Curator of Birds

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is Canada’s premier museum, featuring a comprehensive collection of Art, Culture and Nature. Among the top 10 cultural institutions in North America, ROM has a world-class collection of 18 million artworks, cultural objects, and natural history specimens, featured in 40 gallery and exhibition spaces. ROM’s mission is to transform lives by helping people to understand the past, make sense of the present, and come together to shape a shared future.

The Museum is known globally for expanding the boundaries of knowledge and presenting that knowledge in new and innovative ways within the intersecting worlds of art, culture, and nature.

ROM’s vision is to become a distinctly twenty-first century museum, one that is globally recognized for expanding the boundaries of knowledge, fostering innovation in presenting that knowledge, and increasing public relevance within the intersecting worlds of art, culture, and nature.

To realize this vision, ROM has embarked on a new strategic direction that builds on its strengths and capabilities, while evolving in step with a rapidly changing world. The Museum is becoming an ever more outward-facing institution, focused on playing a central role in community and cultural life, while increasing artistic, cultural, and scientific impact both nationally and internationally. ROM’s extensive exhibition schedule and public programs attract approximately 190,000 students and a total average attendance of more than one million visitors annually.

As the country’s preeminent field research institution and an international leader in collections-based scientific discoveries, ROM builds and shares global collections, creates knowledge, inspires learning, encourages gathering, and sparks exchange on topics that matter to people and communities.

Situated in the most diverse major city in the world, Toronto, within a province and country known for pluralism, openness, and global perspectives, ROM is well positioned for the future and for an even larger role on the world stage, encouraging greater engagement through inclusion and transdisciplinary thinking. Learn more about ROM’s Strategic Direction.

An ecologically diverse group with more than 11,000 species, birds are a vital component of Earth’s biodiversity. Birds are integral in ecosystems around the world, playing key roles in seed dispersal, pest control, pollination, and nutrient cycling, among many others. Birds and their behaviours have long influenced human cultures, providing inspiration in art, literature, and music, as well as in agriculture.

Additionally, birds contribute to tourism economies and are central to many conservation efforts aimed at protecting biodiversity. Sadly, bird biodiversity loss is a growing concern, reflecting the broader declines in ecosystems worldwide. Many bird species are facing increasing threats from climate change, pollution, and human activities like habitat destruction and urbanization. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), nearly 13% of bird species are currently threatened with extinction, with over 1,500 species classified as vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered.

Protecting bird diversity is essential for maintaining ecological balance and ensuring the health of the planet.

As Canada’s largest museum and most highly visited cultural institution, ROM is ambitious in its unique capacity to facilitate discovery and awareness of the fundamental role of birds in global ecosystems and human culture. The Museum’s Birds collection is world-class and global in scope, comprising more than 200,000 specimens, including the world’s largest collection of bird skeletons and globally significant holdings of frozen tissues and specimens of recently extinct species.

This diverse trove of skins, skeletons, nests and eggs, and tissues from species adapted to varied habitats and geographic regions is an invaluable resource, used regularly by local and international researchers seeking to document and understand bird diversity. This exceptional resource supports ROM public…