Edit: I have added identifications to each photo in the caption.
The curators at the museum decorate for the holidays by changing around the mounted specimens on display. (These are all pretty old, usually gifted to us – we almost never mount specimens in a lifelike way.) For Thanksgiving, all the specimens on display were edible animals.
For the winter holiday season… quiz! What connects all of the specimens in these pictures?
(And if you’re not into the quiz, here is your holiday/day-before-the-end-of-the-world gift: a video of a sledding crow.)
Northern Hawk Owl
Common Murre
Horned Puffin
Snowy Owl
Snow Goose
Long-tailed Jaeger (not sure why his bill is so orange – possibly an effect of specimen aging?)
Peregrine Falcon
Rough-legged Hawk
Long-tailed Duck
Surf Scoter
Another Snowy Owl
Rock Ptarmigan
I’ll comment with IDs for all of these – and the answer – in a few days, so answer the quiz before then!
Tough Little Birds 
Interesting. First my facetious answer. They are all birds. Then I will say that they are all from North America.
Ooh true, and soooo close! But there is something – something quite similar to your (second, haha) answer – that unites them that makes them vaguely winter-holiday appropriate.
I could have used the Peregrine Falcon picture when I wrote my posts about the “My Side of the Mountain” books.
Do you have an Eskimo Curlew in your collection? I have a 2nd Cousin a few generations removed (Delos Hatch) who was a naturalist in Wisconsin. He captured one in 1903. When I write about him someday I would like to have a picture of one.
According to the online records, we have six Eskimo Curlews, none collected more recently than 1889. All appear to be study skins, however, not mounted display skins like the ones in this post, so they might not make for the greatest photos.
There’s a photo of a display specimen from Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Numenius_borealis_(Harvard_University).JPG
Looking forward to the post about your cousin, he sounds like an interesting guy!
P.S. That link only works if you highlight the whole address and copy/paste it – for some reason the link didn’t like the “.jpg” ending, and the address doesn’t work without it.
They all live in Alaska? I think many of them even live here year-round.
Bravo! They all live in the Arctic for at least part of the year. So they are winter-y birds, at least by the same reasoning that penguins are seen as winter-y birds.
I should have guessed that you would figure it out! You have a slight advantage :-)
lol fun little quiz
Beautiful!!! Great shots!!!
Thanks! They’re certainly easier to photograph than live birds, although not quite as much fun.