[CPProt.net] The phony bird collector

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

The phony bird collector
  
Tom Spears 
Ottawa Citizen 
October 3, 2005
 
 
Some people steal Rembrandts, others swipe money. A few get turned on by
stealing dead birds from the British Museum.

Doing so makes the late Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen a cad and a scoundrel,
say outraged bird researchers who have just uncovered his hoaxes.

The retired British Army officer had built himself a solid reputation for
collecting and cataloguing specimens of many species by the time he died in
1967.

Now, revisionists have been checking his records and finding how much he
lied, cheated and swindled.

And stole.

Some of the dead birdies were actually British Museum specimens, stolen by
the dastardly colonel and repackaged with his own label, claiming he found
them himself.

He took an owl originally found on a Chinese island and claimed he had
collected it in Myanmar (which was still Burma at the time he went there.)
Biologists consider it poor form when you lie about where animals live. It
throws their maps off.

This guy was a major supplier to museums of natural history. The forensic
work has taken a decade; the journal Nature estimates there are at least
hundreds of phony bird specimens, and maybe thousands.