\u201cPhil built a lot of really cool stuff that I\u2019d like to preserve,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Organizing species by plumage, the way Unitt did, is among them.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have all the young birds together, all the adult males, all the adult females, each subspecies together,\u201d said Terrill. \u201cAnd that’s really cool for me actually, because each plumage is together.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said he\u2019s excited to add new collections, including cataloging birds with their wings spread. Otherwise, you miss a lot of data, Terrill said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou notice the wings are closed, and there’s a lot of feathers on the wing, and a lot of the interesting stuff that happens with a lot of these, like, different molt strategies,\u201d he said. \u201cThe variation is within the wing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Terrill previously served as the science director for Oregon\u2019s Klamath Bird Observatory and has spent his career studying birds of the West Coast and parts of the Americas. Of all his research, feathers are his muse.<\/p>\n
\u201cStudying the evolution of feathers, especially studying their functions, can tell us a lot about how birds live.\u201d<\/p>\n
In San Diego County, often called the \u201cbirdiest county in America<\/a>,\u201d there are plenty of places to see how birds live.<\/p>\n \u201cRight here in San Diego, we can go up to the mountains, we can go over to the desert, we can go to the coastal chaparral, we can go to the ocean,\u201d said Terrill. \u201cAnd it would be completely different communities of birds. And Baja is very much the same way.\u201d<\/p>\n His new role is also a change for the museum. Ornithology is now its own department at The Nat. Unitt had overseen ornithology and mammalogy. The museum said the change is part of its commitment to studying the hundreds of species recorded in the region.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a really special region for birds,\u201d Terrill said. \u201cA lot of it is because of the diversity.\u201d<\/p>\n With a warming planet, it\u2019s perhaps more important than ever to learn how and where birds fly.<\/p>\n Ryan Terrill, the San Diego Natural History Museum’s new curator of ornithology, holds a Wedge-rumped Storm-Petrel in the department’s collection on Oct. 20, 2026. <\/p>\n \u201cThis one here was collected in Death Valley at Stovepipe Wells, on the sewage pond,\u201d Terrill said while holding a specimen of a tiny seabird called a Wedge-rumped Storm-Petrel. \u201cCertainly not where that bird wants to be, which is why it died. And this is one difference we\u2019re seeing with climate change is these hurricanes starting to make more landfall and bringing these weird, you know, tropical seabirds inland. There’s one of these here, at least one of these heat waves Salton Sea right now.\u201d<\/p>\n Marine heatwaves, including an ongoing one in the Pacific Ocean<\/a>, have been wreaking havoc on seabirds. For months, temperatures all along the West Coast have risen 3 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. On Tuesday, the ocean surface temperature off the La Jolla coast was 73 degrees Fahrenheit, one of the hottest on record for that day, according to the Shore Stations program<\/a> at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.<\/p>\n Those warm ocean temperatures are leading to large bird die-offs, and with a \u201csuper\u201d El Ni\u00f1o winter, Terrill said he expects to see more.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the reasons California is such a seabird hot spot is because we have this cold water current running north to south on the coast and a lot of upwelling,\u201d he said. \u201cSo this deep, cold, nutrient-rich water gets brought to the surface and there’s a lot of food. As the water gets warmer, less of that happens and there’s less food.\u201d<\/p>\n Seabirds have to wander farther to try to find food, he added, as he picked up a Nazca booby, or a large seabird, from the department\u2019s collection. \u201cThis is a bird that was completely unrecorded in California prior to 10 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n Terrill said he hopes to continue his research into how climate change influences birds in Southern California and Baja California. He also plans to build a feather lab at the museum and study where birds fly to grow new feathers in the border region.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat is the evolutionary history of these different strategies birds used for molt,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat are some of the ecological reasons, like why do different birds replace their feathers in different ways? And I realized that there was not a lot of research into those sort of why questions.\u201d<\/p>\n To see some of the museum\u2019s bird collections, he suggests booking a backstage tour. The Nat\u2019s Expedition Baja and Coast to Cactus exhibits also include bird content.<\/p>\n And, he added, he\u2019s also thinking about bringing public bird walks to Balboa Park.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just outside the San Diego Natural History Museum at Balboa Park, Ryan Terrill approaches the nearest tree and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":503534,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[74,76,75],"class_list":["post-503533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503533\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/503534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Ryan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1792628890_684_.jpeg\")
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