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The Illinois State Museum Basket Collection
The Illinois State Museum owns the bulk of the Thomas Condell Collection of Native American artifacts, including a group of outstanding examples of basket work dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1920s. A lifelong Springfield resident, Condell traveled often to the Southwest U.S. for treatment of tuberculosis. Condell, who also traveled to the far West and worked in Colorado at the silver mine in which he had business interests, became an avid self-taught collector of Native American material culture. His eye was expert, and his selections demonstrate a broad range of techniques and approaches to creating containers for a variety of purposes. Most of the ethnographic basketry exhibited in From Limb to Limb is taken from the ISM's Condell Collection.

Storage Basket 1890-1900
Western Apache, Willow, devil's claw
Illinois State Museum Condell Collection
This Western Apache food-storage basket demonstrates, with its closed neck configuration, the similarity in container shapes in cultures separated widely by geography and time. Its similarity to Greek amphorae is striking. The abstract pattern of interwoven diamond forms recalls the shape of netting that was in earlier times used to carry such baskets.

Bird Nests of the Illinois State Museum Collection
The museum has a large collection of bird nests collected primarily by Judge Richard Magoon Barnes, editor and punblisher of The Oologist magazine, during the early twentieth century. The collection,, numbering more than ten thousand specimens, came to the museum in 1947 through the generosity of Mrs. R. M. Barnes, Col. Richard Barnes Stith, and Mrs. F.W. Stith. In addition to a broad array of natural history specimens, the gift included an extensive collection of rare books, magazines, and folios that reflect Barnes' primary interest in ornithology.
The nests selected for the From Limb to Limb exhibition, some of which also come from the museum's Holland Collection, illustrate the broad range of configurations that have been achieved by birds from disparate regions and environments.

Black Chinned Hummingbird Nest
Illinois State Museum Barnes Collection
The nest of a Black-Chinned Hummingbird is only three-quarters of an inch in diameter. Its deep cup and density functions not only to conserve body heat but to make a secure container for the precious pari of eggs tended by the female. Chimney Swift Nest
Illinois State Museum Barnes Collection
The Chimney Swift constructs its distinctive nests in chimneys and on other vertically enclosed, isolated surfaces. Unable to perch or stand upright like songbirds, they are uniquely qualified to roost on vertical surfaces. Using a mastic of spittle, the swift gathers and interweaves twigs to create a shelf-like affair that holds up to four eggs during incubation.

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