THE WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD: ‘the weirdest bird's-nesting expedition that has ever been or ever will be’.

Presented by Douglas G. D. Russell, Curator: Bird Group, the British Natural History Museum at Tring.

Wednesday, March 21st at 7:00 pm.

In the darkness of the southern winter of 1911, three men lay exposed to the elements in the tattered remnants of their shelter, 900 feet up the side of Mount Terror in Antarctica. For days, the blizzard raged around them: it seemed they had little hope of survival, but they had what they came for. In pitch darkness, they had walked over 70 miles in 19 days, suffering temperatures that dropped below -70; but they had found a way to the Emperor penguins colony and had three complete, though frozen eggs. It was not the eggs themselves, but the embryos they contained that they considered so precious.

The story of why these men risked their lives to the ‘utmost extremity of human endurance’ is one of the most iconic in Ornithology and these specimens remain some of the most poignant in the Natural History Museum (NHM) collections. The ornithological collections at Tring are amongst the largest in the world and the most comprehensive. There are about 700,000 bird skins representing well over 90% of known species, with types for over 8,000 taxa. The collection includes many extinct and endangered species and a wealth of historic material including specimens collected by Darwin, Audubon and others. There are about 800,000 eggs, some 17,000 specimens preserved in spirit, over 16,000 skeletons and 4,000 nests.

The museum also houses one of the finest ornithological libraries in the world with over 80,000 volumes, and including unpublished manuscripts, field notebooks and paintings.