David Willard spends his days around half a million birds. Stunning birds of paradise with soft tail feathers and iridescent chests; pipsqueak hummingbirds smaller than a human thumb; woodpeckers with stately beaks. Not one squawk escapes from any of them, however. They are all dead.

It sounds like a morbid remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, but this has been Willard’s workplace for the last 30 years. He is the collection manager of birds at the Field Museum and with his long, lanky limbs and narrow face, Willard himself slightly resembles an elegant bird.

He estimates this collection, the fourth largest in the world, holds 90 percent of the world’s bird species. On the museum’s third floor, curators like Willard, 61, manage 24 million artifacts and specimens. There are 13 curators for zoology alone. Less than one percent of them are on display in the galleries.

Willard, who holds a PhD from Princeton University in ecology and animal behavior, has always been interested in birds.  “On my grandparents’ farm there was an apple orchard,” he said “and at the end of the season apples that didn’t sell, waste apples, would get piled up into a  among them the brightly-colored scarlet tanager, came to nibble at the fruit.

“Because [the apples were] fermenting, they gave the impression of almost getting a little tipsy, like they were a little tamer than they would be normally,” he said. “Whether that’s true or not, I’m not sure.”

Robert Willard, David Willard’s younger brother, still grows apples at Ela Orchard—the same farm their grandfather established in the late 1920s in Racine County, Wis. Robert says his older brother frequently comes on weekends to help with the farm work.

But even these outings can’t keep David Willard away from birds. “The farm has woodlands, marshlands, fields, and orchard,” Robert Willard said in an email message, “and we enjoy birding in these.”  

Back at the museum, row after row of lifeless birds line the musty halls of the Ellen Thorne Smith Bird and Mammal Study Center, which has five permanent staff members. It is like a mini morgue, its shelves sliding out to reveal species that still thrive and some that are extinct. Willard holds up an ivory-billed woodpecker, a species that used to dwell in the southeastern part of the United States and has long thought to be extinct. A possible sighting in Arkansas in 2004 set off a CIA-style hunt spearheaded by Cornell University researchers. A video of a bird flying away provided some shaky proof that the woodpecker is still around, but there is still no consensus among experts that it is alive.

“This was kept secret for a long time because they didn’t want hundreds of people to come in there looking for the bird and disturbing it,” Willard said. “That video was analyzed almost like one of the crime shows on TV to see if it could be determined without question that it was an ivory bill.”

Besides housing thousands of specimens, the Field Museum’s center is also a research and preservation facility. Birds that slam into downtown Chicago’s buildings and die while migrating are routinely brought in by volunteers who scour the streets early in the morning to pick up the casualties. Willard says more than 30,000 birds have been picked up at McCormick Place alone over the last 30 years. These animals are catalogued and studied to track changes in species.

“One of the central themes of a museum like this is studying evolution and themes over time,” he said. “We can measure skeletons and compare them to what we have from the ‘70s and ask questions.”
The research can offer more than just information on the birds. Changes in their size and migration can clue researchers in on environmental changes too. “With evidence of global climate change, these birds will serve as a study of how that’s doing,” Willard said. In the next year or two, he said, museum curators hope to begin analyzing the data they have compiled.
On a quiet Thursday morning, interns from Evanston Township High School gingerly skinned birds under the watchful eye of John Bates, an associate curator of birds and head of the zoology department. Bird carcasses were tossed into a tank of dermestid beetles where the insects devour the flesh, leaving the skeletons for Willard and his colleagues to catalog and pack away.

“I never know how much to warn people—the smell isn’t the world’s best,” Willard said as he cracked open the door to the beetle room. Thousands of the insects crawled in tanks, cleaning up everything from a tiny sparrow to an angry-looking bobcat. It smelled like a pet store litter box that hadn’t been cleaned in a few days, but the beetles are good at their assigned job.

“It basically dates to the time of Aristotle,” he said. “People have recognized this is a useful insect for this process.”

Willard’s quiet disposition and subdued passion about his work belie his pivotal role in establishing such a thorough collection.

“Dave is legendary in the bird community,” Bates said. “He has put together a tremendous program here at the museum in terms of salvaging these birds. The reason the collection is in [this] kind of shape is because of all the time and effort Dave has put in over the years.” Bates notes that Willard starts his day at the museum at 5 a.m.

“I’m an early riser,” Willard said with a sheepish chuckle. He unpacks a paper bag full of birds that volunteers picked off the streets. “I’m usually here until 6:00 or 6:30 in the evening. When it’s your hobby, it’s not as devoted as it sounds.”