In 1929, the arrival of Robert Thomas Moore (1882-1958) to Los Angeles was splashed onto the pages of the Los Angeles Times. Moore, his wife Margaret, and their young daughter Marilynn had just returned from an expedition to Ecuador. There, Moore had scaled two of Ecuador’s most fearsome volcanoes, Mount Chimborazo and Mount Sangay. Tales of derring-do were not all Moore brought back. Packed neatly into boxes were 3,000 bird specimens, which Moore and local collectors had spent months acquiring.

The motive for Moore’s move to California from Maine was ostensibly business. His Borestone Mountain Company was well known for breeding silver foxes, and the climate of the San Gabriel Mountains was gaining a reputation for providing them ideal conditions. But after he arrived, Moore devoted more of his time to another of his pursuits, ornithology. An affiliate of Caltech, Moore fell in with a burgeoning group of local ornithologists interested in bird taxonomy (or the describing and naming of biodiversity), including another Caltech affiliate, Donald R. Dickey, who by that time had amassed the largest privately held bird collection in the United States. When Dickey died suddenly in 1932, and Moore’s attempts to take control of his collection were thwarted, he decided to build his own collection that would rival and surpass Dickey’s.

To help him realize this vision, Moore turned to Chester Converse Lamb (1882-1965), who had been a fixture in Los Angeles ornithology from his youth. In young adulthood, he moved to Berkeley along with a cadre of naturalists under the mentorship of the naturalist prodigy Joseph Grinnell. Lamb had just finished years of grueling collections for Grinnell across the Baja peninsula, but parted ways with Berkeley on ill terms when he lost an eye in an accident and was denied a disability claim.

The fruits of Moore and Lamb’s collaboration were almost immediately apparent. In 1935, Moore trumpeted the discovery of a spectacular new species, the Tufted Jay (Cyanocorax dickeyi), which had somehow evaded Western knowledge through expeditions that had dissected Mexico for centuries prior.

In 1951, Moore moved his growing collection from his house in Pasadena to Occidental College, where it became The Moore Laboratory of Zoology. With the world’s largest collection of Mexican bird specimens, its legacy continues to reveal itself through scientific research – now focusing on DNA – and public outreach, as well as conservation efforts that directly benefit the very species that make up the collection.