Fairfield Museum hosts ‘Birding the Carnegie’

FAIRFIELD – The Carnegie Historical Museum in Fairfield hosted an event Saturday morning to show off its remodeled display of taxidermied birds.

Museum board member Therese Cummiskey led a tour of the building’s bird displays, the first program to highlight the birds since the museum underwent major renovations in 2020-2021. Thirty-six people attended the tour, known as “Birding the Carnegie,” which was many more than Cummiskey expected.

“I was hoping we’d have eight to 12,” Cummiskey said. “I was really happy with the turnout, and I’m hoping we’ll have other ‘Birding the Carnegies’ to introduce people to other birds.”

One of those 36 people was youngster Eli Carlson, an elementary school student who is fascinated by animals. His mother Melanie said her son has been asking about going to the museum, and was thrilled to learn it had reopened.

Carlson said one of the things he learned on the tour was about how passenger pigeons went extinct.

“They flew in big groups, and they were easy to hunt because they flew close to the ground,” Carlson said.

Residents Diana Flynn and Becky Droz said they were surprised by a number of facts they learned during the tour. Flynn said it was sad to learn about all the birds that once called Iowa home but don’t anymore either because they went extinct or because their habitat was destroyed. Droz said it was hard to believe that huge birds such as cranes once lived here.

Cummiskey talked about an unfortunate practice among some bird collectors of the 19th century who, upon learning a species was in danger of extinction, killed that very same endangered animal to ensure they had a specimen to preserve, further contributing to its demise.

The passenger pigeon went extinct due to over-hunting.

“They shipped them back east and they became somebody’s dinner,” Cummiskey said.

Saturday’s tour was the first of a two-part collaboration between the Carnegie Historical Museum and Jefferson County Conservation. Cummiskey will lead a bird hike at Jefferson County Park on April 15 at 8 a.m. where she hopes to introduce residents to a variety of birds that inhabit the park.

Cummiskey hatched the idea of pairing a bird hike with a museum tour because she wanted people to know that the museum’s taxidermy display was more than “old birds.”

“They are old birds, but they have a story to tell,” she said. “I thought we should give people a few cool details about the birds.”

One of those interesting tidbits concerns Iowa towns named after birds. In northwest Iowa, there is about a 15-mile stretch between Palo Alto and Pocahontas counties that contains three towns named after birds: Curlew, Mallard and Plover. Cummiskey explained that the names of these towns were chosen by the president of the railroad that went through the area, a man named Charles E. Whitehead, an avid hunter who chose those names because they were birds he hunted in the area.

When Cummiskey joined the museum’s board in 2019, she looked into consolidating the bird displays into one section of the museum, and adding interpretive information about each taxidermy subject or photograph. In 2020, the museum’s foundation received funding from Iowa Audubon’s 2020 small grants program to update the museum’s bird displays. It also received funding from the Wilson B. Reynolds and Juanita E. Reynolds Fund to update each of the six bird display cases so they would tell a better story of the diversity of birds in the area, and thus enhance their use in education.

One of the noteworthy displays created during renovations was the Iowa Wetland Birds display, complete with a mural painted by Fairfield resident Kathy Tollenare. The museum has an exhibit dedicated to Dr. Joshua Monroe Shaffer, who donated more than 400 pieces of taxidermy to the museum in 1893.

Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com