Teaching Resources

Working With Birds

I am best known for my ‘Working with Birds’ resource on bird specimen preparation methods in photo essay format. This educational material has over 800 PowerPoint slides that can be used as-is in the 18 presentations, or customized by instructors by selecting either a few or several dozen slides and incorporating them into their lecture material.

Over the years, I have received many letters of endorsement from universities and museum around the world as to the utility of these teaching resources.

Szabo, I. 2010-ongoing. Working with birds. Hosted on the University of British Columbia Beaty Biodiversity Museum website, 18 presentations. Link

Cowan Tetrapod Collection's Contributors

With the help of Beaty Biodiversity Museum staff members and volunteers, this new web resource was launched in conjunction with the UN Women and Girls in Science Day (Feb 11, 2021). Link

I initiated this 10-year project in order to highlight and make available the cultural history of the material objects (the bird, mammal, reptile, and amphibian specimens) housed at the Cowan Tetrapod Collection. The aim of this resource is to bring to life the contributors and collectors that helped build, and those that are continuing to contribute to, our collection. When completed, citizen scientists, elementary to graduate students, curatorial and education staff at our museum, plus staff at other museums can utilize this resource to gain a better understanding of not only who our contributors are but also often find answers as to why the decision was made to prepare a specific tetrapod for a ~300 year museum existence.

Bird Specimen Workshop

At part of the 2012 NAOC-V (North American Ornithological Conference) held in Vancouver, I convened the following workshop. As of April 2021, the combined total views for all eleven videos in this series in excess of 62,000. It takes approximately 5.5 hours to watch the series.

Szabo, I, K. Bostwick, C. M. Milensky, H. C. Proctor, M. B. Robbins, E. Scholes III, P. W. Trail, J. Wieczorek and D.K. Tan. 2012. "NAOC-V workshop: Using and Contributing to Avian Collections". UBC Beaty Biodiversity Museum YouTube Channel, uploaded 30 January 2013.