Exhibition: Birds: Brilliant and Bizarre

Unravel the epic story of birds, discover the secrets to their success and learn some of their surprising and often shocking tactics for survival.



Birds are the soundtrack to our mornings, they soar through our skies and swoop around our streets, but how well do we really know our feathered friends?

A hoot for all the family, our new exhibition invites you into their world like never before! Swirl around with a murmuration, chirp along with the dawn chorus and see if you have the stomach to sniff a stinky seabird egg. From feeling their heartbeats to seeing through their eyes, get to know our beaked buddies better.

Meet the oldest bird in the world the so-called wonderchicken, find out what a pigeon has in common with a ferocious T. rex and discover how these winged wonders managed to survive the mass extinction that wiped out all the other dinosaurs.

Today there’s more than 11,000 species. From pigeons to penguins, ostriches to ospreys, birds live on every single continent on Earth, so what’s the secret to their success? From sucking blood to bathing in acid, our feathered friends have found surprising, clever and downright freaky ways to survive.

But the way we live our lives is beginning to affect how they live theirs. As the effects of a changing world come home to roost, can we find a way to take them under our wing and create a future where they can soar once more?