Shorpy is funded by you. Help by purchasing a print or contributing. Learn more.
Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.
[REV 25-NOV-2014]
Vintage photos of:
1916. "N.R. Wood of Smithsonian Institution mounting birds." Our second look at Nelson Wood in his natural habitat. Harris & Ewing glass neg. View full size.
Being of the bald guild myself, perhaps I'm prejudiced, but when I look at this photo and the previous one, I see a craftsman.
Many people believe that pet-owners look like their pets, to a certain degree. I would like to propose that some workers look like their subjects.
Maybe someone can find this very bird on a search. You can go here and search the Smithsonian bird database. You can also search on "Wood, N. R." in the collector field of the advanced search and find instances of his work. The search results, no photos I've seen so far, are interesting that he is still recorded in a field of the database almost a 100 years later.
According to the SI: "The Division of Birds, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, houses and maintains the third largest bird collection in the world with over 625,000 specimens. Our National Collection has representatives of about 80% of the approximately 9600 known species in the world's avifauna."
Today's Top 5