I have to admit how completely tickled I was to go into the Hall of Birds as construction was going on and see the tree of life that me and my friends and colleagues worked on for so long featured so prominently, creatively, and beautifully in the hall. I never thought that I could see so directly the impact of my work on what we tell our visitors about birds. Getting into this kind of detail never seemed possible--this is way too complicated everyone says, nobody understands trees. But there that tree is for all our visitors to see, and now with this web site for the whole world to see. The cleaned glass on the cases and all the cleaned glass eyeballs on the specimens help too.
I have to thank the people in our Exhibitions Department for working with John and myself to take what we do and make it digestable and visual and interesting.
Awesome!