Thanks Ed and Helen for calling this to the attention of MD birders. The Baltimore Bird Club has daily interaction with the City and the Cylburn Arboretum Association (CAA) and we will be watching this process carefully. It makes sense for the City to find out what these properties are worth........and get an idea of how much it would cost to restore them. In the case of Cylburn, both the Mansion (where the MOS/BBC offices and storage are) and the Carriage House (Nature Museum) are in desperate need of restoration. We are on a task force with the City and the CAA to see what it would take to restore and expand the Nature Museum in the Carriage House......estimated @ $2 million. I can't imagine how much more would be needed to restore the Mansion. The City doesn't have the money and it's hard for private groups (for example, the CAA) to raise capital unless they have actual control of the buildings in question. Cylburn was fortunate a few
years ago to get a $1 million donation from a local philanthropist (and a charter member of MOS) to build a state of the art "green" visitor center (unfortunately there wasn't enough money to install bird-safe glass - but we are working on that). The BBC has installed an eBird Trail Tracker in the visitor center so people can identify what birds they have seen and enter data into eBird.
In the meantime, we are keeping track of what is going on, both with the CAA and the City (Baltimore has challenging politics) and will continue to do so. Right now MOS/BBC has a task force working on inventorying and evaluating the collections we have at Cylburn and the MOS sanctuaries. I think people would be surprised and impressed by the extent of the collections - natural history specimens, books, records, etc. - that we have. And we have the same problems that the City does with these sites........not enough money to properly curate and maintain them. Items that do not fit into the mission of the MOS/BBC, may be deacquisitioned to appropriate organizations. Currently we are working with the Towson University Biodiversity Center on cataloging and databasing the extensive egg collections from the 19th century. We are developing a Collections Policy and eventually hope to have a volunteer Librarian/Curator to manage all this. If anyone
wants to volunteer to help us.....we really need people to help inventory the mammal and shell collections....or has questions, please contact me.
Karen
MOS/BBC Cylburn Liaison
Karen Morley
kdmorley at yahoo dot com
________________________________
From: Ed Boyd <>
To:
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 8:49 AM
Subject: [MDOSPREY] Baltimore's home to the MOS possibly to be sold or leased by Baltimore City
This article was in yesterday's Baltimore Sun and I'm surprised that it hasn't already been mentioned. Along with 14 other historic sites and landmarks, Baltimore's Cylburn Mansion, Arboretum and Park are being considered for possible sale or lease by the city of Baltimore. Although the on-line article doesn't mention it, the printed version stated that the park was being included with the mansion for consideration. The longtime home to the MOS, loss of Cylburn as a public facility would require the MOS to likely seek out a new facility for its operations, museum, meetings and records storage. That will be the responsibility of the board, of course, but I thought Marylanders would be interested in this if it had passed by on their radar yesterday.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-historic-properties-20120319,0,7132936.story
Ed Boyd
Chestnut Hill Cove, MD
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