New Yorker article about ornithological fraud

Thanks to a tip from birdingonthe.net, those of us who don't get New Yorker magazine can read the May 29 article about Michigan State University professor Pamela Rasmussen's confirmation of massive fraud by Col. Richard Meinertzhagen.

The article mentions the controversy about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker on page 53, and then it gets juicy on page 54.

Based on an analysis of several preparers' styles, Knox concluded that at least two redpoll skins which Meinertzhagen claimed to have shot in Blois, France, on January 17, 1953, were probably stolen from a series of birds in the Natural History Museum, which had been collected by Richard Bowdler Sharpe decades earlier, in Hanwell, Middlesex, on November 17, 1884. Meinertzhagen had replaced the tags on the birds' feet with new tags, containing false data about where and when they had been collected.

Side note: Isn't it lovely what the Internet allows us to share?