Birger Persson lived between 1909 and 1997. He was one of the major beetle collectors in the inland of northern Sweden. In his youth, Birger was curious of all the plants that he saw wherever he was. All the beautiful flowers he found while tending cattle in the forest made him long for finding out their names and living conditions.
 

Birger pressed dried plants when he was young in order to learn how to recognize them, but as time went by he became less interested in drying them for his herbarium, or to quote from the documents that he left at his death: "Just think of the Calypso orchid, a small, insignificant plant. So small and insignificant that a person without an eye for the beauties of the forest will never get a chance to see it." He proceeded to collecting beetles, and he donated his valuable collection to the ForestryMuseum in Lycksele.

Birger was a forest keeper at SCA, and thus the forest was his working place. His duties also included keeping track of information and describing vegetation and habitats. He focused on the small species that were hard to define. Birger used collection methods that gave him a wide range of animals, out of which he then selcted the species that interested him at the moment.
Photo: VÄSTERBOTTENS-KURIREN, Tuesday, July 10, 1984


He also enjoyed keeping contact with the beetle experts of the country. He sent a lot of material for inspection. In his youth he was assisted, mainly by Anton Jansson. Later in life Stig Lundberg was of great help. The scientific value of the collection is his meticulous survey of the beetle fauna around Umgransele in the inland of the County of Västerbotten.


Photo: VÄSTERBOTTENS-KURIREN, Tuesday, July 10, 1984

In 1979 he bought a bag net for his car which was often used. During the period of 1979-1991 there are for instance 58 defined instances noted as "car bag net catching along the Barjas road", a forest road network southwest of Umgransele. Birgers collection of about 20 000 beetles is a very important contribution to the knowledge of the northern Swedish inland beetle fauna. In his collection there are 1 357 species from the Lycksele Sami country, and just over 80% of the known beetle fauna. According to his own documents Birger has also made 280 new provincial findings and thus expanded the provincial number of known species by 17%.


A notable finding, however, is the last specimen in Sweden of the now extinct longhorn beetle: Acmaeops smaragdula. It was caught on June 17 in 1946 on a plant, a Russian vine, at the railway station at Umgransele. Birger probably caught the beetle when he was out to collect his mail.




More information about the beetle collections

Birger's beetle collection which is kept at the Forestry Museum in Lycksele is now overhauled and documented, with the purpose of making the material accessible. It can be found at the Forestry Museum in Lycksele, Tel. 0046-950 379 45. It is available for display by agreement. The information about the beetles is also available in EXCEL format after contact with the museum. Information about the coordinate fixed beetles that Birger collected is available through Artportalen, which is an independent collection site for species discoveries. These discoveries are free for use for everyone - the public, researchers, organizations and authorities.

The Forestry Museum beetle collection is also searchable via GBIF (the Global Biodiversity Information Facility). GBIF is an international projectt whose task it is to make the information on the species of the Earth (e.g. animals, plants, fungi) as well as species observations available to everybody. The purpose of GBIF is to collect and coordinate this enormous amount of information. The data come from databases, which are administered by natural-history museums, authorities, organizations, research centres etc., among them the Forestry Museum in Lycksele.