Range improvements, 1938, 1941

This series holds records from Lee Crandall’s positions as Curator of Birds and General Curator at the Bronx Zoo. The first of its three subseries consists of Crandall’s own curatorial correspondence, the second of correspondence files created by other Bronx Zoo curatorial staff that presumably ended up in Crandall’s files due to his position as General Curator, and the third is a volume of letters and other salutations gathered for Crandall and presented at his 1952 retirement.

Within the correspondence, major topics include Society-sponsored collecting trips in Ecuador, Costa Rica, and the Congo by Charles Cordier; Crandall’s own expedition to Papua New Guinea; special Bronx Zoo exhibits such as falconry shows and an exhibit of African art; and animal subjects, notably the 1941 importation of a pair of giant panda cubs that had been gifted to the New York Zoological Society by the Chinese government. Some early correspondence regards the distribution of William Beebe’s A Monograph of the Pheasants and Raymond Ditmars’s “Living Natural History” film series. Other than Crandall, the main staff members represented in the records are Mammal Curator Claude W. Leister and renowned aviculturist Jean Delacour, employed by the Society at the time in the capacity of Technical Advisor. Their files comprise the bulk of the non-Crandall records.