Mike Warren/DN
OFFICER LARRY
Bratt holds one
of the 71
stuffed Puerto
Rican Birds
found last week
on the front
yard of a
Northwest
Lincoln home.
Police are
unsure how the
birds, which
were killed and
preserved in the
1920s, got to
the Lincoln
yard.
71 stuffed birds found
By Jake Bleed
Senior staff writer
In the 20-odd years Larry
Bratt has worked as a police offi
cer, he said he has never worked
a case like the one he worked this
week.
A week ago, Lincoln police
found a black plastic garbage
bag on the lawn of a home in
Northwest Lincoln. Inside were
71 stuffed Puerto Rican birds, all
killed and preserved in the
1920s.
“We don’t know how they
made it here,” Bratt said. “They
don’t have any value except sci
entifically.”
The egrets, herons, sand
pipers and other birds native to
Puerto Rico are now in a police
property room while police look
for their owner.
Each bird is tagged with a
small card giving the bird’s
name, sex and date collected and
the man who apparently collect
ed them all: Parke H. Struthers,
about whom the police know lit
tle.
Born in 1891, Struthers
wrote several articles and books,
including a 1923 article titled
“Observations on the Bird Life
of Porto Rico,” for which he
apparently killed and stuffed the
71 birds.
Later in life, Struthers wrote
two books about New
Hampshire, published in 1967
and 1968.
Bratt said Thomas Labedz, a
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Department of Zoology collec
tions manager, inspected the ani
mals and told police they were
preserved with an arsenic-based
paste designed to keep bugs out.
The birds were then stuffed
with cotton, Bratt said.
Bratt said Labedz told police
several of the birds were either
extinct or endangered.
Labedz refused to comment
on the recovered birds.
Bratt said that legislation
passed since the birds were killed
and stuffed has made keeping
such a collection illegal. Only
game birds can be shot, stuffed
and kept for notoriety.
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