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It's rare, so let's dissect it for science.....

Oh for crying out loud... Lots of things were "standard practice" that are now justifiably forbidden or taboo. Do kingfishers somehow fail to thrive in captivity? I rather doubt it. They could have at least waited for a natural death.
 
Interesting article.

On an slightly related note, we get most of our museum specimens as good condition roadkills. No need to kill anything common when traffic does it for you. :(
 
Do you know of any entomologists that need a series of yellow jackets from north Florida? They are everywhere around here lately.......... So come and get 'em!
 
I started to read an article about that, maybe the same, that Tom Crutchfield posted, with the comment, don't judge until you read this. Well, I didn't get very far, and I am not convinced.
 
It used to be standard practice for ornithologists (and everybody else) to kill the rare thing they found only because there was no other way to prove that you had found it. It fell out of practice more once we had photography, and then fell out a lot more once we had videography. Obviously this guy was more interested in studying its morphology and not behavior. A video instead of a death could have given him both.
 
Yeah, when Connie and I see some bird high up in a tree that we can't identify, we often jokingly say that I should "Audubon" it so we could get a closer look.
 
Do you know of any entomologists that need a series of yellow jackets from north Florida? They are everywhere around here lately.......... So come and get 'em!

Nope. I used to know a guy that would take them hive and all and freeze them and then send them to a lab that did some sort of work with the stinger/poison. I don't think he does that anymore....and he was in Ohio. ;)

It used to be standard practice for ornithologists (and everybody else) to kill the rare thing they found only because there was no other way to prove that you had found it. It fell out of practice more once we had photography, and then fell out a lot more once we had videography. Obviously this guy was more interested in studying its morphology and not behavior. A video instead of a death could have given him both.

My last two county record publications were photographs. Specimens were left alive where we found them.
 
I read a similar article yesterday, all the way to the end, and I disagree with the decision. I don't even agree with the conservation argument for zoos, so obviously I'm not going to support killing it because "that's what scientists do". I think we owe it to wild animals to provide them with the habitat they need and then leave them the eff alone.
 
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