanner close-ups
- diagrams and drawings
- recording the basic information-age, gender, weight, wing-chord, ingesta, injury, etc for the database;
- banding of releases: 1682, with 95 band returns (or recoveries) several alive. Band returns have made some vital contributions proving the success of our principles
- a lot of patient observation crouching behind blinds, viewing through one-way glass, watching with a closed-circuit security camera. Luckily, the house windows looked into several aviaries where we could view and photograph unseen (more or less.)
In the past I shared our experiences on radio and TV appearances, lectures, newspaper columns, magazine and small journal articles, illustrated newsletters and four books including three desktopped volumes on trauma. No more books after that! Print publishing is too expensive, too slow, too demanding, and guess who is left to distribute the books. I had planned to make a volume of my manuscript about herons, but instead will post it chapter by chapter in the Website. Some chapters are here already.
Volume 3 of Beaks, Brains and Bones: Loons, Ospreys and Grebes. Traumas and studies of 126
Common Loons, 41 Ospreys and some grebes. 96 pages, 130 illustrations. $15.00
The Avian Ark, illustrated stories of early admissions (also available in Japanese) $8.00