All summer & autumn Albert R. Brand has been roving the hills of New Jersey and southern New York. Before dawn he would drive his truck up beside a pre-selected tree or fence, bear to it a small, cable-attached object, then retreat to wait, watch, listen. Once he put his '"trap" on the limb where a song sparrow came each dawn to serenade his nesting mate; once near a beer barrel which a whippoorwill had chosen for its nightly concert stage.
Last week Ornithologist Brand returned in triumph to his post at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History, bearing the first comprehensive sound film ever made of the songs and calls of wild U. S. birds. With 90 common species thus preserved, he hopes eventually to record the song of every U. S. bird. Ambitious Albert Brand would need several lifetimes were he to pursue with his microphone the twitterings of all the birds whose skins, stuffed but unmounted, have been coming to rest in the Museum during his absences this year. A nature-loving youngster named Lionel Walter Rothschild began collecting them in England half a century ago. Coming of age in 1889, he founded a zoological museum on his ancestral estate at Tring, Hertfordshire. No bait for birds, the Rothschild gold was lure enough to set men snaring them in the trees, brush, jungles, marshes of all the earth. Bit by bit the hauls of famed ornithologists and obscure amateurs found their way to Tring, gave it what many experts regard as the best all-round collection in the world.* Mammals, reptiles, insects have come too. From Tring issues sporadically the learned Novitates Zoologicae, and occasionally a story for the Press about fleas, of which it has the world's premier collection. The fortune of Zoologist Rothschild has not escaped Depression. Last year the second Baron Rothschild, now grown to look like a huge-paunched, twinkle-eyed St. Nick with a Ph.D., wrote the American Museum a reluctant letter offering to sell most of his birds. They had cost him around $1,000,000, but when a rich Museum patron offered half that much the deal was closed. Curator Robert Cushman Murphy hastened to Tring last February, helped classify, catalog, pack the nearly 280,000 specimens. Last week the Museum's President Henry Fairfield Osborn announced that Sculptress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and her three children had presented the Tring collection as a memorial to their husband & father, the late Harry Payne Whitney.* It will be housed in the new Whitney Wing (now nearing completion), for which Sportsman Whitney left $750,000 and New York City added an equal amount. Many of the birds will eventually be mounted for public display, but most will be available and of interest only to scientists. Lord Rothschild specialized in rare and disappearing species, got among others a great auk, two Labrador ducks, a series of passenger pigeons and Guadalupe caracaras. Other groups: birds of paradise, Hawaiian honey-creepers, Old World sun-birds, 6,000 American humming birds. Added to its present strength in birds of the Americas and the Pacific (many of them gathered by Whitney-sponsored expeditions), the gift definitely places the American's collection abreast of the British Museum's, With nice tact, the Donors Whitney have provided fellowships whereby, for a time, European scholars may come to study their lost treasure.