Bird Study Skin

What is cool about working at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is that there are opportunities to actually look at bird collections as a reference for illustrations, and what is more, you can actually prepare a bird study skin! After a lesson by a curator, I had the chance to prepare four specimens (all the specimens died by window strike, car accident, or starvation and not purposely killed by humans for collection.) Those helped me to understand bird anatomy and that knowledge will make my scientific illustration more accurate.