ChrisR

At long last I am very pleased to say that the OPAL cabinet project is finished! Yesterday I collected the final batch of drawers from Max at the NHM in London and slotted them into place – as in the photo   The observant amongst you will notice that I have only 36 drawers in the cabinets, not 40, but I have bought 4 extra drawers as ’spares’ for working on accessions outside the cabinet.

Many thanks again to everyone at OPAL, the NHM and the AES for helping make this aquisition go so smoothly. The cabinets are already proving to be incredibly useful and will revolutionize the way we work at the Tachinid Recording Scheme 

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Whilst at the NHM last week Max Barclay kindly sorted me out with some new unit trays for the OPAL-funded cabinets. I have spent a few days transferring the collection over to the new trays and this is the result:

I’m sure you’ll agree, they look really professional and they fit much better than the old, mismatched ones. Many thanks to Max for working late and helping to find and sort-out all the boxes etc.

Hopefully I will be able to go back next week and pick up the remainder of the drawers to finish off the project completely.

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I have just spent a really fun day with 2 friends of mine, Becca & John, driving up to the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London to pick up the OPAL-funded insect cabinets!! Max & Howard were away in Peru on a NHM jolly but Paul Brown stood in for them and looked after us very well.

C&D had delivered the cabinets in the previous week and they were there ready for us to collect on arrival. Sadly the supply of drawers had temporarily dried up and the new unit-trays still hadn’t arrived from the suppliers so I can’t fit-out the second cabinet or move my collection over yet but I will collect those in December or January.

Once we had loaded up the van we went off to meet Erica McAlister (Diptera curator) & Silvio Nihei, a very eminent “tachinid-ologist” who is based in the Sao Paulo University Zoological Museum. Silvio is over here working on the types in the NHM tachinid collection, recording them and selecting material to take back with him to Sao Paulo. I gave him some of my French Guianan specimens and in return he will give back as much information as he can to me. He seemed very impressed with them and thinks that I have a few very interesting things in there – including possibly a new species of Borgmeiermyia!

Then after lunch I called in at the Angela Marmont Centre (AMC) to thank Lucy & John at OPAL for their help and funding and let them know how the project was progressing. Lucy showed me round the AMC, which looks like a superb resource for anyone interested in British wildlife and I passed on a few ideas that I have had for the next year’s funding round.

Then we all piled back into the van and came home for a bit of furniture removal, cabinet making & a slap-up curry! The cabinets went together fairly easily with a lot of help from Becca & John and I slotted in the first batch of 20 drawers, stood back and admired them … they look superb!! 

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The 20 NHM drawers

The funding hasn’t come through yet but I always planned to make a contribution myself so last Friday I bought the first 20 drawers from Max Barclay at the Natural History Museum in London! I didn’t have to buy them so quickly but I wanted to make a tangible start to the project and it coincided very nicely with my girlfriend wanting a trip up to London so … I am now the proud owner of 20 hardwood drawers – glass-topped and unlined.

Max (curator of beetles and one of the new faces of the Darwin Center) also kindly agreed to provide me with as many secondhand large unit-trays as I needed – they are slightly short but in all other respects fit the drawers perfectly. I also have an option to buy new unit-trays through the museum – they’re not cheap though so I am counting my pennies and trying to use secondhand as much as possible.

Unit trays are quite a problem because, although you might think that a ‘unit’ implies a standard size, there are multiple sizes. Oxford University Museum and Edinburgh have standardized on a wide ‘accession-type’ drawer; while the Natural History Museum & Cardiff Museum have standardized on a narrower, squarer design of drawer. There are other sizes too and the whole thing screams out for a revision but these massive museums have so many drawers already that it would cost a fortune to rehouse them, not to mention the years of work to transfer specimens into new drawers … sadly it will never happen.

A close-up of a drawer with unit-trays

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Earlier this year The Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) network announced that they had made grants available to UK natural history societies and recording schemes. OPAL are a multipartner organization that aims “to create and inspire a new generation of nature-lovers by getting people to explore, study, enjoy and protect their local environment.” They are funded by the Big Lottery Fund.

Traditionally funding has been very scarce for amateur entomologists so I was very keen to apply for some – despite the rather pesimistic grumblings I got from other entomologists. Coincidentally I had been experimenting with unit-tray drawers and could see that this was the way I should be keeping my expanding collection so I had an immediate project to be funded – to rehouse the Tachinid Recording Scheme’s collection into cabinets with drawers fitted-out for unit-trays.

I did some research and the choice was between modern, steel cabinets; hand-made wooden cabinets; or second-hand Hill’s units from ex-museum stock. In the end I went for the steel cabinets (new) fitted with recycled, ex-museum, hardwood drawers (from the NHM) with unit trays (new but also from the NHM). The steel cabinets are sealed units and should provide a really pest-proof primary barrier against museum/carpet beetle (Anthrenus), which is common in most houses, while the tried & trusted hardwood drawers will provide a secondary barrier. This should mean that I need to use the minimum of insecticides/chemicals against pests – something that I am keen to do because I have to breath the air around these cabinets on a daily basis!

There was a little problem with the minimum requirements that all applicants must meet, but Lucy Carter at OPAL was very helpful and made it very clear that we were the kind of organization that they wanted to support. So, after a little negociation, OPAL changed their rules to allow me to apply through another society that fulfilled their requirements – such as the Amateur Entomologist’s Society (AES). Dafydd Lewis (the AES Secretary) was very helpful and agreed to support my application so after a few evenings of work pulling together costings and writing out my application form we got the application in just in time to meet the July 31st deadline! I waited nervously until a few days ago when I received the message I had been waiting for from Lucy Carter to say that they had approved my grant for the full/maximum amount allowed – 2000 pounds!! This money will be suplimented by 650 pounds of my own money to form the project funding.

This was really great news and marks a quantum leap in the way the recording scheme will work from now on. Instead of storing all specimens in jumbled store boxes with all the attendant problems (bad organization & greater risk of damage/pests) we will store our main collection in state-of-the-art cabinets. Every species will be catalogued in a logical way and it will be easy to find anything I need for comparisson. At the moment the palearctic collection fills 11 non-standard (wide) drawers so in a standard cabinet I am expecting it to fill at least 15 drawers (with expansion space in each drawer) and the new cabinets will give me a total of 40 drawers. This sounds a lot of space but actually I am sure that I will fill this over the next 5-10 years because I receive at least 300 specimens from foreign donors every year.

So, although I haven’t received the money yet, I would still like to thank everyone at OPAL for their very generous grant and the AES for their support in the application process!

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