He found the scarcely known Blyth's Kingfisher in Burma, he claimed. This magpie is one that Meinertzhagen stole from the museum and re-labelled as one of his own. And he's even made up a little story about how he collected it. He's written on the label, "On a yak, one of a pair." And to me, this conjures up an image of him sort of in Himalayas raising his gun to shoot this, this small bird off the back of a moving object. So he's a dead shot with a gun. It's fantastically glamorous and completely untrue. Meinertzhagen disguised the true origins of countless specimens. It's now believed that up to a third of his collections are hoaxes. This leaves, of course, a very large proportion of the Meinertzhagen collection which is almost certainly entirely genuine. The difficulty with Meinertzhagen is detecting the good from the bad, not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.


这只喜鹊也是迈纳茨哈根，从博物馆偷取后贴上自己标签的。他甚至还捏造了收集该标本的小故事，他在标签上写到，"栖于一头牦牛上一对中的一只"。由此我想象出这样一个场景，在喜马拉雅山上，他举枪射击。这只栖息在奔跑的牦牛背上的小鸟，他还真是个神枪手啊。这太富传奇色彩了，但是全然不可能，迈纳茨哈根掩盖了，不计其数标本的真正起源。如今我们相信他三分之一以上的收藏品均为假造。当然，排除伪造标本后，迈纳茨哈根的大部分收藏，还是真实可信的。处理此人收藏的困难之处在于，如何取其精华，去其糟粕，避免真伪不辨，丢弃珍本。