KU Leuven, Zoology Museum, Bird collection (Aves)

The collection of the KU Leuven Zoology Museum is currently estimated to contain over 16.000 specimens. Its history is strongly entwined with that of the university and can be traced back to the first half of the 19th century when the remains of the zoological collection of the Old University (1425–1797) were brought together in the Cabinet of Natural History (Cabinet de l'Histoire Naturelle), located in the Collegium Regium. Allied bombing during WWII caused severe damage to the collection, resulting in the loss of many specimens. Additional fragmentation occurred in the late 1960s - early 1970s when half of the collection was transferred to Louvain-la-Neuve following the split of the Catholic University of Leuven into two independent sister universities: the Dutch-speaking Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (currently KU Leuven) and the French-speaking Université Catholique de Louvain (currently UCLouvain). The ornithological collection contains of over 1.990 mounted birds in addition to a large collection of bird clutches. It includes a large donation by the Pas-Wegner family to the Biology Department of KU Leuven in 2020 consisting of 1.324 mounted birds collected by Frans Pas (1935-2020) and his father Jan Pas (1905-1988). Father and son mostly collected specimens in the Campine area across the Dutch-Belgian border, but birds from other areas in Europe (incl. Greenland) are present as well. Their collection furthermore contains a total of over 140 specimens purchased from Danish taxidermists Jørgen Kofoed, Thorkil Duch and Christian Aboe Sørensen, as well as from the German company A. Schlüter KG. In addition to the mounted birds collected by Frans and Jan Pas, the ornithological collection of the Zoology Museum contains around 670 mounted birds dating back to the 19th century and originating from more exotic locations, including Java and South America. Highlights of the ornithological collection include mounted specimens of the extinct Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), Carolina Parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis) and Blue-grey Macaw (Anodorhynchus glaucus), alongside the almost complete set of European birds from the Pas collection. Please note that the current version of this GBIF dataset only contains the mounted birds of the Pas collection.