Frederick Sheldon, the LSU Museum of Natural Science museum director, opened a drawer to find a black-hooded oriole among three rows of brightly colored birds whose feet were tagged with miniscule handwriting.”We don’t have much space here at the museum for our collections,” said Sheldon, genetic resources and ornithology curator. “We make do with what we have. There is so much the visitors of this museum don’t see beyond the exhibits.”Sheldon said most museum visitors are children on field trips or families on school vacations.”While my favorite exhibit is the bird collection, most people come to see the original Mike the Tiger,” Sheldon said.Located at 119 Foster Hall, the majority of the museum’s exhibits are dioramas created in the 1950s, Sheldon said.The newest exhibit, “Experience Antarctica,” was the first new exhibit in 50 years and was begun by Sophie Warny, museum palynology and education curator.Warny said she created the Antarctica exhibit from a research project funded by a National Science Foundation grant.”You’d better love your job as a curator or you’d be miserable,” Warny said. “It’s a lot of hours and a lot of grant writing.”Warny, no stranger to hard work, difficult research and grant writing, said her biggest accomplishment as a curator was discovering seven new species and a genus of dinoflagellates from sediment samples in Morocco.”As a scientist, it is your dream to discover something,” Warny said. “Each time you look at a new project, it’s like a mystery.”Curators of the LSU Museum of Natural Science train graduate students and conduct research on their areas of expertise as well as accumulate specimens for the museum’s vast collections.As an ornithology curator, Sheldon is the overseer of the top bird collection in the nation and the head of the program that has discovered more new birds in the last 30 years than anyone else in the world.”Stuff is happening here,” Sheldon said. “It’s an exciting adventure. Without it, I wouldn’t know what to do with my life. While this is a museum, the most active part of my job is the same as the mission of the museum: to acquire, preserve and research the specimen in the collections to generate new knowledge.”A large part of working as a curator for the museum is training graduate students and some dedicated undergraduate students to be professors and to perform research, Sheldon said.”We make them go out in the field and do a 19th century exploratory adventure, usually to the tropics of Borneo,” Sheldon said. “They collect animals and specimen in the field, return to Louisiana State University and perform 21st century cutting-edge molecular genetics. They do everything they have to do for a museum, but they know everything to be an up-to-date researcher.” Sheldon also manages the day-to-day operations of the museum, a component of the Louisiana Museum of Natural History, but he said his favorite part of being a curator is getting to be outdoors on the expeditions for species.”We’re exposed to tons of diseases and dangers on our adventures,” Sheldon said. “We travel, but we don’t stay in the fancy hotels and stay on the beach. It’s nice though. We get to see the sights, the natural sights. It’s beautiful out there.”He didn’t know he wanted to be an ornithology curator his whole life, Sheldon said. He never knew he could make a living out of his bird watching habit.”It just kind of happened,” Sheldon said. “I’m not like a lot of people that grew up collecting plants, animals and bugs. I never knew I could make a career out of it.”Sheldon said he took a class on birds as an undergraduate and got really interested in bird watching. He attempted to get a job after college but couldn’t because of the recession, so he decided to go to graduate school for ornithology.”I live to be outside, so I’m glad I went back to school,” Sheldon said. “I go at least twice a year to the tropics, mostly in Borneo, a southeastern island in Asia, and to be outside. It’s not as effective in gathering fame in the scientific world, but it sure is a lot more fun.”—-Contact Catie Vogels at [email protected]