You just have to be a wildlife museum scientist to appreciate the adventure that Ron Cole and Andy Engilis experience on their scavenging trips to refuge freezers. From the best of the roadkill and donated carcasses of mammals, birds and fish from all over the world, the two biologists are building what they consider to be one of the biggest wildlife teaching museums in the nation. Although the collection consists of more than 12,000 dead specimens, the Museum of Wildlife and Fisheries Biology is really a tool devoted to the ecology and conservation of living animals. "I like to think of the museum as a library," says Cole, who started the collection from scratch in 1972. "Rather than paper and pages, we document a tremendous amount of information with our museum collection." The museum, located in a 1,300-square-foot room on the first floor of Academic Surge, is used as a lab by students from the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Conservation Biology. Classes from other units on campus such as avian science, and evolution and ecology, also take advantage of the resource as do students from other university campuses and area K-12 schools as well as environmental researchers. "I didn't realize how unique the breadth of our collections is and how rare it is for students to handle them until I heard from our students who went on to graduate school at other campuses," Cole says. "They called back and said, 'You ought to be proud of what you've developed. It's a far cry better than what we've got here.' " The museum's collection includes about 5,000 birds, more than 4,000 mammals and almost 3,000 containers of fish stored in fluid. Differences in age, sex and season On any given day, you'll find students inspecting a row of bird or mammal skins, often all of the same species but demonstrating the differences of sex, age, the season they died in and the range of individuality found within any group. UC Davis encourages undergraduates and others to handle the specimens -- also known as "study skins." "A bird in the hand is better than a thousand pictures," Engilis quips. In this high-tech era when online biology courses substitute three-dimensional pictures for real animals, an "old-fashioned" museum filled with study skins continues to offer advantages for budding biologists, Cole maintains. "There are two dimensions. The first is that there is a lot of variability within a species that you can find in our museum. This is true in birds, which have four to five plumages in a life cycle, and for mammals, which have seasonal pelages. Secondly, on line you can't assess the structure, texture and features of wildlife," he says. "Biologists are not adequately trained if they don't know this." Cole, who officially retired on Wednesday, held a staff position with the department since he was hired in 1965 as a contract researcher and lab technician. "I keenly love what I do. But it's time to turn the reins over to a successor with new ideas and energy," he says. Nevertheless, you'll likely find him on campus most days at his new desk, squirreled away in a corner of the museum, where he volunteers his time instructing student interns in the art of taxidermy and lending his expertise gained from 40 years of museum work to anyone who needs it. Member of the local biologist network Engilis, the new museum scientist, is primarily a bird specialist but is right at home working with mammals. Hired in January to assume Cole's position, he's a longtime campus friend and member of the local wildlife-biologist network. He graduated from UC Davis in 1982 with a degree in avian science. He also left the campus with a strong tie to Cole, who was his mentor during his undergraduate days. Over the ensuing years, the two have participated in a number of research and educational expeditions to Latin America, Australia and Papua New Guinea, as well as in North America. Engilis continued on to graduate school at the University of Hawaii and then to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu before taking a job in 1989 as a regional biologist for Ducks Unlimited. For the past decade, he coordinated wetland restoration activities and conducted field research in Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and California (including the Cosumnes River Preserve), as well as in Mexico, New Zealand and Australia. "It's like a homecoming to become the new museum scientist," Engilis says. That homecoming allows him to pursue an abiding interest in the wildlife along Putah Creek, which has contributed to the core of the Wildlife Museum's collection. Like Cole, over the years Engilis has ambled up and down the creek looking for wildlife. One year, he and a friend started at the source of the creek in Lake County on Cobb Mountain and drove the length of the Coast Range stream, counting 140 bird species during that very long day. "Putah Creek is very rich in animals and birds," Engilis concludes. The museum's challenge Gathering specimens remains a challenge for the museum, which has holes to fill in its collection. "Our objective is to expand our geographic and seasonal representation through international collaboration and collecting expeditions," Engilis said. That's why he and Cole made a road trip to the Monterey Peninsula in January to find more coastal bird species. They visited the freezers at wildlife refuges and sanctuaries in the area, including ones maintained by the California Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Because international migratory bird laws and state and federal laws protect birds or mammals from illegal possession and interstate trade, the museum has secured a number of permits to collect and transport dead wildlife. However, such collection is illegal without permits, Engilis says, and other people who find bird or mammal carcasses should leave them alone. Nevertheless, many dead animals are brought to wildlife refuges by people who find them along the road. The birds and mammals are tagged with information about where they were found and then placed in the freezer. For Cole and Engilis, finding gems among frozen carcasses in January was like a biologist's treasure hunt. "We just told people we wanted to pick through it. By the time we were finished, we had filled our camper with ice chests of frozen animals," Engilis says.