Birds

Museum as an aviary 

Rosa Dyer's PhD research has focused on exploring relationships between people and birds through museum objects. During her Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with Birbeck, University of London, and the Pitt Rivers Museum, Rosa Dyer has produced and delivered in-person tours highlighting feathered friends and people's relationships to them, at this museum and also including a few birds on display at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History that sits just next door.

 

This webpage brings together content created for public audiences to share her doctoral research. Rosa also contributed content for the Museum's 360 degree Virtual Tour launched in 2024, with some of this content also featuring on gallery interactive on the first floor of the Museum for from Summer 2025 to early 2026, next to a case themed on Bird related objects. 

Here you can encounter various avian varieties in different ways, including a conversational podcast series and through two digital versions of these tour experiences recreated as a narrative multimedia guided virtual tour and a bird-spotting map interactive below: 

Find out more about Rosa Dyer on her researcher page: Rosa Dyer Researcher

 

 Listen 

Rosa Dyer collaborated with Claudia Hirtenfelder for Season 6 of The Animal Turn podcast series. The first episode released in March 2026 looks at the Huia, a New Zealand songbird whose dimorphic beaks garnered the attention of science, fashion, and empire. Rosa uses the museum object to ask questions about how different knowledge systems value animals. 
 

https://www.theanimalturnpodcast.com/museumobjects

 

Visit The Animal Turn podcast on their website here: Season 6 | Animals and Museum Objects/Collections

 

 Guided Virtual Tour 

This virtual guided tour recreates the content of physical tours delivered across the two museums between 2022 and 2025. The tours were delivered to a range of audiences, including members of the general public attending Late Night events and Research Spotlights, members of University of Oxford societies participating in termly seminar programmes, ornithological research groups, visiting researchers and undergraduate students.

Experience the tour: Birds Between Nature and Culture 

 

 

View the above tour in full screen at the Shorthand weblink here: Birds Between Nature and Culture

Rows of museum drawers with one lower drawer open revealing colourful featherwork items on display in bespoke foam mounts.

 Bird-spotting in the Museum

Journey by map to discover some of the birds on display on the First Floor of the Pitt Rivers Museum that featured in Rosa's original tours. These bird's eye floorplans also show how the Pitt Rivers Museum is positioned behind the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. 

Some of the taxidermy birds on display at the Museum of Natural of History are also highlighted here to show the connections and help reflect on how context can also shape the stories that we tell about birds - and people's relationships to them - in museum displays. 

This experience has a vertical layout designed for an in-gallery screen at the Museum - it contains the same tour stories as the Virtual Tour above if you prefer to read content as laid out above. 

 

https://view.genially.com/69e5e2ffc9fb0ffa7dd2c4e5

 

 

Additional resources

Recorded Online Roundtable

In 2022 Rosa co-organised an online roundtable event exploring how Indigenous artists from Brazil have engaged with feathered and bird-related museum collections to discuss issues of Indigenous rights, climate change and biocultural diversity loss.

This event was supported by the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies at Birkbeck University of London and featured as part of the Taking Care project programme. Discussion contributors include Professor Luciana Martins, Glicéria Jesus da Silva known as Célia Tupinambá, Joāo Pacheco de Oliveira, and Thandiwe Wilson, with live interpretation provided by Cecilia, Aline, and Carla from MULTILATERAL. 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/embed/p-eMxVH3caQ?si=_FjImJrfVqT-1g_k

 

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to those who have contributed to this work, including all those who took part in the in-person tours and provided helpful feedback. Thank you to Glicéria Tupinambá, Jessica Tupinambá, Jefferson and the Shuar community for sharing their knowledge and expertise. Also to Claudia and the Animal Turn Podcast.