Professor uses museums to give a bird’s-eye view of science, international intrigue

Contact: Sue Nichols, University Relations, (517) 353-8942, nichols@msu.edu  
 
There’s so much more to birds than watching.

For Pamela Rasmussen, assistant curator of mammalogy and ornithology at the MSU museum and a visiting assistant professor of zoology, birds are science. History. Intrigue. Morality.

Rasmussen is author of a new, exhaustively exacting field guide Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide. On the way there, her work on uncovering the fraud of British Col. Richard Meinertzhagen has received international attention, detailed in Nature in September, and in the May 29 issue of The New Yorker.

Bird watching?

It’s birding.

sQUILPIT! Grrt-grrt. That’s the call of the Lichtenstein’s Sandgrouse, detailed in Rasmussen’s book. Rasmussen can spiritedly duplicate all the calls. Her book breaks ground to provide birders with accurate vocalizations of birds.
 
Her expertise and stature in ornithology is vast. And at this point, in her labyrinth of an office on the third floor of the MSU Museum, she hasn’t even mentioned her rediscovery of the forest owlet alive in India, or her discovery of the Serendib Scop-owl in Sri Lanka.

Rasmussen may be focused, but she’s hardly one-note. Below is a sampling – on her passion about birds, and the role of museums in understanding them, and her part in unveiling an international scandal.

• On the guide, and its emphasis on bird calls
• On Rasmussen's passion for detail
• On Meinertzhagen's fraud
• On museums as the field with better views — and air conditioning
• What's next for Rasmussen: another Smithsonian research project