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If you are a bird watcher, or you love learning about birds, the National Institute of Culture and History hopes that you will be interested in visiting their latest exhibit which was opened today.

It’s called the Bird Taxidermy Exhibit, and it’s a project on which NICH and the Museum collaborated with the Belize Audubon Society, and Dr. Steven Zitzer. He’s a taxidermist, which basically means that he preserves the bodies of animals, and in his case, birds. He’s been collecting different species of birds in Belize, which were knocked down by motorists. Rather than allowing these animals to decompose, he’s preserved their bodies for artistic and educational purposes. 

He’s created pieces from over 20 bird species found in Belize, and this morning, NICH and the Audubon Society opened an exhibit at the Museum. They invited the press for the opening ceremony, and 7News spoke with the Director of the Museum about this unusual entry for the general public viewing pleasure:

“The exhibit is the birds of Belize; it's a collaboration between 3 parties, Dr. Zitcher who did the stuffing of the birds, the Belize Audubon Society who is celebrating their 50th anniversary and the Museum of Belize. If you look at the work dormy it means skin, so what it is, is just the preservation of bird skin with the feathers in tacked. Dr. Zitcher approached us with a collection of birds, it was just his hobby. He would stuff these birds and he works with the Belize raptor center and he approached the house of culture in San Ignacio 3 years with his birds and we put it up as a small display. When he approached us again and we sought out a partner in the Belize Audubon Society to collaborate for this exhibit. It doesn't feature the entire amount of birds we have in Belize because that would full up the entire museum but we have about 23 different species, all that Dr. Zitcher had to collect and mostly hit by vehicles on the roadside and so on and so he stuffed a number of toucans, parrots, barnolds and so and so. You will see it in the exhibit upstairs."

"There are 30 species in the exhibits that represents less than 10 percent, there's about 600 different kinds of birds in Belize. These represents the one that cross highways and are mostly hit by cars, so they are birds that get hit by cars mostly and it's a lot of bigger ones because there are the ones that people see on the side of the road. It's not really representative of that much over all diversity but it's what gets injured the most and I always have new stuff to work with, so I'm adding new things to the exhibit and I will always just work really with birds because stuffing animals is a whole different technique and I prefer not to do that."

"As you walk through this museum display, you'll see that they tell a story, they tell of story of where they live. What they eat, where you can find them and even their death which is untimely in all of them but the reality is they tell the story and they tell the story of Belize and the rich biodiversity that we have. Each bird in itself is an educator and we have selected this display to be collaborated with the museum as we know that it would be highly visited. We have school kids our largest population is in Belize City, we have visitors. The original date for this actually has changed a few times because we realise that cruise tourism, this actually a huge attraction to the country. Everyone who brings a guest I hope that they will bring them to the museum for this sampling of what Belize has."

The exhibit runs for the next 6 months.