town of Planada, near Merced, where they continued to study natural history and provide specimens of great scientific value. Most of these later specimens are housed at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. There is also a substantial collection at San Jose State University. There is a smaller collection of mounted specimens on exhibit at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, in the town of Pacific Grove, California, as well as a permanent exhibit devoted to the life and work of Rollo Beck. Contributions to science The work of Beck and other early ornithologists was undertaken primarily to document biodiversity before it was lost forever without being recorded, and to understand the evolution and ecology of organisms from the regions visited during the expeditions. The work of Beck and others brought an awareness of and a catalog of regional biodiversity that is essential to have in order to do modern conservation. Much of what we know about western U.S. birds and Pacific ornithology – from Bent's "Life Histories of North American Birds" to Murphy's "Oceanic Birds of South America" - rests on the fieldwork of Rollo Beck and other early ornithologists. Some believe that our understanding of global biodiversity and the practice of modern conservation biology, much of which seems to be anti-collecting, owes much to these early collectors who worked so diligently to document and preserve voucher specimens in museums. Controversy Human history is replete with examples of island species that were being persecuted by farmers, ranchers, hunters, and sailors; were being harvested unsustainably; and were being decimated by introduced species. By comparison, scientific collectors were relatively few in number and seldom took large numbers of specimens of any one species, but competition between museums and private collectors to acquire the rarest of the rare put disproportionate collecting pressure on species whose populations were already teetering on the brink for other reasons. Beck and others in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were responding to published statements that "time was running out" and that species should be collected and documented in museum collections "before it is too late." In the absence of a conservation framework and infrastructure, Beck and others engaged in what can be called "salvage collecting," which hastened the extinctions and which does not correspond to modern conservation thinking. Rollo